A research project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of BA Masters (Research Psychology) in the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, February/May 2016. / Research psychology is one of the five categories in which one can register as a psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA). It is, however, the most under-represented and under-researched category of the five. Many people who are eligible to register choose not to, but presumably still obtain employment. This raises questions regarding what these people are doing and what influenced their decisions to register or not to register. The aims of this research study were thus to track former research psychology masters students and gain an understanding of the different career paths this degree led them to, and why they chose to pursue a particular path. In addition, this research aimed to determine whether or not former research psychology masters students registered with the HPCSA as a research psychologist, and their reasons for doing so or not doing so, thus enabling evaluation of the relevance of the category among those with potential eligibility to occupy it. This study also sought to evaluate the degree of transformation in this division of psychology, and provide valuable career information for students interested in studying this degree. A sample of 122 former research psychology masters students was obtained through a purposive snowballing sampling technique. The respondents completed an online survey consisting of a mixture of forced choice and open ended questions. Results showed that it does not seem to be of paramount importance to be registered as a research psychologist with the HPCSA to conduct research that is considered valuable to the community, or, more broadly, to do the kind of jobs that this degree would qualify one to do. Respondents were able to pursue a variety of different career paths despite their registration status. These career paths included working in academia, health/social research, marketing and corporate research, monitoring and evaluation and psychometrics. Results also showed that there is some evidence for the transformation of psychology, with a slightly more diverse group of students in recent years, however not enough to show significance

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Psychology at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 1997. / This investigation explores and describes the experiences of psychology students who have recently completed their honours research projects. This is apparently the first study to explicate this research event by approaching it from an existential-pbenomenological viewpoint and by making use of the phenomenological method of research. The guiding idea behind the investigation is that we need to train our students to become able and enthusiastic researchers. In order to accomplish this task we instruct them about research and/or allow them to conduct a relatively independent research project at honours level. In order to enhance their training, explicit accounts of students' research experiences can be useful sources of information, to provide insight into and to alert students to the challenges facing them when they become involved in this research event. Honours students were asked to write the story of their research experiences in as much detail as possible, and to focus on their own subjective experiences of the complete event. Seven students participated in the investigation. The individual protocols were divided into natural meaning units and the natural meaning units were collapsed into themes. A brief summary of each theme was compiled. These themes were then used to formulate a general structure which reflects the collective experience of the students. The general structure as a whole, and the themes in the structure in particular, were validated by making use of subjective methods and statistical analysis. Four general themes were identified as representative of the shared experiences of the individual respondents. The four themes were: time constraints, problem-solving, personal growth, and capacity for understanding. The following important observations were made regarding these themes: The themes represent the general essence of students* experience of the research event during their honours year of study. The themes that emerged from the data reflect some of the problems identified by authors and instructors in the field of research methodology. This investigation can be seen as a starting point for further research on the research experiences of students. Insights generated by the study provide some useful guidelines for academics involved in the training and teaching of research methodology students.

Interference effects are widespread in tests of explicit memory, such as recall and recognition. Implicit memory, in contrast, appears to be highly resistant to such effects. Four experiments were performed to provide a systematic investigation of interference in one implicit memory task, stem completion. In the first two experiments the cues used in the stem completion task uniquely identified one studied item (e.g., test cue ANT______; only one studied item, say, ANTIQUE, began with "ANT"). Performance in a single-list control condition was compared to a three-list interference condition in Experiment 1. No indication of interference, proactive or retroactive, was obtained. In Experiment 2, the effect of similarity of the interfering material to the targets was examined by using neighbours (words that shared all but one letter) in the interfering lists. In addition, completion performance was measured on words from each list. There was no interference attributable to the similarity manipulation, and there was no sign of a buildup of interference across list positions. In the final two experiments, the cues were non-unique, i.e., more than one studied item matched the stem cue (e.g., study ANTIQUE, ANTENNA, ANTLER; test cue ANT______). Because such a test limits the subject to one response out of the three studied alternatives, comparison to a uniquely-cued condition can lead to incorrect conclusions. Instead, an appropriate method of analyzing the data was developed. Using this analysis, proactive interference was detected in the stem completion task. The combination of findings from the unique and non-unique cue conditions suggested that there was no interference during encoding (e.g., no unlearning), but that interference effects arose during retrieval. A search mechanism that could explain the pattern of results was proposed.

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This. thesis is a philosophical consideration of creativity and its relationship to positive mental health. This relationship is viewed by exploring the functions of the creative process, the creative personality, the creative environment, and the creative product and their contributions to the enhancement of mental health.Using library research, a generalized concept of positive mental health is developed as well as a concept of creativity as a positive influence on mental health. The review of literature and the findings are combined for clarity.

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Effects of paralanguage cues of expectancy, experimenter expectancy, subject set, subject sex, and task ambiguity on subjects' reaction time to a list of words were studied in a factorial 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 repeated measurement analysis of variance design. Subjects were 144 undergraduate psychology students, half males and half females, receiving extra class credit for participation. Experimenters were four paid graduate teaching assistants, two males and two females. The study had several purposes. One purpose was to study the relative impact of the paralanguage cues of expectancy in the instruction reading versus all other cues of expectancy on subjects' behavior. A second purpose was to determine the nature of the interaction between task ambiguity and expectancy cues. A third purpose was to study sex differences in susceptibility to expectancy cues. Studying the effect of subject set instructions which provide a hint as to the experimental hypothesis and a request to comply with it on subjects' responses was a fourth purpose. Finally, a fifth purpose was to study further subjects' awareness of the stimuli that affect their behavior. Paralanguage expectancy cues were manipulated by a drama professor tape recording the task instructions so as to induce quick, neutral or slow responses. Task ambiguity was manipulated by having simple (nonambiguous) and homonym (ambiguous) words in the list. Experimenter expectancy and subjects' set were manipulated by written instructions. A significant main effect for paralanguage cues of expectancy (p < .001) and a significant interaction among paralanguage expectancy cues, experimenter expectancy, and subject set (p < .01) were sound as well as unhypothesized significant main effect for ambiguity (p < .05). Subjects were found to be unaware of the paralanguage cues that affected their behavior even with subject set instructions (independence model, x² = 4.85 4 df p < .3). The main effect for experimenter expectancy mediated by all other nonverbal cues except those in the instructions reading, and the interaction between word ambiguity and expectancy cues, and that between subject sex and expectancy cues were not significant. The present results support previous findings concerning the effect of manipulated paralanguage expectancy cues and the relative importance of these cues over all other nonverbal cues of expectancy, and extend these previous findings by including subjects of both sexes in a nonevaluation apprehension situation. The present findings also support previous studies which found that subjects comply with expectancy information given to them irrespective of its social desirability and that they are unaware of the expectancy cues affecting their behavior. The present findings do not support previous findings on the interaction between subject sex and experimenter expectancy. Due to subjects' general unawareness of the paralanguage cues of expectancy affecting their behavior, an adequate test of the dominant subject role in this study was not possible.

The question of how we recognize shapes when they are misoriented with respect to their typical orientation has not yet been adequately answered. Two kinds of theories have been proposed to address this question: One theory contends that initial access to the correct stored representation is orientation-dependent and the other theory contends that initial access is orientation-independent. Current evidence, based on naming latencies, does not distinguish between these two theories. In the present experiments, Cooper and Shepard's (1973/1982) cuing paradigm was adapted to distinguish between the orientation-dependent account and the orientation-independent account of shape recognition. A new measure of shape recognition involving figure-ground decisions was employed because naming responses may be too far removed from perceptual processing. The results of three experiments supported the orientation-dependent account of shape recognition suggesting that the representations of shape in memory specify the canonical orientation of the shapes they represent. A process of normalization is required prior to access to canonical orientation representations; however, the evidence suggests that this normalization process may not be mental rotation. Other conceptions of the normalization process, including the establishment of multiple representations, are discussed.