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Language production is characterized by an unlimited expressive capacity and creative flexibility that allows speakers to rapidly generate novel and complex utterances. In turn, listeners interpret language "on-line", incrementally integrating diverse representations to create meaning in real-time. A challenge for theories of language has been to understand how speakers generate, integrate, and maintain representations in service of language use and processing and how this is accomplished in the brain. Much of this work has focused prefrontal cortex mechanisms such as "working memory". The goal of this dissertation is to understand the role of the hippocampal declarative memory system (HDMS) in language use and processing, specifically in referential processing and narrative construction. To test the role of the hippocampus in referential processing, healthy comparisons, brain damaged comparisons (BDC), individuals with bilateral hippocampal damage participated in an eyetracking experiment in which individuals viewed scenes and listened to short stories. The amount of time participants spent looking at the characters after a pronoun reference was recorded. Healthy comparisons and BDC participants preferentially targeted the first mentioned character while participants with hippocampal damage did not, suggesting that the hippocampus plays a role in maintaining and integrating information, even in short discourse history. In a second experiment, participants with bilateral hippocampal damage and healthy comparisons told narratives multiple times over the course of a month. The narratives were analyzed for the number of words, the number of episodic details, the number of semantic details, the number of editorials and the consistency of details over the multiple tellings. The patients with hippocampal damage told stories that were significantly shorter, more semanticized and less consistent from telling to telling than healthy comparisons. The final goal of this study was to understand the effects of unilateral hippocampal damage on language processing. Individuals with unilateral hippocampal damage participated in all of the previous experiments. It was predicted that individuals with left hippocampal damage would perform worse than individuals with right hippocampal damage, and their performance was significantly impaired across measures. This suggests that the left hippocampus may be particularly important for processing linguistic material outside of even verbal memory.

The present study investigated the reliability and robustness of a new mnemonic strategy - self-imagination - in a group of memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage. Despite severe memory deficits, almost all of the participants demonstrated a self-imagination effect (SIE) for recognition memory in study 1. Moreover, the ability to benefit from self-imagination was not affected by the severity of the memory deficit. In study 3, more than half of the participants showed a SIE on a task of event-based prospective memory. The data from study 2 suggest the SIE is not attributable to semantic processing or emotional processing and indicate that self-imagination is distinct from other mnemonic strategies. Overall the findings from the present study implicate self-imagination as a new and effective mnemonic strategy. The data also indicate that when it comes to memory there is something special about processing information in relation to the self.

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Prior research suggests that aspects of self-knowledge are relatively intact in many memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury. Therefore, cognitive strategies that rely on preserved mechanisms of the self may be particularly effective in this population. The three studies presented in this dissertation investigated the practical utility and mnemonic mechanisms of a novel cognitive strategy designed to capitalize on self-referential processing: self-imagination. Study 1 investigated the effect of self-imagining on cued recall in memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury and healthy controls. Sixteen patients and sixteen healthy controls intentionally encoded word pairs under four separate conditions: visual imagery, semantic elaboration, other person imagining, and self-imagining. The results revealed that self-imagining enhanced cued recall more than the other encoding conditions in patients and healthy controls. Study 2 was an initial investigation of the effect of self-imagining on free recall. Twenty healthy adults intentionally encoded word pairs under four conditions: self-imagining, a self-descriptiveness task thought to rely on access to semantic information in self-knowledge, an autobiographical memory task requiring retrieval of a self-relevant episodic memory, and a structural processing task. The results demonstrated that self-imagining improved free recall more than the other encoding conditions in healthy adults. Study 3 investigated the effect of self-imagining on free recall in memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury and healthy controls. Fifteen patients and fifteen healthy controls intentionally encoded personality trait adjectives under five conditions: a self-imagining task, a self-descriptiveness task, an episodic autobiographical memory task, a semantic elaboration task, and a phonemic processing task. The results revealed that the advantage of self-imagining over the other cognitive strategies extended to free recall in patients. Furthermore, the results indicated that the mnemonic benefit of self-imagining was partly attributable to preserved mechanisms associated with the retrieval of semantic information in self-knowledge. The findings from this dissertation indicate that self-imagining is a self-referential cognitive strategy that generates robust and reliable mnemonic improvement in memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury and healthy controls. Cognitive strategies that involve preserved mnemonic mechanisms of the self, such as self-imagination, may provide a new direction in cognitive rehabilitation.

Depression is a common psychopathology that causes affective, behavioral, and cognitive dysfunction and is present across cultural identities. To reduce the dysfunction and treat the symptoms that arise from depression, researchers have created positive psychological interventions (PPIs), which are empirically supported interventions that cause a positive change by targeting a positive variable. In the current study, I created a new PPI, the Best-Self PPI, that draws from elements of optimism, coherence, and character strengths PPIs. Specifically, I hypothesized that the Best-Self PPI would work by positively biasing self-referential processing, which may predict depression and psychological well-being. Participants (n = 133) were undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 32 (M = 19.97, SD = 1.66). Participants were primarily female (n = 85; 63.91%) and White (n = 87; 65.41%) and completed either the Best-Self PPI or wrote about a childhood memory (T1, +0 Days), completed the Self-Referential Encoding Task (T2 +1 Day), and then completed a set of outcome measures (T3, +8 Days). Although the intervention appeared to have no effect on depression, well-being, or affect compared to the control group, I found that: 1) self-referential processing bias partially mediates the relationship between self-critical rumination and depression, 2) self-referential processing bias and state self-esteem fully explain the relationship between self-critical rumination and depression, and 3) self-esteem fully explains the relationship between self-critical rumination and psychological well-being. The results provide new empirical evidence for why some interventions may reduce depression and promote psychological well-being through changes in self-evaluations. I encourage researchers to use the evidence in the current study that modifying self-referential processing and state self-esteem may affect depression and psychological well-being to improve existing interventions and create new interventions to promote psychological well-being above and beyond the elimination of suffering.

The conceptual model of emotion regulation (ER) of Gross and Thompson (2007) introduces families of ER strategies ordered on a temporal scale. This scale has been attributed implications both for the grouping strategies but also for the neurocognitive processing. The two event-related potential (ERP) studies of emotional regulation presented here focus on emotional regulation at different temporal distances, as well as, different stages of cognitive processing. Trying to discern if various neural processes could be disentangled by looking at different stages of the late positive potential (LPP). The theoretical background begins with the neurocognitive science of emotionality and visits cognitive processing at both early and late stages before summating results of the contemporary research of emotional regulation. 39 participants were enrolled within the two experiments aiming to compare the efficiency of different strategies in reducing negative social emotion induced by photographs of angry faces. Technical difficulties discourage conclusions about how temporal distancing is most effectively adapted. Results suggest self-focused distancing strategies are more effective than situation-focused reappraisal and could be preferred for therapeutic purposes based on greater observed LPP effect.

本研究的主要目的在於運用靜息態功能性磁振造影技術來探討高社會焦慮的自我參照處理腦區的功能聯結。根據Clark和Wells(1995)的模型，高社會焦慮者的負向自我心象只透過自我相關的在線索來建構；然而根據Rapee和Heimberg(1997)的模型則假設高社會焦慮者還會納入他人外在訊息，做自我與他人參照訊息的處理。本研究企圖透過神經影像的發現來檢測上述兩個模型。 本研究篩選出四十名大學生分為高社會焦慮組與低社會焦慮組，所有受試者都會進行靜息態功能性磁振造影的掃描，並使用MPFC、PCC、ACC、VMPFC、DMPFC作為種子進行全腦的功能聯結分析並獲得功能聯結圖譜做比較。 研究結果發現高社會焦慮者的MPFC、PCC、ACC都有增加的功能聯結，顯示他們比一般人更容易做自我參照處理，而VMPFC、DMPFC同時有增加的功能聯結，代表高社會焦慮者的自我參照處理除了自我內在的相關訊息外，還會包含他人外在相關訊息的處理，研究結果較支持Rapee和Heimberg(1997)的說法。最後並提出本論文研究限制，與對社會焦慮症的臨床理論與實務上之建議。 / The purpose of the present study was to utilize the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging(RS-fMRI) technique to investigate the brain regions in functional connectivity of self-referential processing in socially anxious individuals. According to Clark and Wells’ (1995) view, socially anxious individuals were hypothesized to construct their negative self-image with self-related internal information. However, according to Repee and Heimberg’ s (1997) model, they supposed that socially anxious individuals also brought other-related external information to make other-related external information self-referential and other-referential be processed. The present study was designed to use finding of neuroimaging to examine the two models Forty undergraduate students were assigned to either high or low social-anxiety group. All subjects were asked to be scanned with RS-fMRI. MPFC, PCC, ACC, VMPFC, DMPFC were used as seeds to proceed the whole-brain functional connectivity analysis and acquired functional connectivity maps for comparison. The results revealed that functional connectivity of MPFC, PCC, ACC of high social anxiety group increased, it displayed that they were more easily to do self-referential processing. Besides, functional connectivity of VMPFC and DMPFC also increased simultaneously, which means that the self-referential processing of high social anxiety group not only included self-related internal information but also included other-related external information. The result supported Repee and Heimberg’ s model. The limitations of this study and the suggestions for the theories and clinical treatment of social anxiety disorder were advanced in the end.