The literature review comprises discussion of 4 principal domains. First, literature pertaining to diagnostic criteria, clinical features, historical context, prevalence, co-morbidity, aetiology and intervention for BDD is reviewed. Second, research on cognitive processes and metacognition (beliefs about experiencing particular thoughts and mental strategies employed to control particular thoughts) in other disorders is discussed, followed by critical appraisal of the minimal existing research on thought content and metacognition in BDD. Possible lines of future research are suggested. The empirical paper describes the aim of the current study, namely exploring preoccupation in BDD, by investigating the content of thoughts about appearance and metacognition in people with BDD and people with 'normal concerns' regarding appearance. A structured interview and questionnaires were employed to investigate these aspects of preoccupation in BDD, followed by quantitative analyses and coding of descriptive data. The content of the thoughts was found to be similar in the 2 groups, but participants with BDD were found to endorse negative metacognitive beliefs significantly more strongly, to employ thought control strategies involving punishment significantly more frequently and to report significantly lower effectiveness of the 2 most frequently employed strategies. These findings are related to existing literature, and clinical and theoretical implications and limitations are discussed. The critical appraisal expands upon the discussion of these findings, exploring strengths and weaknesses and professional, theoretical and clinical implications further. Future directions for research in this area are proposed and both the researcher's expectations and the research process are reflected upon.

This review aims to explore evidence linking trauma and its psychological consequences to psychosis. In the first section, trauma is defined and common psychological consequences to trauma (intrusions, posttraumatic stress disorder and dissociation) are discussed. The second section focuses on schizophrenia, psychosis and schizotypy, before reviewing evidence for a link between the experience of trauma and the development and maintenance of serious mental illness. The third section outlines several explanations for the evidence reviewed in section two, before proposing some future directions for research.

This literature review aims to explore the contribution psychoanalytical theory has made to our understanding of personality disorder, with particular emphasis on theory, assessment and diagnosis. I begin with a review of how personality disorder is currently defined and diagnosed within the NHS and then give an account of the major theoretical contributions of both academic and clinical psychology to both personality and personality disorder. The review then explores what psychoanalytical theories offer to this knowledge base. I will focus on the major contributions of psychoanalytical theory to our understanding of the symptoms and aetiology of personality disorder and move on to how psychoanalysis has contributed to clinical assessment and diagnosis. I conclude the review with possible future empirical directions for psychoanalysis and personality disorder as indicated by the literature.

Volume 1 is divided into 3 parts as follows: Part 1 (Review Paper) discusses the admissibility of psychometric evidence of cognitive malingering in UK criminal law courts. The paper opens with a historical account of psychologists as expert witnesses, highlighting significant advances relevant to malingering. This sets the context for a discussion about current developments in policy and specifically the creation of a UK standard for the admissibility of scientific evidence. The penultimate section outlines the statistical and methodological issues which challenge the development of empirical cognitive measures of malingering. The paper closes with a discussion of future directions for research and practice in presenting psychological evidence in court. Part 2 (Empirical Paper) reports on a study testing the utility of a battery of measures to identify simulating malingerers from healthy controls and psychiatric inpatients. The battery of measures were chosen for their different approaches to detecting malingerers. An additional qualitative interview was given to the simulating malingerers to investigate the strategies they used to fake the tests. The performance of the test battery was compared to a pre-existing screening tool for malingering. The results were discussed with reference to implications for research and practice. Part 3 (Critical Appraisal) reflects on the process of undertaking the research. It discusses the generalisability of the findings when using a simulating malingering design, the utility of measuring reaction time to detect malingering, difficulties in the recruitment of inpatients, the array of choices in selecting the test battery and the clinical applications of the research.

Volume 1 of this thesis examines the predictors of response to trauma-focused treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is presented in three parts. Part 1 is a literature review of research evaluating the impact of trauma-focused therapy for PTSD on comorbid symptoms of depression. The Downs and Black (1998) checklist was used to assess study quality. Results indicated that both trauma-focused CBT and EMDR treatments were effective in reducing comorbid depression symptoms. However, as interventions varied widely and some studies were affected by significant methodological problems, the generalisability of these results may be limited, and thus areas for further research are also suggested. Part 2 is an empirical study exploring early in-session client and therapist factors that predict later response to treatment. Audio and video recordings of the first or second therapy session of 54 known treatment responders or non-responders were blind-rated for client perseverative thinking, therapist adherence and therapeutic alliance. Results revealed that more perseverative thinking was observed for non-responders than responders to treatment. No group differences were found in regards to therapist adherence or therapeutic alliance. Exploratory analyses revealed that across the sample as a whole, perseverative thinking was associated with reduced therapist adherence to the treatment manual and poorer therapeutic alliance. As this study is one of the first of its kind in this area, recommendations were made for future research opportunities to explore these findings further. Part 3 is a critical appraisal of the empirical study. This elaborates on the main findings of this project and discusses the methodological challenges involved in undertaking this type of research, particularly developing and applying a novel coding frame.

Astrocytes in culture display large cytosolic calcium increases upon stimulation with dopamine, however the mechanism and physiological significance of this calcium response is still unknown. In this thesis, I demonstrate that hippocampal astrocytes in situ respond to dopamine with similar large calcium transients. I also describe a novel astrocyte calcium decrease, which appears specific to dopaminergic stimulation. Dopamine is a potent neuromodulator of hippocampal synaptic activity, as are astrocytes. However, I found no evidence to suggest that dopamine-induced calcium transients in astrocytes affect excitatory synaptic transmission and its short-term plasticity in the hippocampal stratum radiatum. In perforant path - CA1 pyramidal synapses of stratum lacunosum-moleculare, astrocytes were found to lessen the inhibitory effect of dopamine on evoked PTP. This work shows for the first time that astrocytes in situ can robustly respond to dopamine with a complex Ca2+ signal thus may participate in dopaminergic signalling in the brain.

Literature Review: Is Atypical Mentalizing a Risk Factor for Psychosis. The literature review summarises models and rationale underpinning investigation of atypical mentalizing as a risk factor for psychosis, and reviews longitudinal and cross-sectional studies relating to this. It concludes that, although differences in social cognition can be demonstrated to be associated with risk for psychosis, findings to date are mixed, and a focus on the presence or absence of mentalizing skills has limited exploration of the nature of these putative differences. Empirical Paper: Theory of Mind and its Relation to Schizotypy. This section reports an experimental comparison of the performance of high and low schizotypes on verbal and non-verbal measures of theory of mind. In the non-verbal domain, high schizotypes were significantly more likely than low schizotypes to read meaning in randomness and to impute agency or mental states where none were obviously implied. These tendencies were associated with positive schizotypy in particular. The findings are discussed in relation to Frith's (1992) cognitive model of schizophrenia and existing studies of theory of mind and schizotypy and schizophrenia. Critical Appraisal: A critical review of the process of the above study is presented. Observations made during the planning, data collection, data analysis and interpretation stages of the project are described, and suggestions are made for future research.

This thesis describes the method of EEG-correlated fMRI and its application to patients with epilepsy. First, an introduction on MRI and functional imaging methods in the field of epilepsy is provided. Then, the present and future role of EEG-correlated fMRI in the investigation of the epilepsies is discussed. The fourth chapter reviews the important practicalities of EEG-correlated fMRI that were addressed in this project. These included patient safety, EEG quality and MRI artifacts during EEG-correlated fMRI. Technical solutions to enable safe, good quality EEG recordings inside the MR scanner are presented, including optimisation of the EEG recording techniques and algorithms for the on-line subtraction of pulse and image artifact. In chapter five, a study applying spike-triggered fMRI to patients with focal epilepsy (n = 24) is presented. Using statistical parametric mapping (SPM), cortical Blood Oxygen Level-Dependent (BOLD) activations corresponding to the presumed generators of the interictal epileptiform discharges (IED) were identified in twelve patients. The results were reproducible in repeated experiments in eight patients. In the remaining patients no significant activation (n = 10) was present or the activation did not correspond to the presumed epileptic focus (n = 2). The clinical implications of this finding are discussed. In a second study it was demonstrated that in selected patients, individual (as opposed to averaged) IED could also be associated with hemodynamic changes detectable with fMRI. Chapter six gives examples of combination of EEG-correlated fMRI with other modalities to obtain complementary information on interictal epileptiform activity and epileptic foci. One study compared spike-triggered fMRI activation maps with EEG source analysis based on 64-channel scalp EEG recordings of interictal spikes using co-registration of both modalities. In all but one patient, source analysis solutions were anatomically concordant with the BOLD activation. Further, the combination of spike- triggered fMRI with diffusion tensor and chemical shift imaging is demonstrated in a patient with localisation-related epilepsy. In chapter seven, applications of EEG-correlated fMRI in different areas of neuroscience are discussed. Finally, the initial imaging findings with the novel technique for the simultaneous and continuous acquisition of fMRI and EEG data are presented as an outlook to future applications of EEG-correlated fMRI. In conclusion, the technical problems of both EEG-triggered fMRI and simultaneous EEG-correlated fMRI are now largely solved. The method has proved useful to provide new insights into the generation of epileptiform activity and other pathological and physiological brain activity. Currently, its utility in clinical epileptology remains unknown.

Part one of the thesis reviews the literature on whether antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and psychopathy represent distinct categories. This question was addressed by identifying studies with populations of individuals meeting criteria for ASPD and exploring the samples in terms of other constructs. Studies are divided into four areas; cluster analytic studies, studies of emotional processing, theory of mind and mentalizing, and executive functioning. The review suggests that those who meet criteria for ASPD represent a heterogeneous group, and that psychopathy is distinct from ASPD. Part two consists of an empirical paper which measures the constructs of mentalizing and psychopathy in a sample of people with and without diagnoses of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) or borderline personality disorder (BPD). This allowed for the testing of the mentalizing deficit theory of BPD, to explore mentalizing in an ASPD sample, and also to explore the construct of psychopathy, which has been used interchangeably with ASPD. BPD has also been suggested to be a phenotypic expression of psychopathy. Results supported a mentalizing deficit in BPD, and support the premise that ASPD is a heterogeneous group, and consists of at least two subtypes. The implications of findings in the context of a paradigm shift away from categorical towards a dimensional model of personality disorder are discussed, along with the limitations of the study and implications for future research. In part three a critical appraisal of the research process is presented. Issues of research in the probation setting, risk and ethical issues of working with this population, and also the practicalities of working alongside a large scale research project are discussed, in order to guide future research in this area.

The research adopted a qualitative, idiographic design to explore the lived experiences of eight individuals who had persistent enuresis (they were bedwetting until at least 15/16 years old). The current literature base on enuresis has predominately been conducted on children and there is a scarcity of research conducted into persistent enuresis. Research has been conducted into the impact of enuresis, which has predominately relied on quantitative methods and has often relied on parental reports. This research aimed to deepen the understanding of persistent enuresis and explore the experience. Data was collected via semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). There was an over-arching theme that appeared to run throughout all of the participants' experiences, which was the fear of rejection. This fear appeared to significantly impact on how the participants related to other people. Three superordinate themes were identified. The first superordinate theme titled 'Self-Evaluations' describes the psychological experience of bedwetting. It describes the emotional and cognitive experience of bedwetting. The second superordinate theme, titled 'The Relational Experience' describes the experience of bedwetting on a number of different significant relationships. The last superordinate theme, titled 'The Concealment' describes the actions the participants adopted in order to prevent detection. Each of these superordinate themes was further divided into sub-themes and was illustrated by verbatim accounts from the participants. The fundamental findings and theoretical insights are discussed which appeared to revolve around balancing acceptance and rejection in relation to the self and other people. Persistent enuresis can have profound psychosocial implications. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed along with recommendations for future work.