The overarching aim of this thesis was to contribute to the understanding of specific moral-cognitive processes and mechanisms and their association with aggressive behaviour across age groups and across two cultures. A review of the literature identified the key questions for present research. There is extensive evidence that the normative acceptability of aggression is associated with aggressive behaviour. However the acceptability for retaliation in specific situations and discernment between justified and unjustified retaliation has not been thoroughly researched. Secondly the role of self-censure and self-reflection 'in the regulation of aggressive behaviour needs to be examined further. Finally hostility between groups and its association with beliefs has not been investigated in Muslim samples. Eight empirical studies addressed these specific questions. Study one investigated the component structure of Normative Beliefs about aggression Scale using samples from Pakistan and the UK. Beliefs about equal retaliation, excessive retaliation and beliefs about general aggression were found to be distinct components, were endorsed differentially and had different level of association with aggressive behaviour across both countries. Study two established the discriminant validity of this distinction by comparing a group of violent adolescents with a matched group of non-violent adolescents on acceptability of these types of retaliation. Study 3 examined the association of self-censure with aggressive behaviour and normative beliefs about aggression and retaliation. Self-censure was negatively associated with aggressive behaviour as well as with beliefs indicating that higher the endorsement of aggression, lower would be the expected self-censure as a result of aggression. Study four using retrospective accounts of real aggressive episodes found that private self-consciousness predicted self-censure as well as thinking about one's own aggressive actions. Both thinking and self-censure were negatively associated with frequency of aggressive acts. The beliefs about direct and indirect aggression among Pakistani adolescents were tested in Study five and a reliable measure was developed and found to have convergent validity. Study six examined moral reasoning among children and explored at a preliminary level a possible intervention for changing beliefs about victimization in school. Study seven and eight extended investigation of beliefs to intergroup context (anti-Semitic beliefs) and found that extreme beliefs were related to hostile intentions. An educational intervention was carried out which showed that beliefs could be influenced through creating empathy and stressing intergroup similarity.

Ten studies are presented which show how and why individual differences in gratitude are related to well-being, with six key conclusions. Grateful people view the help they receive in everyday life as more costly, valuable, and altruistically intended. Cross-sectional (n=253), multi-level process (n=113), and experimental (n=200) studies showed these attributional biases explain why trait and state levels of gratitude are linked. Trait gratitude involves the habitual focusing on the positive in the world, suggesting why gratitude is linked to well-being. Two studies (n=206 and n=389) presented exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showing that each of the existing measure of gratitude and appreciation (the GQ-6, GRAT, and Appreciation Scale) assess the same latent construct. Two studies (n=389) and (n=201) show gratitude is uniquely linked to subjective well-being (satisfaction with life) and psychological well-being (personal growth, positive relationships with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance), after controlling for the 30 facets of the Five Factor Model. Two longitudinal studies (n=156 and n=87) showed that during a life transition, gratitude led to lower stress and depression, and higher perceived social support. Structural equation modelling disproved other models of causality. Grateful people were shown to use more adaptive coping strategies, characterised by seeking help from others and actively coping rather than avoiding the problem. Across two samples (n=236) these adaptive coping strategies were shown to partially explain why grateful people feel lower level of stress in life. In a large community sample (n=401, 40% with clinically impaired sleep) grateful people had a better quality of sleep. Together, the ten studies show that individual differences in gratitude (1) are related to specific information processing biases, (2) involved a habitual orientation towards noticing and appreciating the positive in life, (3) uniquely predict well-being, (4) lead to well-being over time, (5) are related to positive coping, and (6) predict better sleeping quality.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Philosophy, August 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-134).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-134). Also available in print.

This study explores the mental health nurse’s experience of ethical reasoning while overriding the choices of mental health service users within an acute mental health context. When working with service users in acute mental distress a mental health nurse’s clinical decisions will have a controlling element, which can lead to the service user’s freedoms being restricted. This power to restrict freedoms also known as coercion can be explicit, it follows the rule of law, and implicit; ways of controlling that are ‘hidden’. The ethical use of this power requires the nurse to be an effective ethical reasoner who understands both the explicit and implicit nature of this power. Coercive power, which is explicit, has been thoroughly explored; however, there is limited work exploring the use of this power within an ethical context and as a ‘real-time’ practice issue. In addition, there is little work exploring implicit power as a practice issue or as an ethical issue. To examine this knowledge gap this study adopts an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach to engender an understanding of the mental health nurse’s personal meaning and experience of using both explicit and implicit coercive power. This approach affords the researcher the opportunity to tease out the personal ‘ethical’ meaning of the participants’ experiences by facilitating an in-depth and sensitive dialogue, which focuses on stimulating conscious ethical reflection. IPA is an idiographic mode of inquiry where sample purposiveness and analytical depth is more important than sample size. On this basis, six qualified mental health nurses were recruited who have used coercive strategies while nursing service users in acute mental distress. The semi-structured interviews were thematically and interpretively analysed, the five superordinate themes that were generated are; the nurse as a practitioner, their values, their practice, their use of coercion, and their ethics. In addition, the results of the study highlighted that coercive strategies are a key part of a mental health nurse’s daily practice both explicitly and implicitly. These strategies can be beneficent; however, this is dependent on the ethical reasoning ability of the nurse and the professional support they receive in practice. Being an effective ethical reasoner requires the nurse to acquire ‘good habits’, a basis for enabling the nurse to work through an ethical challenge in ‘quick time’. Furthermore, to enhance these good habits they also need to have an ‘ethical imagination’. Considering these points, this study recommends mental health nurses when using coercive power use a multi-faceted ethical reasoning approach. This approach should aim to create good ethical habits through continually rehearsing good responses to common practice issues. In addition, this approach should not neglect the need for the nurse to use their ethical imagination and to feel for an ethical solution where required. As a future area for research, this study recognises the skilled use of ethical imagination in the field of mental health nursing requires further exploration.

This research explores how ‘authenticity’ is constructed in counselling psychology and asks what the ethical implications of this commonly taken-for-granted value might be. A discourse analytic approach known as ‘critical discursive psychology’ was used to examine eight counselling psychologists’ talk of ‘authenticity’ in semi-structured interviews. The analysis suggested that counselling psychologists may draw on a number of interpretative repertoires regarding ‘authenticity’, using them to establish their identity and negotiate their relationships with clients. However, taken together these repertoires might be said to form an ‘authenticity ideal’, which often functions to position the therapist as authentic and the client as inauthentic. Furthermore, in drawing upon various psychotherapeutic and humanistic discourses, the participants in this study appeared to be distanced from their power in positioning clients as inauthentic, although they demonstrated a problematizing of their own ‘authenticity’ in relation to the need for professional boundaries. This research suggests that talk of ‘authenticity’ tends to locate therapeutic action within a humanistic moral discourse of self-unity. This is of concern because the emphasis on individualism may lead therapists to underestimate the social and relational context of their clients’ difficulties. It should be noted that this critique falls not on the individuals involved in this research, for their answers were consistent with a range of accepted theoretical guidelines; but instead upon the reification of authenticity within counselling psychology and Western society in general. The participants in this study further problematized ‘authenticity’ in terms of needing to balance it with the demands of training and employment organisations. It was found that ii both institutional power and individual embodiment may act as ‘extra-discursive’ influences and constraints upon ‘authenticity’ discourse; however, the methodological feasibility of a critical-realist epistemology within discursive research is questioned. The limitations of the research findings and their relevance for reflexive practice are considered.

Government data continues to indicate that Looked After Children and Young People (LAC/YP) are vulnerable to poor academic achievement and later life outcome. Over the years successive Governments have legislated and invested in policy changes and guidance to inform practice in an effort to close the academic and social gap between those young people in care and their non-looked after peers. The espoused target for intervention and change has been with regards to raising the aspirations of LAC/YP. Seven LAC/YP were interviewed in order to capture their views about their future aspirations and for their perspectives on the factors in their lives that they identified as helping or hindering them as they constructed their future selves. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology was used to better understand some of the lived experiences of the LAC/YP within the system aimed to raise their aspirations. Super-ordinate themes of ‘Imagined future’, ‘Current Support’, ‘Personal sense of agency’ and ‘Impact of past care’ emerged from the data. The implications for policy and practice are discussed in light of the challenges in generalising findings from IPA studies beyond the idiographic.

What are moral values and where do they come from? David Hume argued that moral values were the product of a range of passions, inherent to human nature, that aim at the common good of society. Recent developments in game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behaviour, psychology and neuroscience suggest that Hume was right to suppose that humans have such passions. This dissertation reviews these developments, and considers their implications for moral philosophy. I first explain what Darwinian adaptations are, and how they generate behaviour. I then explain that, contrary to the Hobbesian caricature of life in the state of nature, evolutionary theory leads us to expect that organisms will be social, cooperative and even altruistic under certain circumstances. I introduce four main types of cooperation: kin altruism, coordination to mutual advantage, reciprocity and conflict resolution and provide examples of "adaptations for cooperation" from nonhuman species. I then review the evidence for equivalent adaptations for cooperation in humans. Next, I show how this Humean-Darwinian account of the moral sentiments can be used to make sense of traditional positions in meta-ethics; how it provides a rich deductive framework in which to locate and make sense of a wide variety of apparently contradictory positions in traditional normative ethics; and how it clearly demarcates the problems of applied ethics. I defend this version of ethical naturalism against the charge that it commits "the naturalistic fallacy". I conclude that evolutionary theory provides the best account yet of the origins and status of moral values, and that moral philosophy should be thought of as a branch of natural history.