This study was a replication and an extension of the 2021 research performed by Spurgin and Borquez on the correspondence between receptive and expressive behavior. Spurgin examined the role of the echoic in a hear-say procedure with adult learners, while Borquez examined the role of the echoic in both hear-say and see-say procedures. Both studies found that receptive and expressive correspondence did not occur consistently across participants. The present study asked if the fading steps used during training contributed to the results of the previous researchers. In the present study, the fading steps were changed to minimize the chance that the participant developed a position bias. The conditions were also counterbalanced to analyze the effects of hear-say vs. see-say, easy vs. difficult words, and the order in which the words were trained on the acquisition of receptive labels and the emergence of expressive labels. The study consisted of five phases: pre-training, hear-say teaching, see-say teaching, receptive testing, and expressive testing. Results indicated that although that acquisition of receptive labels improved, the change in fading steps did not make a significant difference in the correspondence of receptive and expressive language. Results showed similar correspondence in the hear-say and see-say procedures. Easy words and words taught more recently were correlated with increased receptive-expressive correspondence.

In march 2001 and fourteen years later in march 2015, destructive acts were carried out against some of our most revered and treasured religious sites. These cultural heritages were demolished in modern iconoclastic acts by extremist groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. This essay examines the demolition of the two statues depicting the Buddha as well as the events in Iraq during 2015. Specifically the destruction of the museum of Mosul, the ancient city of Nimrud as well as other sites of cultural heritages. The acts were carried out by two groups who in very different ways revere their actions as connected to the sacred. On the one hand this was done to communicate devotion towards the divine. The other action was done in order to destroy the sacred of the perceived enemy as well as to enhance the iconoclastic groups' own theocracy. The two groups have a sense of historical connection with similar acts of iconoclastic destructions. Historical events will be discussed in relation to their modern counterparts.                       This essay attempts to locate the theoretical core of these events and tries to explain why they might be regarded as emanating from the theocratic functional systems' need to restore and reproduce itself. I will also, like the responsible groups themselves, set the actions in relation to the relevant international context as well as the historical parallels of iconoclasm. The tendencies to regard these matters as a destructive act based upon absolute reverence to the divine are the most frequent reactions usually brought to the surface regarding these actions. This essay describes the relevant context regarding the destruction of these religious monuments and determines what type of binary codes these actions revolves around. I also add a possible environment of the recipient, which can either be profane or transcendent. The conclusion is that the events in Bamiyan, March 2001, are best viewed as instrumental orientations of actions where the greater goal is the purpose of the act. The environment which the actors attempts to communicate with is the international community and therefore the profane. The events in Mosul/Nimrud on the other hand might more accurately be described as expressive actions where the purpose of the actions are fulfilled by the act itself. The environment which the act attempts to communicate with is in this case a divine entity and therefore the sacred.

The association between receptive language skills and reading comprehension has been established in the research literature. Even when the importance of receptive skills for reading comprehension has been strongly supported, in practice lower levels of skills tend to go unnoticed in typically developing children. A potentially more visible modality of language, expressive skills using speech samples, has been rarely examined despite the longitudinal links between speech and later reading development, and the connections between language and reading impairments. Even fewer reading studies have examined expressive skills using a subgroup of speech samples – narrative samples – which are closer to the kind of language practitioners can observe in their classrooms, and are also a rich source of linguistic and discourse-level data in school-aged children. This thesis presents a study examining the relationship between expressive language skills in narrative samples and reading comprehension after the first two years of formal reading instruction, with considerable attention given to methodological and developmental issues. In order to address the main methodological issues surrounding the identification of the optimal linguistic indices in terms of reliability and the existence of developmental patterns, two studies of language development in oral narratives were carried out. The first of the narrative language studies drew data from an existing corpus, while the other analysed primary data, collected specifically for this purpose. Having identified the optimal narrative indices in two different samples, the main study examined the relationships between these expressive narrative measures along with receptive standardised measures, and reading comprehension in a monolingual sample of eighty 7- and 8-year-old children attending Year 3 in the UK. Both receptive and expressive oral language skills were assessed at three different levels: vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Regression analyses indicated that, when considering expressive narrative variables on their own, expressive grammar and vocabulary, in that order, contributed to explain over a fifth of reading comprehension variance in typically developing children. When controlling for receptive language however, expressive skills were not able to account for significant unique variance in the outcome measure. Nonetheless, mediation analyses revealed that receptive vocabulary and grammar played a mediating role in the relationship between expressive skills from narratives and reading comprehension. Results and further research directions are discussed in the context of this study’s methodological considerations.

According to such functional stylistic features as social preserves, content and the prevailing function Lithuanian essays can be ascribed to three variations: publicistic, scientific and literary style. The major part of essays is dominated by the features of expressive and analytical sub-style of the publicistic style. Essays are also written in the field of liberal arts and natural sciences. In the analysed period the Lithuanian essay surpassed the dividing line between the publicistic and creative literature – texts of fictional content may be called essays. / Pagal tokius funkcinius stilistinius požymius kaip visuomenės veiklos sritis, turinys ir vyraujanti funkcija lietuvių esė galima priskirti trims atmainoms: publicistiniam, moksliniam ir meniniam stiliui. Didžiojoje jų dalyje vyrauja publicistinio stiliaus ekspresyviojo bei analitinio postilio požymiai. Rašoma esė ir humanitarinių bei gamtos mokslų srityje Tiriamuoju laikotarpiu lietuvių esė peržengė ribą, skiriančią publicistiką ir meninę literatūrą – esė pavadinami fikcinio turinio tekstai.

Therapeutic education initiatives embodying a whole child approach can be seen to address the intellectual, emotional, bodily and spiritual as being part of a child’s educational self. Through designing and implementing the concept of “aesthetic life narratives” in a primary school classroom, my research produces a curricular example of how therapeutic notions such as those found in psychological thought can be integrated into contemporary Scottish education through narrative and aesthetic means, exemplifying how individual children can make sense of expressive processes and roles introduced to them in an educational context. The specific characteristics of the research space and the particular interactive quality of research participation also illustrate how different children are able to participate in a short-term emotional education intervention specifically designed to be empowering. At the same time, my experience shows that the complex dynamic between the subjective life of a researcher and the historical nature of a child’s experience with caregivers in their home life can shape educational/research experience, as well as its adult and child participants, in ways unanticipated. What transpired in the process of applying philosophical ideas to the real lives of children in my research produced ethical implications regarding critical reflexivity and the socio-cultural regard of the child that are of wider relevance to educators, researchers, counsellors and policy makers who interact with children in their own work.

This thesis examines the validity of polyvagal theory as a model of normal socio-emotional responding (Porges, 1995, 2001, 2003a). Polyvagal theory makes several claims, and to date many of its predictions lack empirical testing. In the current research, five main hypotheses stemming from polyvagal theory were identified and tested using healthy participants. The initial empirical study examined the influence of laboratory stressors on autonomic function. The findings revealed that social evaluative threat increases activation of the sympathetic nervous system more than a virtual reality maze, and that arousal remains elevated for longer during anticipation of social evaluative threat in comparison to recovery from social evaluative threat. The second study investigated the effects of emotion regulation strategies on autonomic function, and highlighted the effectiveness of two meditation practices in reducing defensive physiological arousal and increasing subjective positive emotion. These studies were followed with a set of studies designed to evaluate the effects of defensive physiological arousal on socio-emotional functioning, as a direct test of polyvagal theory. The first study examined the effects of a laboratory stressor on facial expressivity, revealing that social evaluative threat had little impact on expressive regulation. A second study investigated the effects of a laboratory stressor on emotional sensitivity and spontaneous facial mimicry. Some limited support was found for polyvagal theory, although neither emotional sensitivity nor facial mimicry was significantly affected by laboratory stress. A final empirical study investigated the effects of a laboratory stressor on affiliation tendencies. The laboratory stressor did not influence participants’ willingness to spend time with others, however the experiment did reveal significant relationships between markers of social safeness and affiliation. The overall conclusion of this thesis is that polyvagal may not be a representative model of socio-emotional functioning in healthy participants. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the validity of polyvagal theory as a universal model of socio-emotional responding.

<p>This dissertation investigates identity, citizenship, and belonging on the Navajo (Diné) Nation in Arizona and New Mexico through an ethnographic study of Navajo country western bands and the politics of Navajo language use. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed by scholars as a singular and somewhat monolithic entity. But my dissertation tracks the ways that Navajos distinguish themselves from one another by dint of geographic location, physical appearance, linguistic abilities, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, class affiliations and musical taste. These distinctions are made over and above citizenship requirements for enrollment in the Navajo Nation. Thus, I focus on how a Navajo politics of sameness and difference indexes larger ideas and perceptions of "social authenticity" linked to the ability to speak, look and act "Navajo." Based on 28 months of fieldwork, the dissertations draws on three types of qualitative data: 1) interviews with Navajo country music performers and Navajo language activists 2) participant observation that included playing with three Navajo country bands and living on the reservation 3) discourse analysis of musical performances, band rehearsals, Navajo newspaper articles and other media The resulting study joins linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of music (ethnomusicology) and American Indian Studies to show how "being Navajo" is contested and debated, and, more broadly, to interrogate the complex ways that indigenous identities are negotiated across multiple, often-contradictory and crisscrossing axes.</p> / Dissertation

Habitual suppression of emotions has been linked to adverse consequences such as avoidant attachment, lower social support, and reduced relationship closeness (e.g. John & Gross, 2004). However, accumulating evidence that expression and suppression can be both adaptive and maladaptive in different contexts suggests the importance of flexibility in emotional regulation. The present study examined the mechanisms underlying the only laboratory measure of emotional flexibility: the Expressive Flexibility (EF) task (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Westphal, & Coifman, 2004). This measure has been linked to adjustment over a one-year period, especially in the context of social threat, and among people who have experienced higher levels of life stress (Westphal, Seivert & Bonanno, 2010). We sought to test whether EF is related to physiological recovery from stress in the immediate term. Participants completed questionnaire measures, the EF Task and a stressful public speaking task. In the EF task, participants were filmed suppressing, exaggerating, and not altering facial reactions to negative and positive pictures. A “balanced EF” score was calculated reflecting their ability to suppress and exaggerate with equal success. Regression analyses used EF scores as predictors for psychophysiological indices of stress (SCR and HR) during and after the public-speaking task. The interaction of EF and social safeness (SSPS) was predictive of the magnitude of SCR recovery, such that for people with lower EF, higher SSPS is predictive of greater SCR recovery. These results converge with previous findings on the suggestion that EF is related to resilience, especially in the context of adversity.

Four young children who were learning English as a second language were observed during their participation in an English Language Development class in a school in the North Texas area. Demographic data and checklists were used to describe progress in expressive language and the key vocabulary approach to beginning literacy as adapted by Trietsch and Monk. Data from the interviews with the classroom teachers of the subjects and anecdotal records were used to describe the interaction of the subjects with other English-speaking children and adults. Comparisons were made between progress in writing the key vocabulary and progress in expressive language and between progress in writing the key vocabulary and the progress of interaction with other English-speaking children and adults. The subjects progressed in literacy in English as a second language while learning English as a second language.

Research examining language in written and oral trauma narratives indicates that exposure and cognitive processing are important processes responsible for therapeutic change. Bio-informational theory, which defines emotions as the activation of response, stimulus, and meaning units in memory, provides a meaningful structure for evaluating language in traumatic and neutral essays. This study examined the effects of imagery training procedures designed to prime activation of response or stimulus units on word usage. The effect of writing instructions on activation of meaning units was also investigated. Unscreened undergraduates (n=246) were randomly assigned in a 2 writing condition (traumatic or neutral) x 3 training condition (response-training, stimulus-training, or no-training) design. Word count dictionaries were used to capture the effects of training and instructions on language. Overall, results supported predicted effects of stimulus training and trauma writing, but anticipated effects of response-training were inconsistent. Implications for theory and the use of language to measure emotion are discussed.