Thesis (PhD)-Open University. BLDSC no.DXN017034.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1998. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 14, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Jeff Laurent, Salvatore J. Catanzaro (co-chairs), Connie B. Horton, Alvin E. House. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-83) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2008. / Abstract only has been uploaded to OhioLINK. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-79)

This thesis is an investigation of the proximate mechanisms and ultimate functions of memory for emotional events. The theoretical basis of this Thesis is that in order to reach a full understanding of a biological phenomenon, it is important that both proximate and ultimate (functional) explanations for that phenomenon are explored. Chapters 2 and 3 present an examination of the proximate mechanisms involved in memory consolidation of emotional events. In Chapter 2, three experiments are presented each testing the hypothesis that stress hormone activation immediately following viewing an emotional event enhances memory for that event. Each of the three experiments failed to find an enhancing effect of stress hormone activation on memory consolidation. Chapter 3 describes an investigation into whether the reduced feedback from the body to the brain, which occurs as a result of total spinal cord transection, diminishes the intensity of emotional experience and therefore impairs memory for emotional events. The results of this investigation revealed no differences between spinal cord transection patients and matched control participants in emotional expressivity, emotional awareness and in memory for emotional material. Chapters 4 and 5 explore how memory and emotion may interact differently for males and females and in manner that facilitates their survival and reproduction. Evolutionary theory argues that males should be more concerned than females about threats to their social status, whereas females should be more concerned about threats to their physical appearance and sexual reputation. Chapter 4 describes two experiments testing whether a) males have enhanced emotional arousal and memory for words implying they are of low social status; b) females have enhanced emotional arousal and memory for words implying they are physically unattractive and sexually untrustworthy. The results of these experiments showed that females had enhanced memory for words relating to physical appearance, and partial evidence that males have 2 enhanced memory for words relating to social status. Chapter 5 tests the evolutionary theory that males should be more emotionally aroused and thus have greater memory for cues relating to sexual infidelity (the thought of their partner having sex with another man), whereas females should be more emotionally aroused and have greater memory for cues to emotional infidelity (the thought of their partner forming a close emotional attachment with another woman). It also examines whether relationship status affects emotional arousal and memory for these cues. The results did not find any support for these hypothesised sex difference in memory. However, those ‘currently in a relationship’ did show enhanced emotional arousal to cues to sexual infidelity compared to those ‘currently not in a relationship’. Chapter 6 presents an investigation concerning the evolutionary hypothesis that individuals tend to have enhanced recognition memory for the faces of deceivers or ‘liars’. This chapter describes a study in which participants viewed a series of short video clips of individuals, half of whom were lying, half telling the truth. Participants’ memory for the individuals that appeared in the video clips was tested but there was no evidence of enhanced memory for the faces of ‘liars’. Chapter 7 provides a general discussion of the findings of this thesis. The failure to find an enhancing effect of post learning stress hormone activation on memory for emotional material, and the failure to find an impairment in memory for emotional material in people with total spinal cord transection contradict two established views on the proximate mechanisms involved in emotion, and emotions effect of the brain. How these findings relate to the established mainstream views on emotion and memory are discussed. The findings of studies concerning the functional interaction of memory and emotion presented in this thesis are also discussed in relation to previous research.

This study separated participants into four different conditions based on a 2 (blocked or random study trials) x 2 (blocked or random test trials) between-subjects design. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm the researcher investigated whether or not false memories were produced at the time of study or the time of test. According to the paradigm, participants who view a series of categorical words (mad, fear, hate, rage, temper) are thought to semantically associate critical lures (anger), as a part of the list presented, more frequently than participants who see a string of unrelated terms. The production of false memory is commonly accredited to the priming effect and the relationships among categorical terms. The current study explored whether manipulating blocked versus random word lists had an effect on false memory rates and further examined the conditions under which false memories are produced, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. Participants' responses were assessed based on their recall under either blocked or random conditions in both the study and test phases. Using measures of recognition and reaction time (RT), the results indicate that false memories are created primarily during original study and not during · the test of recognition. However, although the highest rates of false memories occurred during the blocked-study condition, the fastest reaction times for false memories were seen during blocked-test. These findings can contribute to the theoretical understanding of the origin of false memory. After comparing false memory rates and reaction times, concluding whether or not the mind exclusively produces these memories during the encoding process has yet to be determined.

The border between Russia and Estonia has undergone significant changes in the past two and a half decades from a border between two Soviet republics to an international border and external EU border. In the public discourse and the scholarly literature, this border has been characterised as a battlefield shaped by divergent geopolitical visions and evaluations of the shared past. While Estonia has sought to distance itself from Russia and condemns the Soviet past as an occupation, Russia derives pride from its historical role in liberating Europe in World War II and continues to hold on to positive memories of the Soviet past and its role in the Baltic states. The thesis looks at how these official narratives have been negotiated locally in the once united border towns of Narva and Ivangorod in the Russian-Estonian borderland. Based on an extended fieldwork stay and the analysis 58 life-story interviews with people living on both sides of the border, it examines how people living in the borderland position themselves in the context of shifting narrative and structural frameworks. How do they re-evaluate the relations to the other side and reconsider their memories of the shared past? In examining these questions, the thesis seeks to make two general contributions to existing literature: it brings together the fields of border studies and memory studies to explore the reconfiguration of both temporal and spatial orderings in the making of a border. Secondly, it outlines a model for studying border change that focuses on the interrelations between the vernacular and the official level. The first part of the thesis looks at the politics of temporal orderings in the borderland and explores how people belonging to different ethnic groups and generations remember the past in the context of changing borders. It shows how people in part reproduce the polarised narratives mobilised at the official level but also how local experiences and generational change lead to a diversification of temporal orderings. The second part of the thesis explores the politics of spatial orderings in post-socialist memories. It looks at how by remembering the past people both reproduce and undermine borders; it demonstrates that it is not simply the memories of a shared past but also new inequalities following the establishment of the border that shape the ways in which people relate to their cross-border neighbours. Overall, the thesis provides a complex and differentiated account of border change in which different temporalities and spatialities at the vernacular and official levels can interact, interrelate and stand in opposition to each other. It shows that although people living in the borderland experience constraints and even powerlessness in the face of changes in the border, they have an active role in negotiating the changes and develop multiple responses to official narratives. It demonstrates how by appropriating official narratives and relating them to their own purposes, people articulate local concerns and make claims for belonging, recognition and state care in the face of the changes.

Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems have been recognised as a compelling platform for parallel computing due to the programming advantages and scalability. DSM systems allow applications to access data in a logically shared address space by abstracting away the distinction of physical memory location. As the location of data is transparent, the sources of overhead caused by accessing the distant memories are difficult to analyse. This memory locality problem has been identified as crucial to DSM performance. Many researchers have investigated the problem using simulation as a tool for conducting experiments resulting in the progressive evolution of DSM systems. Nevertheless, both the diversity of architectural configurations and the rapid advance of DSM implementations impose constraints on simulation model designs in two issues: the limitation of the simulation framework on model extensibility and the lack of verification applicability during a simulation run causing the delay in verification process. This thesis studies simulation modelling techniques for memory locality analysis of various DSM systems implemented on top of a cluster of symmetric multiprocessors. The thesis presents a simulation technique to promote model extensibility and proposes a technique for verification applicability, called a Specification-based Parameter Model Interaction (SPMI). The proposed techniques have been implemented in a new interpretation-driven simulation called DSiMCLUSTER on top of a discrete event simulation (DES) engine known as HASE. Experiments have been conducted to determine which factors are most influential on the degree of locality and to determine the possibility to maximise the stability of performance. DSiMCLUSTER has been validated against a SunFire 15K server and has achieved similarity of cache miss results, an average of +-6% with the worst case less than 15% of difference. These results confirm that the techniques used in developing the DSiMCLUSTER can contribute ways to achieve both (a) a highly extensible simulation framework to keep up with the ongoing innovation of the DSM architecture, and (b) the verification applicability resulting in an efficient framework for memory analysis experiments on DSM architecture.

Writing concurrent programs with shared memory is often not trivial. Correctly synchronising the threads and handling the non-determinism of executions require a good understanding of the interleaving semantics. Yet, interleavings are not sufficient to model correctly the executions of modern, multicore processors. These executions follow rules that are weaker than those observed by the interleavings, often leading to reorderings in the sequence of updates and readings from memory; the executions are subject to a weaker memory consistency. Reorderings can produce executions that would not be observable with interleavings, and these possible executions also depend on the architecture that the processors implement. It is therefore necessary to locate and understand these reorderings in the context of a program running, or to prevent them in an automated way. In this dissertation, we aim to automate the reasoning behind weak memory consistency and perform transformations over the code so that developers need not to consider all the specifics of the processors when writing concurrent programs. We claim that we can do automatic static analysis for axiomatically-defined weak memory models. The method that we designed also allows re-use of automated verification tools like model checkers or abstract interpreters that were not designed for weak memory consistency, by modification of the input programs. We define an abstraction in detail that allows us to reason statically about weak memory models over programs. We locate the parts of the code where the semantics could be affected by the weak memory consistency. We then provide a method to explicitly reveal the resulting reorderings so that usual verification techniques can handle the program semantics under a weaker memory consistency. We finally provide a technique that synthesises synchronisations so that the program would behave as if only interleavings were allowed. We finally test these approaches on artificial and real software. We justify our choice of an axiomatic model with the scalability of the approach and the runtime performance of the programs modified by our method.

Thesis (M.A.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by Stuart Marcovitch; submitted to the Dept. of Psychology. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 28, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-43).

Diss. (sammanfattning) Linköping : Linköpings universitet, 2007. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.