No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Despite the exponential growth in internet usage for personal communication over the last 10 years (Madden & Zickuhr, 2011) little is known of the online interpersonal persuasion process. Whilst some psychological research has been undertaken in this area, the findings are somewhat contradictory (e.g. Di Blasio & Milani, 2008; Murphy, Long, Holleran, & Esterly, 2003). These studies also fail to give consideration to cues used in online persuasive interactions due to the absence of paralinguistic cues. Further, the extant research in this domain has not explicitly examined the persuasion process in terms of a theoretical model. This thesis aims to address these issues and provide a foundation from which future research can be based. This thesis comprises two studies. The first study examined participants’ reactions to anonymous persuasive requests. These requests were presented using three situational contexts, each of which elicited different self-interest motivations (i.e. social, learning, and political). It also compared participants’ reactions to these contexts across three different communication modes both online and offline (i.e. instant messaging, email, and face to face). Language cues (i.e. language power and emotion) contained in the messages presented were also manipulated. The findings from this study show that in anonymous interactions communication mode does not affect compliance decisions. Instead, individuals are sensitive to situational context in online interactions and they process information in accordance with their self-interest motivations. Further, it was also found that, despite the anonymity, individuals are able to engage in impression formation by using the available cues and utilise these impressions when making compliance decisions. In response to these findings, Study 2 examined the effect of prior information in online interpersonal persuasive interactions and found that this information influences message evaluations over and above those in anonymous interactions. This study also examined the persuasion process in terms of a theoretical model finding that individuals engage in hypothesis-testing utilising all the information they perceive to be relevant to a compliance decision. Thus, it was concluded that Kruglanski and Thompson’s (1999) unimodel of persuasion provides the best explanation for online interpersonal persuasion processes. The findings from this thesis provide a broad foundation from which to base future research. They demonstrate that context is important in online communication and affects compliance decisions. They also show that cues are attended to in online interactions and are used in the evaluation process as they provide relevant evidence from which to base a compliance decision. From the findings of this thesis a model of the interpersonal persuasion process is proposed.

158 pages / This is a study of labor migration and the changing village agricultural production of the Mano society of West Africa brought about by the participation in the developing western economy of the Republic of Liberia. These forces have been accelerating since 1926 due to the coming of the American owned Firestone rubber plantation, the largest such development in the world.

This study aims to investigate how second language (L2) learners’ first language (L1) affects the acquisition of locative phrases in Chinese by examining the performance of L2 Chinese learners with different L1s (L1 English and L1 Korean learners). Locative phrases in Chinese introduced by preposition zài ‘at’ can occur in two positions in a sentence: between a subject and a verb (preverbal position); after a verb (postverbal position). A preverbal locative phrase indicates the general location where an event happens. However, a postverbal locative phrase occurs with restrictions (Li and Thompson, 1981; Liu, 2009) and carries a distinctive semantic function indicating the location where an action ends up (Fan, 1986). These characteristics of locative phrases in Chinese cause difficulties for L2 learners. In the field of Chinese as Second Language or Foreign Language, the preposition zài ‘at’ is the most frequent preposition, but it also incurs the most errors among learners’ usage (Ding and Shen, 2001; Zhao, 2000). It has been assumed L1 Influence is the main contributing factor (Cui, 2005; Ding and Shen, 2001), but to date relatively little empirical research has been done. The present study compares the performance between two L1 groups. The participants were studying Chinese as a foreign language in the US and in South Korea respectively. Three experiments were conducted: a grammaticality judgment, a picture-meaning match, and an open-ended short essay. The grammaticality judgment experiment was designed to investigate how learners’ L1 affects their judgment of grammaticality; the picture-meaning match experiment explored learners’ knowledge on meaning differences between preverbal and postverbal locative phrases; the open-ended short essay experiment examined L1 influence on the use of locative phrases in learners’ writings. Performance of the participants was compared in three ways, following the methodology suggested by Jarvis (2000): within each L1 group (intra L1 group), between L1 English and L1 Korean (inter L1 group), and between each learner group and the NS group (inter L1 group congruity). Results show that L1 influence is significant only when there is a mismatch between L1 and L2. The results confirm that preverbal locative phrases are acquired earlier than postverbal locative phrases, regardless of learners’ L1. Possible factors that may affect the acquisition sequence of Chinese locative phrases were also discussed. This study also finds evidence of avoidance (Laufer and Eliasson, 1993) in the usage of postverbal locative phrases among L1 Korean learners.

No description available.

An experiment was conducted to compare the functional performance of 20 young adults and 20 older adults in two types of tasks. One type of task was normal activities of daily living which are meaningful, familiar, and well practiced while the other type was a contrived, relatively unfamiliar task of wrapping a package. While young and old adults did not differ in the ratings of the familiarity of the two tasks, results from an Age by Task Type mixed MANOVA demonstrated a significant age difference in both activities. This suggests that older adults show age-related decline with tasks even when those tasks are familiar, practiced, and ecologically valid.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate short-term memory disorder in elderly, psychiatric patients and to attempt to relate this disorder to the concept of "neural excitability". There is no doubt that some elderly, psychiatric patients suffer from a short-term memory deficit. Many investigators have reported that patients with diagnoses of senile psychosis or psychosis with cerebral arteriosclerosis experience serious difficulty with "initial learning" or the immediate recall of new, or at least freshly presented, stimuli. A number of studies have suggested that this short-term memory disorder may be the result of a disruption in one of the mechanisms which has been proposed to account for the ability of young, adult subjects to respond sequentially to stimuli presented simultaneously through different sensory channels. One of these mechanisms has been termed the "p system", which only passes information successively; the other, the "s system", which can contain simultaneously information from two channels. This latter mechanism is the short-term store which is required for the effective handling of simultaneously presented, dichotic stimuli, and which is apparently the defective mechanism in elderly, psychiatric patients with memory disorder. A binaural, simultaneous stimulation experiment was conducted. Two groups of 20 elderly, psychiatric patients (one with clinically ascertained memory disorder and the other without such disorder) were tested using tape-recorded digits. Within these two main groups the conditions of recall were manipulated for the purpose of examining what effect the prescription of the order of recall would have upon the ability of the patients to recall the binaural digits. Half of the subjects from each main group were told before the presentation of the digits which channel they would be required to reproduce first, and the other half was told after the presentation. The general experimental hypotheses were that, under the "before" condition, the memory-disordered subjects would have significantly greater difficulty recalling the stored digits (second channel recalled) than would the non-memory-disordered subjects; this difference would be magnified in the "after" condition. Although the results from some portions of this experiment were not fully in accord with expectation, they all were in the predicted direction. Several possibilities were advanced in an attempt to account for this failure to achieve statistical significance, and for some of the disparities between present results and those from previous studies conducted along similar lines. However, the experimental findings did lend weight to the idea that in some elderly, psychiatric patients there is a breakdown in the short-term storage system of the type proposed by previous investigators. The underlying cause for the short-term memory deficit of some elderly, psychiatric patients may be a reduction in the neural excitability involved in the short-term storage process. A current neuropsychological model proposes a two-stage process of memory functioning: reverberatory activity and permanent changes in the nervous system as a result of this activity. A second experiment was conducted using a cumulative learning paradigm with the aim of examining the efficiency of these stages in elderly, psychiatric patients. Essentially the same two groups of subjects were again tested with a list of repeated and non-repeated series of digits. The hypothesis here was that, in contrast to the control subjects, the experimental subjects would not display cumulative learning of the repeated series of digits. In supporting the experimental hypothesis, the results also indirectly reinforced the notion that elderly, memory-disordered patients suffer from a reduction in the energy of the electrical oscillations and/or an impedance of the neural network, both of which would mitigate against any structural modification based on reverberations. Although the experimental subjects in these studies all displayed a severe short-term memory dysfunction, it was suspected that they were not totally incapable of learning, provided they were given sufficient opportunity for practice. The third and final experiment in this thesis dealt with the serial learning of words which were to be recalled or recognized by the same subjects involved in the first two studies. It was expected that the memory-disordered patients would be inferior to the non-memory-disordered on both a recall and recognition task, but that both groups would show evidence of learning over a series of trials, the control group displaying the greatest amount of improvement under both conditions. The experimental results suggest that at least some learning does occur even where the patients exhibit gross memory disorder but that there is a definite limit to the amount of material which can be learned by these patients. Taken together, the results of these three experiments lend support to the notion that the memory disorder manifested by some elderly, psychiatric patients may be referable to a reduction in cerebral reverberatory activity which makes longer-term learning virtually impossible. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate