The title of this thesis is: Connection: A Hermeneutical Inquiry of an Autobiographical Text. It is based on the following thesis question: What is the significance of connecting with another in teaching? The following quote set the stage for the writing: "All places have names and stories, and wisdom sits in (those) places" (Chambers, 2003,p.233). Hermeneutics -- the art of interpretation -- is used to inform an autobiographical fragment. This autobiographical fragment is a fictional rendering of two days of teaching told in a narrative format. the thesis is designed around Gadamer's text Truth and Method. Gadamer's work is supplemented with the work of Martin Heidegger, F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Georg Hegel, as well as modern curriculum scholars such as Cynthia Chambers, David Smith, David Jardine and Max Van Manen. The writing begins with a methodology which grounds the writing, and then is developed through three voices in the form of a literature review, a narrative fragment, and text interpretation. The literature review is guided by questions such as Why use autobiographical narrative? What is the site of the inquiry? and Is narrative still relevant in a postmodern world? Time is also spent on the questions: Who were the great hermeneutical thinkers? and Who speaks for hermeneutics now? After the literature review, a narrative fragment is given. In the last third of the thesis, the narrative is deconstructed using Truth and Method and curriculum scholarship articles to structure the reflections. The "voice" shifts between the three sections. In the first third of the thesis the voice is intended to be academic. The voice in the narrative is personal. The third voice is interpretive and plays back and forth between academic reference and personal reflection. The major themes evolved as the writing progressed. The theme of authoritarianism as antithetical to connection was explored. Alienation acted as a foil to connection. There is an analysis of connection in the context of proper conversation, which includes guidelines for mutual respect and codes of moral conduct. The thesis provides a commentary on the power of hermeneutics to inform the teaching process. It then concludes with a series of questions pertaining to the significance of hermeneutical exploration in teacher preparation and classroom teaching. / viii, 127 leaves ; 29 cm.

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Objective. Previous research has implicated personality and cognitive factors in the experience of suicidal thoughts and behaviours. On the basis of two psychological models of suicide (Escape from Self; Baumeister, 1990; Cry of Pain, Williams, 1997), this thesis investigated an integrative model involving the relationship between perfectionism, motivation, and autobiographical memory recall to predict psychological distress (hopelessness, depression/anxiety, suicide ideation). Methodology. Four inter-related, but independent, prospective studies were conducted to address a number of research questions in both university students (Studies 1,2 & 3) and parasuicide patients (Study 4). Results. The main findings of this thesis are that slow or over-general recall of negative and positive memories moderates the relationship between perfectionism and psychological distress. Furthermore, it was found that perfectionism serves as a mediator in the relationship between behavioural inhibition motivation (BIS) and psychological distress. Overall, the results suggest that much knowledge can be gained from investigating the psychological processes underlying suicidal behaviour, and we highlight the utility of employing integrative psychological models. The results are discussed in terms of their therapeutic implications, as well as their implications for future research.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on January 31, 2008) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Psychology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, June 2007.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [129]-136).

Thesis (PhD)-Open University. BLDSC no.DXN017034.

What does it mean to link one's own history to that of another person or group of people? In what sense can a given history be 'one's own' or 'another's'? This thesis investigates movements between histories in three autobiographical texts which confront intergenerational shifts in language, triggered by the legacies of violent histories. Nabokov charts his movement from the Russian to the English language against the backdrop of the October Revolution, the Second World War and the Cold War. Perec's text confronts the silences in his family history produced by the death of his father in the Second World War and his mother's deportation to Auschwitz. His autobiography engages with a family history of displacement and movement between religious affiliations, countries, alphabets and languages, triggered by multiple waves of anti-Semitism, culminating with his mother's death in the Holocaust. Chamoiseau explores the ambivalent cultural and linguistic affiliations produced by a post- or neo-colonial childhood in Martinique. The thesis argues that in such contexts the links between the author's life and the lives of previous generations take on a central importance. Further, it demonstrates that each author goes beyond his own collective history to forge links between his life and those of other people who have lived through or are still suffering the legacies of different histories of violence and oppression. Though these movements have sometimes been noted, the original contribution of this thesis is that it argues such movements are central to the autobiographical texts under discussion. It looks at why and how inter-generational shifts in language inflect these authors' approach to the connections between their own histories and those of other people, and tests what is to be gained when the critic takes up the comparative interpretive framework these texts establish. By opening up a dialogue between these texts and a range of current theories of traumatic memory, inter-generational transmission of memory and 'multidirectional' memory, it finds that a comparative approach has the potential to enrich and nuance current debates in these areas.

The long-term memory system for what is conscious and can be verbalized – declarative memory- is often separated into memory for general facts and memory for personal events (Squire, 2009; Tulving, 2002). Personal semantics share elements of both semantic memory (i.e., they are facts that can be known) and episodic memory (i.e., they are self-related and idiosyncratic; Renoult, Davidson, Palombo, Moscovitch, & Levine, 2012). According to the taxonomy of personal semantics (Renoult et al., 2012), they vary in proximity to either semantic or episodic memory. Towards one end of the continuum, memory for autobiographical facts such as jobs and names of friends were hypothesized to be closer to general facts. Towards the other end of the continuum, repeated events are summaries of the core elements of similar events that happened more than once (e.g., getting coffee at a coffee shop), and they were hypothesized to be closer to episodic memory (i.e., the recollection of a unique event). Self-knowledge involves self-reflection about one’s own personality traits and preferences; it was thought to be the most distinct from semantic and episodic memory. However, little research had compared personal semantics to both semantic and episodic memory, or to one another, and these proposals needed to be tested experimentally. In this thesis, I compared the neural correlates of three types of personal semantics to semantic memory (study 1, 2, 3) and episodic memory (study 1, 2), and to one another (study 1) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; study 1) and event related potentials (ERPs; study 2, 3). Moreover, I examined whether temporal orientation modified the personal semantics’ relationship to the typically atemporal semantic memory (study 2, 3) and to the typically past-oriented episodic memory (study 2). In study 1, general facts, autobiographical facts, repeated events, and unique events were compared using fMRI, in a follow-up to an ERP study (Renoult et al., 2016). In our analyses of the hippocampus (HPC) and posterior medial network (Ritchey, Libby, & Ranganath, 2015), general semantics and autobiographical facts were often not significantly different from one another (except for the left posterior HPC), and repeated events and unique events did not differ from one another in any comparison. I observed a small graded increase of brain activity from general facts to autobiographical facts to repeated events and unique events (with a significant linear trend) in the left posterior HPC. In contrast, no memory type differed in the anterior temporal network (Ritchey et al., 2015). In study 2 and 3, self-knowledge was operationalized as the knowledge of one’s own traits, and could concern past (study 2), present (study 2, 3) and future selves (study 2, 3). A neural correlate of recollection, the Late Positive Component (LPC), had a larger mean amplitude for thinking about the self than others (study 2, 3), and thinking about a past and/or future self than the present self (on average for study 2, and significant for study 3). The amplitude of the LPC for thinking about the past and future selves did not differ from an episodic recognition memory task (or present self-knowledge; study 2). Further, the temporal orientation effect was smaller and not significant when we compared thinking about the present and the future traits of others (study 3). The operationalization of the “other” as a close friend or a group of people did not modify this result (study 3). Together, in addition to Renoult et al. (2016), these findings suggest that: the neural correlates of autobiographical facts, repeated events, and self-knowledge do not overlap perfectly with semantic or episodic memory. Moreover, the temporal orientation of the knowledge is one factor that can influence the proximity of the neural correlates of personal semantics to either semantic or episodic memory.