In 1989 New Zealand is considering legislation which will make discrimination against lesbians, transexuals and gay men illegal. To increase children's understanding of sexual orientations educators need to have some knowledge of what children already understand and how children use their information. The three studies address this issue in spite of the difficulties in obtaining permission to ask children about homosexuality. A homophobia questionnaire was administered to 290 first year psychology students. They were also asked to recall their childhood feelings about gay people when they first met a homosexual and first understood the concept of homosexuality. Older women were the least homophobic. A second study was carried out with 5, 7, and 11 year old children in three schools with a family discrimination task. A third of the 11 year olds could label the couples of the same sex as gay, homosexual or lesbian and gave more positive items to the two-parent families. A third study involved 31 children from two-parent families and 32 from lesbian families. Out of the 63 six to ten year olds, 27 could define 'homosexual' and 'gay' and 37 could define lesbian. Twenty could use a strategy to recognise a lesbian. Although social discrimination against non-heterosexual orientations placed some constraints on this research, it yielded preliminary evidence for the emergence of children's understanding of sexual orientations between 7 and 11 years of age.

Researchers and theorists have stressed the importance of self-produced locomotion for the development of more distal forms of communication such as social referencing but this notion has not been specifically tested. Social referencing research has also been conducted exclusively in the university laboratory. Three studies examined the influence of self-produced locomotion on the development of social referencing and compared social referencing behaviour in familiar and unfamiliar settings. Social referencing was defined as occurring when, following a novel event, infants looked to a familiar adult and used the information provided by the adult to adjust their behaviour towards the event appropriately. In the first study, forty infants, half locomoting and half non-locomoting, were seen in their own homes at either 7-months (10 crawling, l0 not crawling) or 9-months (10 crawling, l0 not crawling). Testing was repeated on all infants 2 months later. Infants were videotaped in each of three maternal availability conditions (mother available; not available; or not interactive) before a remote control toy car moved toward them. Mothers were instructed to give either a positive or negative facial signal when their infant looked at them during this final phase. The infants were responsive to the availability of the mother on a number of dependent measures. Locomoting infants approached their mothers more, played with the toys less, and differed in some aspects of looking behaviour during the availability phases. During the final social referencing phase neither group consistently used the information provided by the mother to change their behaviour. A second study examined a further ten, 9-month-old infants using an identical procedure. The infants were delayed in the onset of self-produced locomotion due to surgical and immobilization procedures prescribed for club foot. This group did not differ from the normal non-crawling 9-month-olds in the availability phases of the study but did look to their mothers more quickly and vocalized less during the social referencing phase. The third study used a similar procedure and identical novel stimulus to examine 20, 11-month-old infants' social referencing behaviour in a laboratory situation. There was a significant difference between the infants who received a positive versus negative message for the contact with the car measures. When they received a negative message, infants tested in the laboratory were less likely to touch the stimulus car and touched it for a shorter time than infants of the same age and tested at home. Mothers of all infants participating in this study completed the Infant Characteristics Questionnaire. None of the infant characteristics predicted which infants would use the social referencing strategy. It is concluded that social referencing is not a strategy used extensively by 7-and 9-month old infants although social looking is common at these ages in response to new events. Locomotion experience has little effect on social referencing. Infants use information from a variety of sources to assess a new situation and 11-month-old infants are more likely to use social referencing as a strategy in an unfamiliar setting. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed in relation to the cognitive requirements of preverbal and emotional communication and the relative importance of social influences for interpreting novel events.

Pigeons were trained under concurrent chain schedules in which the initial links were equal aperiodic schedules. One of the two terminal links was always a fixed-interval schedule of 10 sec duration. The other terminal link was either a two-valued mixed-interval schedule or a fixed-interval schedule. The shorter of the two intervals comprising the mixed-interval schedules was always 5 sec, the longer was either 10 sec, 20 sec, 40 sec, or 60 sec. The number of times each of the two intervals occurred in these mixed-interval schedules was varied. The data were compared with predictions from various models of concurrent chain performance and the adequacy of these models was discussed. No one model was a good predictor of all the data. Davison and Temple's (submitted for publication) model fitted the FI vs FI data well and fitted the FI vs MI data better than any other model. It was suggested that a "carry over" from one condition to the next had affected the present data. It was also suggested that the way in which Davison and Temple's predictions differed from the obtained preference ratios was the result of a weighting of the intervals in the MI schedules that changed according to the particular choice arranged.

Data from twelve auditory signal detection experiments show that a model general to all signal detection tasks explains results better than specific auditory models. This thesis examines models of the detection of sinusoids in Gaussian white noise, all predicting linear ROC-curves on normal-normal co-ordinates, but differing in their predictions for the ROC-curve slope. Distinction is made between stimulus distributions, transducer distributions and response-inferred distributions. Response-inferred distributions include variance from stimuli, transducers and unstable criteria. The first three experiments (rating) showed that slope increases with increases in p(sn) and in the number of categories available for describing the presence of the signal. An explanation for this data assumes that the 'yes-no' criterion has the least variance and other criteria have variances proportional to their distances from the 'yes-no' criterion. This explanation is developed into a model of selective attention in which the variance of all real criteria is a function of their distances from an optimal criterion. Faulty memory is the assumed cause of criterion variance. Predictions that follow from the model are (i) there is a decline in criterion variance as signal strength increases ; (ii) there is a U- (or inverted U-) shaped function relating slope and signal strength; (iii) criterion variance is less in forced-choice tasks than in 'yes-no' tasks; and (iv) slope is partially determined by task design and any other factor which affects the subject's memory for signal or noise. Experiments 4-6 establish that the concept of criterion variance also applies to yes-no procedures, and Experiments 7-11 substantiate predictions made by the model of selective attention. Data from Experiments 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are analysed in terms of models of sinusoidal burst and gap detection. None of the probabilistic models is adequate, but Zwislocki's (1969) deterministic model of temporal summation accounts for the data. A model of response-inferred distributions is presented in which the mathematical relationships of the variances and locations of criteria, of signal strength and of stimulus variances to the slope of the ROC-curve are described. Equations for the optimal criterion, the variance of individual criteria and a measure of sensitivity uncontaminated by criterion variance are derived. Re-analysis of data using the model of response-inferred distributions supports the predictions of the model of selective attention. The model of response-inferred distributions predicts 'peaked' rating ROC-curves which are similar to two-state functions and commonly observed in the literature. However, both two-state and high-threshold theories are unable to explain the data. Experiment 12 compares the model of response-inferred distributions with Pike's (1973) multiple observations model for latency data and finds the latter model inferior. Criterion variance is shown to account fox at least half of the variance of the response-inferred distributions, and consequently, it is argued that TSD results should be viewed more in terms of the general processes which produce criterion variance than modality-specific models of signal processing.

Eight marsupial phalangers, (Trichosurus vulpecula) with mid-saggital section of the optic chiasma were trained monocularly in a visual discrimination task, as were four which had, in addition, mid-saggital sections of the anterior commissure, fasciculus aberrans and hippocampal commissure. All were tested for transfer to the untrained hemisphere. The results showed that those with the commissures intact transferred information to the hemisphere not trained directly, while those with commissures sectioned did not. It appears that transfer of visual information between cerebral hemispheres can take place in an animal which lacks a corpus callosum, and that the forebrain commissures may be the functional equivalent, in this marsupial, of the corpus callosum in eutherians. A further eight animals received mid-saggital section of the optic chiasma. Two had all other interhemispheric pathways intact, two had mid-saggital section of fasciculus aberrans and hippocampal and anterior commissures, two had fasciculus aberrans only sectioned, and two had fasciculus aberrans only intact. All were trained monocularly in a visual discrimination task and tested for transfer to the opposite hemisphere. Those with all commissural pathways intact and those with only fasciculus aberrans intact demonstrated transfer. Those with all commissures sectioned and those with only fasciculus aberrans sectioned did not show transfer. It seems probable that integrity of fasciculus aberrans is a necessary and sufficient commissural condition for interhemispheric transfer of visual information in this marsupial.

Organisms trained to respond at a high rate to one stimulus, S1, and at a low rate to another stimulus, S2, lying in the same physical dimension as S1, may, when presented successively with a number of stimuli lying in the dimension, respond at the highest rate to a stimulus away from S1 in a direction opposite S2. This "peak shift" effect has been found following training in which S1 and S2 were presented successively, but not when they were presented simultaneously. In the present study peak shift was obtained when S1 and S2 were presented simultaneously during training. In order to isolate the conditions necessary to produce peak shift after simultaneous training, different groups of pigeons were given variations in procedure, but peak shift was obtained with all groups. The variations included using stimuli from various physical dimensions, using different training procedures, and using various methods of presenting stimuli during the tests for peak shift. The results were generally more consistent with discrimination theories that postulate the interaction of generalisation gradients around S1 and S2, rather than with theories that postulate control by some relationship between S1 and S2, and in particular, they were most consistent with explanations of peak shift that propose that the responding occurring in the presence of S1 is inhibited in the presence of S2.

Experimental extensions and theoretical explanations of a psychoacoustic experiment concerning temporal summation of human hearing are investigated. The experiment has the well-established result that, ceteris paribus, a brief tone burst is more readily letected than a brief gap in a tone. Two models, one based on the neuroelectrical activity of the auditory nerve and one on energy-detection theory, are presented and developed in detail: both are shown capable of predicting the result of the bursts and gaps experiment. Seven experiments are reported. Experiment 1 found the reaction time to the start of a faint tone embedded in noise generally shorter than that to its end. Experiment 2 examined the effect of rise/decay time on the detectability of brief bursts of, or gaps in, broadband noise: when the energy change was constant, 1here was no effect except at long (100 msec) rise/decay times. Experiments 3 and 4 assessed the detectability of bursts of, and gaps in, a tone embedded in noise where energy change to noise power per cycle was constant but duration varied. The data demonstrate that the effect of duration on detectability was different for burst than gap events, a result predicted by both models. Experiment 5 showed that, when the energy in and duration of a tone burst in noise were constant but the temporal distribution of the burst energy varied, detectability remained unchanged. The repetition rate of noise bursts and gaps in continuous noise was varied without effect on detectability in Experiment 6. Bursts, however, were consistently mere detectable than gaps. Experiment 7 compared the detectability of increments and decrements of a continuous tone embedded in noise. The quantitative predictions of the two models are compared with the data resulting from Experiments 3, 5, and 7. The qualitative results of these and the other experiments are also discussed in terms of their theoretical implications. Taken all together, the experiments do not definitely favour either model over the other.

Background Depictions of mental illnesses in the mass media have been analysed and criticised for more than forty years with little improvement, and that has serious implications for the ongoing efforts to destigmatise both mental illnesses and those who suffer from them. Aims To examine media depictions of mental illnesses within a social constructionist framework. To identify why media depictions take the form they do and to indicate ways in which such practices may be more effectively addressed. Method Items chosen from factual media genres were subjected to discourse analysis. This form of analysis attends to the preferred meaning of the items and how that meaning is constructed within the item. Exemplars of such analysis are contrasted with the content analyses more commonly performed on media materials before reporting analyses of items from everyday media reports and of materials that were expected to be less stigmatising. Results Irrespective of the form of analysis it is found that media depictions of mental illnesses are dominated by representations of dangerousness, criminal violence, unpredictability, and social incompetence. The same features were found in a destigmatisation documentary and a series of backgrounders on mental health services, in both of which madness was utilised to create interest and drama. It is argued that these characteristics occur because media personnel, like most laypersons, represent mental illnesses as forms of madness. Conclusions That my social constructionist analysis is able to account for the lack of change in media depictions over forty years. That the preference for a public mental health approach to destigmatisation is misplaced because it is unable to address the fear generated by lay understandings of mental illnesses. That the attempt to avoid conflation of the person with the disorder in Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals beginning in 1980 was an inadequate step in an appropriate direction in that it sought to remind clinicians that a mental disorder does not make a person non-human. The thesis findings are interpreted as showing that destigmatisation requires a new way of depicting mental illnesses, one that privileges the individual's experience and their ordinary humanness.

This is a description of the phonology, morphology and syntax of Namakir, a language of the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian, which is spoken on some six small islands of the Shepherd Islands, central Vanuatu. My perspective on Namakir is that of a person trained in linguistics, who carried out linguistic fieldwork for the purpose of grammatical description. In addition I contributed to ethnographic work as well as compiling data for a dictionary, part of which is appended to the present description. Namakir is a conservative language which retains many features that make Oceanic languages unique. Thus it is a valuable witness for comparative and reconstructive work in Oceanic linguistics. The physical, social and historical setting of Namakir is detailed in the introductory chapter. A section on theoretical issues concerning the descriptive enterprise is included. The chapter on phonology outlines the Namakir consonant and vowel inventories, with due emphasis on the glottal stop which, as a reflex of the Proto-Oceanic glottal stop, is a unique occurence in Vanuatu languages Sections on phonotactics, stress and phonological processes add to the basic description of segments. In the chapter on morphophonemics the dynamics of derivational processes are explored. A major section deals with consonant alternation, a phenomenon widely discussed in Oceanic Linguistics. The major form classes are detailed in the next chapter. Nominals, determiners, adjectives, verbs and adverbs are established as word categories and paradigm tables are provided for comprehensive overviews. The last chapter on Namakir syntax provides a systematic description of noun phrase and verb phrase. Possessive constructions receive special attention as they exhibit a number of unusual features. The verb phrase is discussed within the framework of the Oceanic definition of verb and periphery which include subject markers as well as pronominal objects. The Namakir mood and aspectual system is presented in detail. A major section deals with serial verb constructions in relation to current descriptive theories. The concluding sections discuss selected items regarding complex sentence structures. Negation and question sentences, existential and comparative sentence types are included. Coordination together with direct and indirect speech is noted to use forms of a quotative verb, being especially significant in the organisation of narrative sequences. Relative and temporal clauses share a single overt marker. A morpheme-to-morpheme glossed narrative is appended to demonstrate narrative style. A substantial Namakir-English-Bislama wordlist is added as a repository of data collected during fieldwork.

Pigeons were studied in concurrent chain schedules in which the terminal links were variable-interval (aperiodic) and fixed-interval (periodic) schedules. Choice was studied at various maintained percentages of body weight, (Experiment 1) and after various amounts of food had been pre-fed (Experiment 2). No effects on choice of the level of deprivation were found except in those choice conditions in which both terminal-link schedules were variable-interval schedules. Choice behaviour was further studied with equal, but increased magazine durations (Experiment 3) and no reliable effects were found. Explicit discrimination training established control over choice behaviour by the amounts pre-fed (Experiment 4) and generalisation gradiets of choice showed that this control was reliable. The differences found between aperiodic and periodic schedules were probably related to the different patterns of behaviour maintained by these schedules and an attempt was made to relate the results to overall models of behaviour and the 'value' of food.