M.A. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

The goal of this experiment was to determine whether group rational emotive therapy would prove superior to usual group therapy in improving the psychological functioning of male alcoholics in an inpatient treatment facility and to determine if memory dysfunction would impede therapeutic progress. Four areas of psychological functioning were discussed for their relevance to etiology, recidivism, and treatment evaluation; they were depression, self-conception, social anxiety, and cognitive functioning. Further, rational emotive therapy as a potentially superior treatment for alcoholism was discussed and outcome research was reviewed.

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I have in this project studied the area of personalized design as a way to create stronger bounds between artifacts and user. The way we relate to what we surround us with is important when we want to expose our personalities and tell who we really are. Today, in a world of mass-production, design and production seldom occurs at the same place. It feels like we are gliding away from the way we were connected to our things in the past. When we needed new cupboards for the kitchen, we went to the local carpenter and let him design and produce what we needed. The clothes were brought from travelling vendors, produced in the village or made by someone in your family, often with self-made yarn from the family farm’s sheep. We often had a connection to what we owned in another way than today. People knew exactly where their possessions came from, what material had been used and where that material had grown.I have within this project investigated how to create that personal connection to an artifact and adapt it to the contemporary. To achieve this I have looked into the different kinds of invisible information that our bodies contain. Information that is produced by numerous processes all the time, which we may not think about. I’ve been studying how people react when their inner processes are visualized through usage tests, exhibitions and finally interviews. The result is a concept I call Emotional Artifacts. The concept is describing how the idea of personalized fashion can be realized. A prototype has been built to show some of the possibilities with this kind of design that, with certain rules and ground sets, is generated by the user and later applied to different media.

A Critical Examination of A.J. Ayer's Moral Philosophy Ayer' s overall notion of ethics is that all normative ethical statements are cognitively meaningless. This thesis is an attempt to refute this claim. Ayer's notion is based, I think, on his following two convictions: ( i ) ethical statements are purely emotive, (ii) reasoning from factual premises to ethical conclusions is neither deductive nor inductive. Ethical statements are, according to Ayer, purely emotive because they are pure expressions of the feelings and emotions of the speaker. This means that ethical statements do not even report the speaker's mental state. I have shown that there are some voluntarily uttered ethical statements which are not expressive and hence that some ethical statements are not purely emotive. The controversy whether ethical statements can be deduced formally from factual statements is very old. I have switched the problem to a different direction by showing that the induction/deduction dichotomy is not adequate for reasoning. Other reasoning processes, like informal reasoning, allow one to deduce ethical conclusions from factual premises. It is also shown how Ayer's criterion of meaning, namely the verification principle, renders ethical statements meaningful. Finally, I have defended universalistic act-utilitarianism as a cognitive theory of ethics. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis examines historical writing and use of history among women within the Swedish nobility during the early modern period. The study has shown that political history in several cases was transmitted for the purpose of protecting or asserting collective, family-related aswell as individual status and positions, within the framework of women's informal exercise of power. Consequently, it can also be understood as expressions of emotion and political agendas in one – in other words as emotives. Sources conveying political history often express political diplomacy, which for example shows in how they separate content in different categories, support power or omit politically sensitive information. It can be explained by that the authors and their relatives were actors during the strengthening of the early modern state apparatus, and also victims of an ongoing power struggle within and between the nobility and the crown. The thesis also shows examples of internalized conflicts or possible cognitive dissonances relating to simultaneously fearing and depending on power, most clearly for the later investigation period. The study also exemplifies how material produced in this field could be viewed after the establishment of modern genre conventions, when it was often categorized into privately coded genres. Furthermore it shows that the private characteristics of rhetoric enabling this may have been a strategic choice in order to enable a political narrative.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-111).

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-111). Also available in print.