Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves: [108]-111)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-80).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 23, 2010). Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Speech Pathology and Audiology, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-59).

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, September 2, 1999." Also available in print.

Thesis (M.S.)--Villanova University, 2007. / Psychology Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Recent research has shown heightened interest in the potential role of inhibitory mechanisms in solving the multiple category problem associated with processing person-specific information. Inhibition has been proposed to control the activation saliency of one category of person-specific information over other activated categories to guide the processing, interpretation and behavioural responses to socially-relevant stimuli. The current research considers a) whether inhibition operates in a similar manner for both self- and other-referent information, and b) whether the inhibitory mechanism associated with laboratory-observed retrieval-induced forgetting is also involved in categorically thinking about the self and others. Participants studied and carried out guided retrieval practice on positive and negative self- and other-referent traits in seven studies that used variants of the retrieval practice paradigm. The observed patterns of forgetting were found to be consistent with the notion that retrieval inhibition operates in a flexible goal-directed manner to reduce the activation of person-specific information that carries little or no meaning for the social perceiver, regardless of whether that information relates to the self or to a target other. Consideration of the significance subjectively attributed to person information showed that both personally significant self information (Studies 4a,b, 5b) and highly informative other-referent material (Studies 2, 5b) are protected against active forgetting, whilst information of low diagnostic value succumbs to inhibitory processing. The goal-directed nature of active forgetting was also shown to operate in an implicit manner (Study 4a) which remained unaffected by attentional focus being brought to bear on target or non-target items (Study 4b). Two main conclusions are discussed, a) that both self- and other-referent information are protected against active forgetting where that information carries meaning for the social perceiver and becomes integrated into existing person-specific knowledge, and b) that both the retrieval practice procedure and the processes involved in categorical person perception may be subject to the same inhibitory mechanism.

The current study investigated the developmental course of how young children label various facial expressions of emotion. 160 children (2 to 5 years) freely produced labels for six prototypical facial expressions of emotion and six animals. Even 2-year-olds were able to correctly label 5 of 6 animals, but the proportion of correct specific emotion category responses for this age group was < .30 for each of the six facial expressions. The 5-year-olds' proportion of correct specific emotion category labels was at ceiling for the happy and angry faces, but significantly lower for each of the other four facial expressions, and at floor level for the disgust face. The type of errors in labeling facial expressions changed with age: when incorrect, the youngest children produced any emotion label; older children produced labels of the correct valence; and the majority of the 5-year-olds' responses were of the correct specific emotion category. These results indicate that the free-labeling task per se is not too difficult even for 2-year-olds, but that children's use of emotion terms is not initially linked to facial expressions. Thus, the children's production of emotion terms far exceeded their proportion of correct specific emotion category labels. With age, children's implicit definition of emotion terms develops to include the associated facial expression, though this process is not complete for all expressions before the age of 6 years. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

In this master's thesis classification is put into the bigger context of other human capacities of knowledge and action such as perception, language and categorization. By studying and analyzing recent research on categorization in psychology, anthropology and cognitive science and interpreting it through the philosophy of Henri Bergson the thesis  demonstrates how knowledge and action are two sides of the same coin and how this insight is a must for a proper understanding of classification. The analysis focuses primarily on the family resemblance categorization theory of Eleanor Rosch, the ethnobiological universal classication theory of Brent Berlin and Scott Atran, the presentation of evolutionary cognitive science by Peter Gärdenfors and the philosophical discussion on classification by Rebecca Bryant. The thesis removes classification from its assumed Aristotelian origin and connects it with psychological categorization and by extension all human (and nonhuman) acts of differentiation. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.