Section A is a review of the literature on cognitive functioning difficulties in psychosis. It focuses on these difficulties as they relate to cognitive models of psychosis. After outlining relevant cognitive models, the literature on cognitive functioning is critically reviewed. The review highlights methodological limitations; gaps in our understanding; and a need for research exploring people's experiences of cognitive functioning difficulties. Section B describes a qualitative study investigating the experience of cognitive difficulties in people with psychosis. Background: An overview of research on cognitive functioning in psychosis reveals limitations in existing understandings, including the absence of a rigorous account of how people with psychosis experience cognitive functioning difficulties. Aims: This study aimed to provide an account of the experience of cognitive functioning difficulties in people with psychosis, including how these difficulties are perceived and understood, how people respond to these difficulties, and what people’s perceptions are of others’ views of these difficulties. Method: A semi-structured interview was carried out with eight participants, focusing on participants’ experience of cognitive difficulties, how they respond to these, how participants perceive others’ understandings, and available support. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) was used. Results: Cognitive impairment was understood in terms of master themes focusing on controlled and reflective thinking; physical experiences; explaining the origins of impairment; identity; and anticipating the future with fear and hope. Conclusions: The findings had significant implications for clinical psychology, including staff and client education about cognitive difficulties, and the importance of cognitive functioning to formulation. New areas for research include interventions stimulating metacognition; managing identity changes in response to cognitive difficulties; and ascertaining staff understanding of cognitive difficulties. Section C is a critical appraisal of the qualitative study 'The experience of cognitive functioning difficulties in people with psychosis: An investigation' described in section B. It provides critical and reflective answers to four questions on the following topic areas: research skills acquired; what one would do differently if repeating the study; clinical consequences of the study; and future research projects.

Through open-ended interviews and oral history, this ethnographic project captures unique histories of cultivating critical race consciousness as a White subject in social contexts of continuing overt and covert racisms. The project studies the legacy of racist and prejudiced discourses in how White research participants embody, theorize, and perform White consciousness. I explore a spectrum of White consciousness that corresponds to shifting conceptualizations of racism (Jim Crow, Colorblind, and Critical Race Consciousness), unstable ideologies of activism and antiracism (reflecting whether or not and how subjects act against prejudice), and the changing politics of rhetorical practice in backstage settings (that is, how subjects represent and construct racialized realities in these discourse situations). The project concludes that storytelling can be strategically and effectively used in activist research and everyday conversation as a vehicle for positive social change to cultivate critical dialogue about and rearticulate lived histories of race, racialized identities, racial privileges, and racisms.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to lay the groundwork for the eventual combination of micro and macro levels of class analysis into a unified theory. The first steps of this process require the creation of a micro level theory of class identity formation, a slight reconceptualization of the class map upon which the macro level theory is based, and an elaboration of the partial macro level theory provided by Wright (1997). At the micro level, I find the factors which contribute to class identity formation depend on which class identities are being distinguished. This result echoes the findings of Centers [1949] 1961, but moves beyond his analysis by quantifying the contribution of each of the factors to the predicted probability of selecting a class identity. At the macro level, I find that including partial ownership in Wright's class map uncovers important hidden variation among Wright's non-owning class locations. Separating partial owners from non-owners illustrates an important source of division in class consciousness not possible using Wright's class map. Finally, I further elaborate Wright's partial theory of class consciousness by demonstrating that McPherson's concept of socio-structural space can be usefully applied to the class structure, which provides a set of hypotheses to explain how class formation affects class consciousness. The solidarity hypothesis is supported, suggesting class based homogeneous friendship relations strengthen class consciousness in the polar class locations. Increasing class based social distance between friends, decreases the strength of an individual's class consciousness. While just the first steps, these advancements in theory and empirical results help further the cause of creating a unified theory of class by strengthening our understanding of both the micro and macro levels of class analysis. With these improvements in place, further work at both levels of analysis can continue the process of integrating the two levels of analysis.

There is a widespread intuition that physicalist theories of consciousness are importantly incomplete. But the psychological facts give us reason to think that the gap-intuition does not justify the belief that physical theories of consciousness always leave out some facts about consciousness. I target this belief, and aim to establish that it is not epistemically justified by the gap-intuition. I begin by making a case for thinking that a purely psychological analysis of the "explanatory gap" is not only a viable one, but is in many ways preferable to the standard modal-epistemological analysis. Then I marshal a body of empirical findings in support of the view that various sub-personal psychological processes play a key role in producing the gap-intuition. The most crucial of these processes is the agent-detector, a cognitive system specifically dedicated to detecting other conscious agents in the third-person mode. Leveraging this account, I argue that while the relevant sub-personal processes are generally accurate, in the case of the gap-intuition they are "tricked" in a manner analogous to a visual blind spot or a bias in decision-making. Thus gap-intuitions are not trustworthy and do not confer justification upon belief in a "real" gap. I conclude by situating my account within the context of existing literature on the explanatory gap. My account naturally complements various physicalist accounts of the gap, and also deserves consideration as an outright replacement for such accounts. The overall lesson is that the gap-intuition would arise whether or not physicalist theories of consciousness really do leave something out, and would persist even if we came to accept a true physicalist theory of consciousness. Thus anti-physicalist arguments that are based on the gap-intuition pose no serious threat to physicalist theories of consciousness.

The Brazilian government has recently enacted some of Latin America's most extensive affirmative action laws and policies, including racial quotas in all public universities and a law that requires schools throughout Brazil to teach Afro-Brazilian history and culture. In this context, a large-scale black consciousness movement has emerged, with a vast array of black organizations (otherwise known as "Black NGOs") using race as a productive political strategy to secure access to resources and rights for people of African descent. Through yearlong ethnographic investigations of three of these organizations in the city of Salvador (Bahia) from 2009-2010, this dissertation examines the effects of such changes on black activists' interpretations of blackness and their understanding of black consciousness. It looks to the complex ways in which black activists are creatively juxtaposing Brazil's long-held racial ideologies on the one hand with discourses and forms of knowledge about race that have been set forth by the new race-conscious legislations and policies on the other. Drawing from and contributing to the field of linguistic anthropology, I demonstrate that language is crucial to their goals of revealing patterns of institutional racism, critiquing commonsense notions of blackness in Brazil, and promoting anti-racism. I show how black activists teach one another elaborate ways of using language to scrutinize deeply entrenched ideas about race and blackness embedded in their own and others' speech as well as new ways of thinking and talking about race in Brazil. The dissertation carries throughout a concern with the status and formation of black consciousness in light of recent cultural and political changes. Drawing on my training in linguistic and cultural anthropology, I combine the analysis of data from participant observations, in-depth interviews, and countless conversations with black activists to examine what I call "affirmative language practices"--linguistic strategies that black activists use to foreground multiple points of views about race and blackness within Brazil's dominant frameworks of racial identification and categorization. I employ the notions of voice, dialogism, participant roles, and intertextuality (explored in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Erving Goffman, Jane Hill, and others) to provide evidence that black activists do not require or privilege black identity in the construction of "black consciousness." I argue that for these black activists, black consciousness may be characterized by the emergence of an ideological critique in and through language that allows Afro-Brazilians to articulate competing ideological positions about race and racism in Brazil.

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between height and self-esteem, and to examine the mediating effects of self-consciousness. Four hundred and seventy-nine college students, 143 males and 336 females, 75% under the age of 21, were administered The Personal Opinion Survey which consisted of demographic information, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and Elkind and Bowen's Imaginary Audience Scale. Findings revealed a nonlinear relationship between height and self-esteem. Further, self-consciousness emerged as a significant mediator of the relationship between height and self-esteem, accounting for the difference in male and female self-esteem scores. Moreover, the influence of self-consciousness on the height and self-esteem relationship was revealed greatest for females.

Darbo tikslas – atskleisti taivaniečių tautinės tapatybės formavimosi procesą bei ištirti ir palyginti trijų pastarųjų Kinijos Respublikos Taivane prezidentų politiką formuojant taivaniečių tapatybę. Per pastaruosius porą dešimtmečių Kinijos Respublikos (KR) Taivane žmonių gyvenimas stipriai pasikeitė. Ši šalis, kelis dešimtmečius save laikiusi Kinijos dalimi ir teisėtos politinės valdžios žemyne savininke, ėmė stipriai keistis ir joje ėmė formuotis taivanietiška tapatybė. Tokios tapatybės formavimosi požymių buvo galima aptikti ir ankstesniais laikais, tačiau jie niekada nebuvo tokie ryškūs ir saviti, kaip per pastaruosius porą dešimtmečių. Kinijos Respublikos Taivane valdančioji Guomindang (GMD) partija nuo pat įsitvirtinimo saloje teigė, jog egzistuoja tik viena Kinija, o Taivanas yra šios Kinijos dalis. Partijos tikslas buvo suvienyti visą Kiniją GMD partijos valdžioje. Tačiau kuo toliau, tuo labiau Kinijos Respublikos Taivane gyventojai pabrėžia, jog Taivanas nėra Kinija. Vis daugiau šios šalies gyventojų laiko save taivaniečiais, o ne kinais. Tiriant taivaniečių tautinės tapatybės formavimosi procesą bei prezidentų politiką formuojant taivanietišką tapatybę darbe buvo remiamasi aprašomuoju, istoriniu, interpretaciniu-analitiniu tyrimo metodais. / In the last couple of decades life has changed a lot for people in the Republic of China (ROC). This country experienced transformation of its government from authoritarian rule to democracy. It has also experienced emergence of new national Taiwanese consciousness. Nowadays most of people in Taiwan find themselves Taiwanese and not Chinese anymore or experience double identity. In these last couple of decades when all transitions emerged, Taiwan was ruled by three different presidents that influenced development of Taiwanese national consciousness. So this paper is analyzing influence of Taiwanese presidents in forming Taiwanese national consciousness. Goal of this paper is to explore development of the national Taiwanese consciousness and research the influence of last three Republic of China presidents in forming national Taiwanese consciousness. There are couple of tasks that needs to be done in this paper in order to reach the goal. There are going to be analysed conditions in which national Taiwanese consciousness have been forming. Highlight main events in Taiwanese history that contributed to formation of Taiwanese national consciousness. Analyse politics of last three Republic of China presidents in forming Taiwanese national consciousness and research how their position in supporting one of the four Taiwanese national consciousness types influence their country future and national security. In this paper it has been discovered that all three Republic of China... [to full text]

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I argue that conscious visual experience consists in a direct and noninferential grasp of the way one’s current perceptual contact with the environment poises one to pursue various intentional plans, goals and projects. I show that such a view of visual consciousness is supported by current work in cognitive neuroscience, affords a compelling account of colour perception, and suggests a way to bridge the ‘explanatory gap’ between consciousness and the language of the natural sciences. In chapter 1, I examine the reasoning that leads to the appearance of an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and the physical in more detail, and set out the constraints on a solution that our discussion of the problem has imposed. I then sketch the two rival takes on the relationship between perception and action mentioned above – adjudicating between these two theories (and finding in favour of the action-space view) is the task of the next two chapters, and is a recurring theme throughout. Chapter 2 moves on to discuss some recent work in the neuropsychology of vision and what it might suggest about the functional role of conscious vision, and the first half of chapter 3 considers two puzzle cases concerning colour perception. Each of these discussions turns out to constitute a source of support for the actionspace view that visual perception consists in a grasp of the practical consequences of sensation, and the second half of chapter 3 sets out this view and responds to an initial range of questions and objections it might face. Chapter 4 illustrates our view via a discussion of colour perception, and chapter 5 discusses the type of grasp of practical consequences that is necessary for perceptual sensitivity to issue in conscious experience. By chapter 6, we are in a position to see how the action-space approach can help close the explanatory gap for phenomenal consciousness, and our final chapter sets out how I think this should be done. I conclude with a brief discussion of further questions and prospects for the action-space approach.

This thesis is about consciousness and representation. More specifically, the big picture issue in the background throughout is the relationship between consciousness (or "phenomenology") and representation (or "intentionality") in the life of the mind. Phenomenology and intentionality are inarguably the two central topics in philosophy of mind of the last half-century. The question of phenomenology is, "how can there be something it feels like, from a subjective viewpoint, for a physical being to experience the world?" The question of intentionality is, "how can something physical, such as a brain state, be about, or represent, some other thing out in the world?" Not too long ago, the majority opinion was that these two questions addressed two essentially independent domains. However, in recent years the views of many philosophers have swung dramatically in the opposite direction. An important theme of analytic philosophy of mind in the last decade or two has been the exploration of the groundbreaking idea that these two domains might be fundamentally linked in previously unrecognized ways. Perhaps phenomenal properties are reducible to certain kinds of intentional properties. Perhaps the mind's non-derivative intentionality is grounded in phenomenology. Perhaps we should think of phenomenology and intentionality as "intertwined, all the way down to the ground" (Chalmers 2004, 32). This thesis addresses one crucial question within this larger framework: whether, and how, thoughts are phenomenally conscious. Thoughts are an important test case for theories about the relationship between phenomenology and intentionality, because they have long been considered paradigmatic intentional states, in contrast to perceptual and sensory experiences, which are paradigmatic phenomenal states. While there is something it is like, from the inside, for an individual to undergo a perceptual experience such as an olfactory experience of roasted coffee beans, by contrast entertaining a thought might seem to lack such a distinctive qualitative "feel". The thought is clearly intentional: it involves carrying informational content about objects and properties in the world. But is there also something it is like for a subject to experience thinking itself? To answer this question in the affirmative is to accept the existence of a phenomenology of thought, so-called "cognitive phenomenology" (CP). The literature on this topic so far has focused primarily on the question of whether CP exists. Here I will focus on the subtly different, and largely neglected, question of whether a kind of CP exists that is able to determine thought's intentional content. Many proponents of CP seem to be motivated by the hope that it can, since they believe that in the case of other conscious states, the phenomenology accounts for the intentionality. However, in what follows I argue that this ambitious project is doomed to fail, because CP is not suited to determine the intentional content of thought.