A total sample of 1,105 students from the universities of Natal, Witwatersrand and the North participated in this study. The Eating Attitude Test (EAT) and the Bulimic Investigatory Test, Edinburgh (BITE) were administered to three female and three male student samples. Subjects also provided biographic, demographic and weight-related information. The majority of subjects fell within the average weight range of the Body Mass Index (BMI), with the percentage of underweight Indian subjects being higher than the corresponding percentages of the black and white student groups. The majority of males in each race group have accurate weight perceptions. In contrast, the minority of females (fewer than a third) of Indian and white females and under half of black females have accurate weight perceptions. However, all overweight white females assessed themselves as such and 89% of overweight black women assessed themselves as overweight. In terms of exaggerated weight perceptions, more white and Indian females (72% and 70% respectively) consider themselves as overweight or very overweight when they were actually of average weight, than black females (47%). Females in each race group scored consistently higher on all scales assessed than their male counterparts. White females exhibited the most disturbed eating behaviours and attitudes in terms of the categorised percentage scores obtained on all scales of the BITE and EAT. No Indian males obtained scores in the pathological range. On the EAT scale, 19% of white females, 17% of black females and 9% of Indian females, 7% of black males and 1% of white males obtained scores which were categorised as pathological. The more stringent criteria of the BITE showed a lower percentage of all subjects in the pathological range, albeit still retaining the gender discrepancy. Thirteen percent of white female students, 8% of black females, 3% of Indian females, 2% of white males and 1% of black males obtained a pathological score on the BITE scale. The Indian female and male sample exhibited the healthiest eating behaviours and attitudes relative to the other two racial groups examined. In terms of mean scores a general trend emerged in which black males obtained higher mean scores than white and Indian males, and black females obtained mean scores (which were overall) similar in magnitude to those of white females. The majority of black females who obtained pathological scores were urban raised and were from the upper socio-economic stratum. The majority of white females who obtained pathological scores were from urban backgrounds, had exaggerated weight perceptions and expressed a desire to lose at least 10 kilograms of weight. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1996.

Understanding human behaviour is key to understanding the spread of epidemics, habit dispersion, and the efficacy of health interventions. Investigation into the patterns of and drivers for human behaviour has often been facilitated by paper tools such as surveys, journals, and diaries. These tools have drawbacks in that they can be forgotten, go unfilled, and depend on often unreliable human memories. Researcher-driven data collection mechanisms, such as interviews and direct observation, alleviate some of these problems while introducing others, such as bias and observer effects. In response to this, technological means such as special-purpose data collection hardware, wireless sensor networks, and apps for smart devices have been built to collect behavioural data. These technologies further reduce the problems experienced by more traditional behavioural research tools, but often experience problems of reliability, generality, extensibility, and ease of configuration. This document details the construction of a smartphone-based app designed to collect data on human behaviour such that the difficulties of traditional tools are alleviated while still addressing the problems faced by modern supplemental technology. I describe the app's main data collection engine and its construction, architecture, reliability, generality, and extensibility, as well as the programming language developed to configure it and its feature set. To demonstrate the utility of the tool and its configuration language, I describe how they have been used to collect data in the field. Specifically, eleven case studies are presented in which the tool's architecture, flexibility, generality, extensibility, modularity, and ease of configuration have been exploited to facilitate a variety of behavioural monitoring endeavours. I further explain how the engine performs data collection, the major abstractions it employs, how its design and the development techniques used ensure ongoing reliability, and how the engine and its configuration language could be extended in the future to facilitate a greater range of experiments that require behavioural data to be collected. Finally, features and modules of the engine's encompassing system, iEpi, are presented that have not otherwise been documented to give the reader an understanding of where the work fits into the larger data collection and processing endeavour that spawned it.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Sveriges lantbruksuniv., 2007. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Projektet hade sin bakgrund i önskan att tillhandahålla en virtuell träningsmiljö för lärare där de kan öva på sin icke-verbala kommunikation med elever. Före det här projektet hade utvecklingen av träningsmiljön lett fram till ett visualiserings-system för ett tredimensionellt virtuellt klassrum med animerade karaktärer samt ett system för upptagning och igenkänning av användarens rörelser. För att en sådan träningsmiljö skall vara användbar krävs dock att de virtuella studenterna uppvisar ett trovärdigt mänskligt beteende. Den här rapporten avhandlar implementationen av mänskligt beteende i agenterna förkroppsligade i visualiseringssystemet. För detta ändamål användes det BDI-baserade multi-agent-systemet Jason tillsammans med inspiration från personlighetsteorin OCEAN, affektionsteorin OCC och beteendearkitekturen PMFserv. Rapporten avhandlar även resultatet av ett experiment som utfördes för att utvärdera systemet. I experimentet blev 16 testpersoner introducerade för två olika lärar-scenarion, varpå de, för var och en av dessa scenarion, fyllde i en enkät om deras upplevelse. / The project had its background in the desire to provide a virtual training environment for teachers in which they can exercise their non-verbal communication (e.g. gestures and orientation) with students. Prior to this project, the development of the training environment had led up to a visualisation system for a 3D virtual classroom with virtual students and a motion recognition system for capturing and recognising the user's movements. For such a training environment to be useful however, the virtual students need to express believable human behaviour. This report covers the implementation of human behaviour in the agents embodied in the visualisation system using the BDI-based Jason multi-agent simulation platform with further inspiration taken from the OCEAN personality theory, the OCC theory of emotions and the PMFserv cognitive architecture. It also covers the results of an experiment that was conducted to evaluate the system. During this experiment, 16 test persons were introduced to two different teaching scenarios and were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their experience after each scenario.

Longitudinal developmental fMRI studies just recently began to focus on within-subject reliability using the intraclass coefficient (ICC). It remains largely unclear which degree of reliability can be achieved in developmental studies and whether this depends on the type of task used. Therefore, we aimed to systematically investigate the reliability of three well-classified tasks: an emotional attention, a cognitive control, and an intertemporal choice paradigm. We hypothesized to find higher reliability in the cognitive task than in the emotional or reward-related task. 104 healthy mid-adolescents were scanned at age 14 and again at age 16 within M = 1.8 years using the same paradigms, scanner, and scanning protocols. Overall, we found both variability and stability (i.e. poor to excellent ICCs) depending largely on the region of interest (ROI) and task. Contrary to our hypothesis, whole brain reliability was fair for the cognitive control task but good for the emotional attention and intertemporal choice task. Subcortical ROIs (ventral striatum, amygdala) resulted in lower ICCs than visual ROIs. Current results add to the yet sparse overall ICC literature in both developing samples and adults. This study shows that analyses of stability, i.e. reliability, are helpful benchmarks for longitudinal studies and their implications for adolescent development.

Research in younger adults dissociates cognitive from affective facets of social information processing, rather than promoting a monolithic view of social intelligence. An influential theory on adult development suggests differential effects of aging on cognitive and affective functions. However, this dissociation has not been directly tested in the social domain. Employing a newly developed naturalistic paradigm that disentangles facets of the social mind within an individual, we show multi-directionality of age-related differences. Specifically, components of the socio-cognitive route – Theory of Mind and metacognition – are impaired in older relative to younger adults. Nevertheless, these social capacities are still less affected by aging than factual reasoning and metacognition regarding non-social content. Importantly, the socio-affective route is well-functioning, with no decline in empathy and elevated compassion in the elderly. These findings contribute to an integrated theory of age-related change in social functioning and inform interventions tailored to specifically reinstate socio-cognitive skills in old age.

D.Litt. et Phil. / The aim of this investigation is to provide support to the growing evidence that people's paradigms directly influence the way differences are managed. Adherence to the old or Newtonian model has seemingly led to a restricted ability to deal with differences. Adherence to the new or quantum model, on the other hand, appears to facilitate not only the understanding of why there are so many differences and why they should be "celebrated" (topic of the American Counselling Association's 1995 Conference, Denver), but also encourages people to freely and nonjudgementally acknowledge, explore and integrate these differences. As a first step toward achieving this aim, a review of the literature regarding the existence of differences, the perceived causes of differences, and the perceived ways of managing differences in interpersonal relationship up to the present time will be provided. Secondly, the importance of paradigms in general, and of the natural scientific paradigms in particular, will be illustrated. Concepts of Newtonian and quantum physics that are considered relevant to the investigation will be described under this heading. Thirdly, the rationale of the exploratory, or qualitative study will be outlined. Fourthly, a chapter linking the natural scientific paradigms . to the discipline of psychology will be presented. Psychological analogies of Newtonian and quantum concepts will be put forward as well as examples of Newtonian and quantum psychology. Finally, implications of the described and discussed findings of Newtonian and quantum physics on the management of psychological differences will be explored, so that the 'celebration' and integration of differences can, indeed, be promoted.

A multitude of sensory inputs needs to be processed during sensorimotor integration. A crucial factor for detecting relevant information is its complexity, since information content can be conflicting at a perceptual level. This may be central to executive control processes, such as response inhibition. This EEG study aims to investigate the system neurophysiological mechanisms behind effects of perceptual conflict on response inhibition. We systematically modulated perceptual conflict by integrating a Global-local task with a Go/Nogo paradigm. The results show that conflicting perceptual information, in comparison to non-conflicting perceptual information, impairs response inhibition performance. This effect was evident regardless of whether the relevant information for response inhibition is displayed on the global, or local perceptual level. The neurophysiological data suggests that early perceptual/ attentional processing stages do not underlie these modulations. Rather, processes at the response selection level (P3), play a role in changed response inhibition performance. This conflict-related impairment of inhibitory processes is associated with activation differences in (inferior) parietal areas (BA7 and BA40) and not as commonly found in the medial prefrontal areas. This suggests that various functional neuroanatomical structures may mediate response inhibition and that the functional neuroanatomical structures involved depend on the complexity of sensory integration processes.

Longitudinal developmental fMRI studies just recently began to focus on within-subject reliability using the intraclass coefficient (ICC). It remains largely unclear which degree of reliability can be achieved in developmental studies and whether this depends on the type of task used. Therefore, we aimed to systematically investigate the reliability of three well-classified tasks: an emotional attention, a cognitive control, and an intertemporal choice paradigm. We hypothesized to find higher reliability in the cognitive task than in the emotional or reward-related task. 104 healthy mid-adolescents were scanned at age 14 and again at age 16 within M = 1.8 years using the same paradigms, scanner, and scanning protocols. Overall, we found both variability and stability (i.e. poor to excellent ICCs) depending largely on the region of interest (ROI) and task. Contrary to our hypothesis, whole brain reliability was fair for the cognitive control task but good for the emotional attention and intertemporal choice task. Subcortical ROIs (ventral striatum, amygdala) resulted in lower ICCs than visual ROIs. Current results add to the yet sparse overall ICC literature in both developing samples and adults. This study shows that analyses of stability, i.e. reliability, are helpful benchmarks for longitudinal studies and their implications for adolescent development.

Research in younger adults dissociates cognitive from affective facets of social information processing, rather than promoting a monolithic view of social intelligence. An influential theory on adult development suggests differential effects of aging on cognitive and affective functions. However, this dissociation has not been directly tested in the social domain. Employing a newly developed naturalistic paradigm that disentangles facets of the social mind within an individual, we show multi-directionality of age-related differences. Specifically, components of the socio-cognitive route – Theory of Mind and metacognition – are impaired in older relative to younger adults. Nevertheless, these social capacities are still less affected by aging than factual reasoning and metacognition regarding non-social content. Importantly, the socio-affective route is well-functioning, with no decline in empathy and elevated compassion in the elderly. These findings contribute to an integrated theory of age-related change in social functioning and inform interventions tailored to specifically reinstate socio-cognitive skills in old age.