M.Ed. / Nowadays more and more emphasis is placed on the importance of the so called "Emotional Intelligence" which include aspects like social skills, purposefulness, persistence, self-motivation, reliability and solid interpersonal relationships. Goleman (1996: xii) mentions qualities such as "self-control, zeal and persistence" and says that these qualities can be taught and learned irrespective of the individual's intellectual potential. The modern working force requires people who are reliable, adaptable and flexible so that they can cope with various circumstances in a multi-cultural society that is characterized by diversity. The aspects mentioned here, manifest in the different dimensions of the self-concept of the individual and it is therefore important to investigate the nature and the quality of the self-concept and endeavour to determine how this self-concept is established. For this reason the meta-theoretical and theoretical assumptions concerning self-concept were discussed and serve as a theoretical frame of reference for this study. The aim of this study is to determine if similarities exist between the selfconcept of the child and the self-concept of the parent and to investigate whether the self-concept of the parent is reflected in the self-concept of the child. The research design and methods are discussed as well as the validity and reliability of the questionnaire and the test sample. A quasi-experimental research design was employed to enable the researcher to gather measurable data. This approach was used in order to make numerous comparisons between the different groups. In this way it would be possible to identify possible differences as well as possible similarities between the self-concept of children and the self-concept of their parents. The design that was followed, included the use of an existing questionnaire which provides for the measuring of he self-concept on eight different scales. These scales correspond with the different aspects of the self-concept and include: the intellectual (academic) self-concept, the general social selfviii concept, the role of the family, the value orientation of the learner and the educator, the physical aspect, self-confidence, religion and the experience of frustration. The self-concept ,questionnaire (consisting of 46 items) was issued to 100 children. These children were identified in conjunction with the guidance teacher and they were subdivided into two groups namely those with a predominantly high self-concept and children with a predominantly low selfconcept. Children had to complete a questionnaire and see to it that the respective parents also complete questionnaires. Questionnaire items were drawn up, based on existing literature and research findings...

We hypothesized that bone evolved, in part, to enable bony vertebrates to escape danger in the wild. In support of this notion we show here that a bone-derived signal is necessary to develop an acute stress response (ASR). Indeed, exposure to various types of stressors in mice, rats (rodents) and humans leads to a rapid and selective surge of circulating bioactive osteocalcin because stressors favor the uptake by osteoblasts of glutamate, which prevents inactivation of osteocalcin prior to its secretion. Osteocalcin permits manifestations of the ASR to unfold by signaling in post-synaptic parasympathetic neurons to inhibit their activity, thereby leaving the sympathetic tone unopposed. Osteocalcin is also engaged in a complex cross talk with the other principal endocrine regulator of the ASR, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Exogenous osteocalcin stimulates an increase in circulating adrenal steroids and Ocn-/- mice born of Ocn-/- mothers exhibit a severe developmental defect in adrenal steroidogenesis of corticosterone and aldosterone. Like wild-type animals, adrenalectomized rodents and adrenal-insufficient patients can develop an ASR, and genetic studies suggest that this is due to their high circulating osteocalcin levels. We propose that osteocalcin defines a bony vertebrate specific endocrine mediation of the ASR. Together these results demonstrate a role for bone in the physiology of danger.

Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / Vol. 1 :Examen de la littérature (TH-000218) ;Vol. 2 :Contribution expérimentale (TH-000219) / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / One of the biggest hurdles to the development of an effective driver state monitor is the that there is no real-time eye-gaze detection. This is primarily due to the fact that such systems require calibration. In this thesis the various aspects that comprise an eye gaze tracker are investigated. From that we developed an eye gaze tracker for automobiles that does not require calibration. We used a monocular camera system with IR light sources placed in each of the three mirrors. The camera system created the bright-pupil effect for robust pupil detection and tracking. We developed an SVM based algorithm for initial eye candidate detection; after that the eyes were tracked using a hybrid Kalman/Mean-shift algorithm. From the tracked pupils, various features such as the location of the glints (reflections in the pupil from the IR light sources) were extracted. This information is then fed into a Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN). The GRNN then maps this information into one of thirteen gaze regions in the vehicle.

M.A. (Psychology) / A survey of the literature which concerns this study, indicated the tremendous confusion which exists in the field of Sport Psychology. Many researchers investigated various divergent factors and drew conclusions without attempting to formulate links with existing research. The lack of specific cultural research in South Africa, served as motivation for undertaking this research project.The aim of this study was to compare three groups of successful swimmers (Olympic swimmers, successful and unsuccessful provincial swimmers) in relation to certain temperament traits. The research hypothesis suggested that such traits might be the using factors for differential success levels in swimming. These traits included; Sensation Seeking, Nervous System Type, Introversion-Extraversion, and General Anxiety competitive anxiety. Self Concept was also investigated. The sample consisted of 58 competitive swimmers drawn from the 1992 South African Olympic Swimming Team, and the Eastern Transvaal and Transvaal Provincial Swimming Teams. The Olympic Team comprised the most successful group, while the remainder of the sample was subdivided into two groups (Successful and Unsuccessful Groups). The distinction was based on whether the individual swimmers had won medals and made the final of their respective races at the South African National Championships ...

The aim of this qualitative study was to explore research assistants&rsquo / opinions regarding the courses they take during their graduate study in terms of improving their science perception and research skills. The research questions include research assistants&rsquo / assessments about the effectiveness of graduate courses on research skills and science perception, their evaluation of the graduate programs in terms of improving science perception, and their suggestions on the improvement of the quality of the graduate program regarding science perception and research skills. The sample for the present study contains 12 interviewees from four different v institutes of Middle East Technical University. The interviewees are all PhD candidates at METU. The sample was chosen by using purposive sampling. In this study, the data collection instrument was a semi-structured interview guide designed by the researcher. There were 8 main questions and 9 sub-questions. The collected data was analyzed through content analysis. The results of the study are presented under four main themes, which were derived from the research questions. First theme was the assessment of research skills which was about usefulness of courses, competence about research methods, reasons for not taking courses, problems because of not taking them. The second theme was the assessment of science perception which was about contributions of courses, reasons for not taking courses. The third theme was the evaluation of the graduate programs which consisted of should-be-developed and positive aspects. The last theme was about suggestions which could be realized by university administration and by personal efforts. In conclusion, the findings revealed that the research assistants are aware of the importance of research methods course for enhancing research skills, and of effectiveness of history and philosophy of science course regarding the improving of science perception. In this respect, based on literature review and the research assistants&rsquo / views it is suggested that history and philosophy of science course utilizing explicitly-reflective inquiry approach should be included curriculum of graduate programs.

M.A. / This study is an attempt at providing substantiated research data on sensation seeking, measured using the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS), and its role in sensory, perceptual and cognitive functioning. The areas of functioning investigated included sensory tolerance levels, preference for perceptual complexity, speed of perpetual closure, verbal ability versus spatial ability and creativity ...

We can hold conversations with people in environments where typically there are additional simultaneous talkers in background acoustic space or noise like vehicles on the street or music playing at a café on the sidewalk. This seemingly trivial everyday task is difficult for people with hearing deficits and is extremely hard to model in machines. This dissertation focuses on exploring the neural mechanisms of how the human brain encodes such complex acoustic environments and how cognitive processes like attention shapes processing of the attended speech. My initial experiments explore the representation of acoustic features that help us localize single sound sources in the environment- features like direction and spectrotemporal content of the sounds, and the interaction of these representations with each other. I play natural American English sentences coming from five azimuthal directions in space. Using intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings from the human auditory cortex of the listener, I show that the direction of sound and the spectrotemporal content are encoded in two distinct aspects of neural response, the direction modulates the mean of the response and the spectrotemporal features contributes to the modulation of neural response around its mean. Furthermore, I show that these features are orthogonal to each other and do not interact. This representation enables successful decoding of both spatial and phonetic information. These findings contribute to defining the functional organization of responses in the human auditory cortex, with implications for more accurate neurophysiological models of spatial speech processing. I take a step further to investigate the role of attention in encoding the direction and phonetic features of speech. I play a mixture of male and female spatialized talkers eg. male at left side to the listener and female at right side (talker’s locations switch randomly after each sentence). I ask the listener to follow a given talker e.g. follow male talker as they switch their location after each uttered sentence. While the listener performs this experiment, I collect intracranial EEG data from their auditory cortex. I investigate the bottom-up stimulus dependent and attention independent encoding of such a cocktail party speech and the top-down attention driven role in the encoding of location and speech features. I find a bottom-up stimulus driven contralateral preference in encoding of the mixed speech i.e. Left brain hemisphere automatically and predominantly encodes speech coming from right direction and vice-versa. On top of this bottom-up representation, I find that attended talker’s direction modulates the baseline of the neural response and attended talker’s voice modulates the spectrotemporal tuning of the neural response. Moreover, the modulation to attended talker’s location is present throughout the auditory cortex but the modulation to attended talker’s voice is present only at higher order auditory cortex areas. My findings provide crucially needed evidence to determine how bottom-up and top-down signals interact in the auditory cortex in crowded and complex acoustic scenes to enable robust speech perception. Furthermore, they shed light on the hierarchical encoding of attended speech that have implications on bettering the auditory attention decoding models. Finally, I talk about a clinical case study where we show that electrical stimulation to specific sites in planum temporale (PT) of an epilepsy patient implanted with intracranial electrode leads to enhancement in speech in noise perception. When noisy speech is played with such an electrical stimulation, the patient perceives that the noise disappears, and that the speech is similar to clean speech that they hear without any noise. We performed series of analysis to determine functional organization of the three main sub regions of the human auditory cortex- planum temporale (PT), Heschl’s gyrus (HG) and superior temporal gyrus (STG). Using Cortico-Cortical Evoked Potentials (CCEPs), we modeled the PT sites to be located between the sites in HG and STG. Furthermore, we find that the discriminability of speech from nonspeech sounds increased in population neural responses from HG to the PT to the STG sites. These findings causally implicate the PT in background noise suppression and may point to a novel potential neuroprosthetic solution to assist in the challenging task of speech perception in noise. Together, this dissertation shows new evidence for the neural encoding of spatial speech; interaction of stimulus driven, and attention driven neural processes in spatial multi-talker speech perception and enhancement of speech in noise perception by electrical brain stimulation.

This study sought to determine whether the DG, CA3, and CA1 regions contain uniformly excitable populations and test the hypothesis that rapid addition of new, more excitable, granule cells in prepubescence results in a low activation probability (P1) in the DG. The immediate-early gene Homer1a was used as a neural activity marker to quantify activation in juvenile (P28) and adult (~5 mo) rats during track running. The main finding was that P1 in juveniles was substantially lower not only the DG, but also CA3 and CA1. The P1 for a DG granule cell was close to 0 in juveniles, versus 0.58 in adults. The low P1 in juveniles indicates that sparse, but non-overlapping, subpopulations participate in encoding events. Since sparse, orthogonal coding enhances a network’s ability to decorrelate input patterns (Marr, 1971; McNaughton & Morris, 1987), the findings suggest that juveniles likely possess greatly enhanced pattern separation ability. / ix, 51 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

The theoretical and methodological assumptions of this research imply a move away from a positivist empiricist approach with its reliance on the real, the measurable and the predictable towards an interactive and collaborative methodology situated in a constructivist and social epistemology. This thesis comprises a recursive intervention in the researching therapist's life. The author sets out on a voyage of self-research to investigate her "choreography of coexistence" (Maturana & Varela, 1987, p.248), due to curiosity about personal and professional impact. The purpose is to create a map of relational modes that in itself creates shifts: in the therapist. This invention-orientated research creates the context of the researcher and moves through processes: the writing of autobiography, detailed contextual description, the interpreting of feedback, and deconstruction. The contents that pour forth are many different narratives tracking the evolvement of the self in the original family, through further definition in new relationships and the expansion of roles in many professional systems both with clients and colleagues. " Extracts from conversations provide new perspectives and feedback about impact. Thus a continual 'provoking of voices' becomes a thesis theme that highlights the researcher's structure, organisation and interpersonal processes. An emancipatory and developmental process is documented through the researching therapist's positioning as actor, observer and then critic in relationship to the data. Patterns and themes emerge that facilitate both self- differentiation and connectedness and many new head-heart connections. This new knowledge could enable the professional's skilful and intuitive use of self. The self comes into being as it reflects itself, ·so a recursive process evolves where looking at the self operates on the products of its own operations. This is an active process, where the researching therapist constructs an experiential reality. Given the accountability that accrues from constructing such a reality, a focus on pragmatic, aesthetic and ethical criteria is incorporated. This research, like the practice of therapy, is a departure from attempts to demonstrate what is already known to modes of research that are recursive and improvisational. / Psychology / D. Litt. et Phil.