Objectives. To see whether a cognitive behavioural guided self-help approach can reduce mental health symptoms, which patients might benefit most, and whether such a treatment increases self-efficacy and internal locus of control. Design. Repeated measures and correlational designs were used. Methods. 173 patients were recruited at a cognitive behavioural guided self-help clinic in Edinburgh, of which 97 completed the three-session intervention. Verbal IQ was estimated with the National Adult Reading Test (NART). Measures of emotional symptoms, self-efficacy and locus of control were taken before and after treatment, with follow-up at one month and six months. Results. Patients completing the intervention made favourable gains, which were maintained at six months. Self-efficacy and locus of control measures were not robustly correlated with mental health improvement, but did show pre- to posttreatment changes in themselves. Conclusions. Guided self-help appears to be a useful treatment option for those with depression, anxiety and stress. The implications of the findings, the strengths and limitations of the study, and areas for future research are discussed.

This thesis comprises a narrative exploration of the lived experience of being someone who has self-injured. Self-injury, like pain, emotions, sensation and social life, is understood and examined as inherently embodied. The thesis is intended to contribute to sociological approaches to the study of embodiment and to sociological understandings of self-injury. Twelve participants were recruited in non-clinical sites. The sample was heterogeneous in terms of their experience of self-injury, contact with medical and psychiatric services, socio-economic background, household type, age and sexuality. Both men and women were interviewed in an attempt to counter the relative neglect of men in previous research. Two interviews were carried out with each participant: the first was a life-story interview, while the second explored self-injury more directly. The approach to data collection and analysis was intended to be collaborative, and comprised both narrative and thematic techniques. The thesis demonstrates the importance of studying self-injury as an embodied, socially situated and socially mediated behaviour. An embodied approach underlines the importance of the visibility of self-injury. The existence of visible marks and scars created by self-injury were important aspects of the lived experience of participants. The ways in which these marks were negotiated in social life represented a key focus of analysis. My analysis reveals the importance and utility of attending to the practical and material aspects of self-injury in attempting to understand the behaviour. I highlight the diverse ways in which self-injury is practised, and the equally various meanings and understandings it holds for practitioners A variety of complex and contradictory justifications for self-injury are critically examined. These justifications share a concern with pain, incarnate, suggesting that self-injury is: a method of transforming emotional pain into physical pain; a way of relieving emotional pain; painful; painless; attention-seeking; private. A sociological, narrative analysis illuminates the ways in which these understandings and justifications can be located within biographical, interpersonal and socio-cultural contexts. By locating these justifications within socio-cultural contexts, the complexities and contradictions of the accounts become understandable. My analysis confirms the importance of attending to socio-cultural understandings of bodies, emotions, authenticity and morality in exploring narratives about self-injury.

Education is, at least, the endeavor to get people to do things they could not previously do, to understand things they did not previously understand, and perhaps, to become the people they did not expect to become. - Sockett, 1998, p. 195 In today’s fast-paced technology driven knowledge-based society, students in the Gulf and abroad, are expected to remain engaged while playing a more invested role in becoming independent, mature learners, no matter what their personal or educational challenges are. It is quite common for students to abandon their EFL studies due to a lack of motivation and/or confidence. There has been extensive research undertaken to better understand how motivation and confidence affect EFL/ESL learners, yet little attention has been paid to a more recent area of educational research in emotional intelligence (EI) and how self-coaching may also contribute to a tertiary EFL/ESL learners’ ability to succeed. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that everyday occurrences encountered in their personal and academic life may very well, at times, have a detrimental effect on students’ confidence and motivation, and therefore impede their ability to reach set goals. This study explores the possible correlations between the three main constructs, confidence, motivation and EI while investigating female Emirati tertiary EFL students at Zayed University in the U.A.E. and their interest towards self-coaching to reach their academic and personal goals. This exploratory longitudinal interpretive study used a mixed-method approach to gather data generated from a survey (CMEII) constructed and piloted for this study and completed by 199 female Emirati tertiary EFL participants measuring motivation, confidence and EI. In addition, student journals, interviews and progress reports retrieved from CMEI workshops also informed the research questions pertaining to these aforementioned constructs. Results suggest that there is a correlation between confidence, motivation and EI. These results would indicate that when the level of motivation increases, so does the level of confidence in speaking English. Motivation to self-direct in English is positively correlated with problem solving, higher life-satisfaction and confidence levels. Surprisingly the higher the academic anxiety, the more students want to self-direct. Furthermore it was found that students participating in this study found self-coaching methods extremely helpful in supporting them in reaching both their personal and academic goals. The implications of this exploratory study into confidence, motivation and emotional intelligence has laid the foundation for future research in this area. By creating and piloting the first Confidence, Motivation and Emotional Intelligence survey instrument (CMEII) designed for the ESL/EFL learning environment, a primary obstacle has been traversed. The CMEII research instrument and results of this study will no doubt help bring light and understanding to how self-coaching and self-direction can support female EFL students in reaching their personal and academic goals in the U.A.E and abroad.

Why is trait self-control associated with successful goal progress? Existing research has attempted to answer this question by focusing on individual differences in the process of goal pursuit. Herein, we propose and test a novel mechanism suggesting that self-control facilitates goal attainment not only by affecting the process of goal pursuit but also the type of goals peo- ple select in the first place. Three studies showed that high (vs. low) self- control individuals are more likely to report successful goal attainment and this association was mediated by their tendency to select the goals that reflect their true/authentic self. These results were obtained using cross-sectional and longitudinal designs and were robust against controlling for previously established mechanisms of the effect of trait self-control on goal attainment (habit strength, experiences of goal-conflicting desires). Overall, there findings contribute to the literatures on self-regulation, authenticity and goal management.

Background: Chronic pain conditions particularly fibromyalgia (FM) are an important issue considering the demand that they place on health services and the negative impact on an individual’s well-being. Research regarding what impact FM may have on the various domains of health related quality of life is sparse. In addition, research identifying predictors relating to a person’s self-concept on pain outcomes such as quality of life and disability is scarce in a chronic pain population. Self-esteem has been linked to psychological adjustment in various chronic diseases (Chong et al, 2009) and is suspected to be a vulnerability factor in FM (Johnson et al., 1997; Michielsen et al., 2006). Research on self-compassion found that it is a significant predictor of increased psychological adjustment in people with chronic medical conditions (Wren, Somers, & Wright, 2011). The majority of research on self-compassion has been conducted in non-clinical samples. Identifying the predictive values of self-esteem and the self-compassion subscales (self-warmth and self-coldness) in relation to pain outcomes are useful provided they can be enhanced and utilised to inform intervention. Aims: This research portfolio had two aims, to systematically review and carry out a meta-analysis with the literature investigating the impact of FM on health related quality of life using the Short Form-36 version one and to investigate whether self-warmth, self-coldness and self-esteem act as predictors of quality of life and disability for individuals with chronic pain. Method: A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies which assessed the impact of FM on health related quality of life was undertaken. Sensitivity and subgroup analyses were conducted to address the level of heterogeneity in the studies. The empirical study comprised of a cross-sectional design in which 60 individuals with chronic pain were recruited from three NHS sites based in Fife and Lothian and a pain self-management group in Fife to complete six validated psychometric questionnaires: Self Compassion Scale (Neff, 2003), Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), Brief Pain Inventory- Short Form (Cleeland, 1991), Pain Disability Questionnaire (Anagnostis, Gatchel, & Mayer, 2004), Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (Zigmond and Snaith, 1983) and Quality of Life Scale (Burckhardt, Woods, Schultz, & Ziebarth, 2003). Systematic Review Results: In total, 18 studies met the inclusion criteria of the systematic review and demonstrated that the health related quality of life of individuals with FM was lower compared to healthy controls on all eight subdomains of the SF-36 particularly Physical Role. It was found that Social Functioning was the subdomain least affected when comparing participants with FM to healthy controls. Empirical Project Results: Quality of life was lower than previous research with females reporting a higher level of quality of life than males. It was found that after controlling for demographic and clinical variables, self-warmth was the only significant predictor for quality of life but not on levels of disability. Neither self-coldness nor self-esteem were significant predictors on scores of quality of life or disability. Conclusion: The above studies expand literature on the nature of chronic pain and its outcomes such as health related quality of life. The meta-analysis evidenced that HRQoL was lower in individuals with FM than in healthy controls. The association between symptom severity and quality of life requires further investigation in FM. Psychological interventions targeting the development of self-warmth attributes and skills may have a beneficial effect in improving quality of life for people with chronic pain. While the systematic review highlighted that FM has a more significant impact physically rather than mentally in relation to quality of life, both studies highlighted the need for interventions to target the psychological adjustment of people with chronic pain conditions.

People are motivated to self evaluate and undertake this in their interactions with others. Interactions with others are increasingly taking place online, including via social networking websites, which can contain several differences to face to face interaction. This thesis examined how specific self-evaluation factors (self-esteem, social comparison tendency and self-concept clarity) affect various behaviours on and psychological outcomes of engaging with social media sites, including Facebook. Self-esteem predicted positive mood during Facebook use, whilst one’s relationship with the site (i.e. how emotionally connected to the site one is – or ‘Facebook intensity’) predicted engagement with activities interpreted as indicative of a ‘fear-of-missing-out’ (e.g. finding out what friends were up to). High scorers in performance and appearance self-esteem reported a positive mood shift after profile editing whilst low scoring counterparts reported the reverse. Those who compared to others frequently experienced a negative mood shift after viewing the Facebook newsfeed possibly reflecting the cognitive effort associated with social comparison. Self-esteem predicted use of positive emotions in status updates whilst number of Facebook friends was negatively predicted by self-concept clarity and positively by social comparison tendency. Participants textually described both their actual and ideal self enabling consideration of the implications for self-presentation attempts in certain online environments. Low self-esteem individuals decreased their use of anxious language when idealising the self whilst those with low self-concept clarity increased their use of positive emotions. The discrepant word count between actual and ideal selves suggested that the actual self appeared more easily articulated, most 4 pronounced amongst those who infrequently compared themselves to others. When others rated these self descriptions it appeared high scorers in self-esteem and self-concept clarity and those who compared frequently to others were generally most positively received. It appears that whilst those with unclear self-concepts and low self-esteem can present a more positive and less anxious idealised self than actual self, the overall thesis findings appear to support the rich-get-richer hypothesis (Valkenburg, Schouten, & Peter, 2005) with high scorers on these self-evaluation factors garnering the most benefits from social media. Whilst those who compare frequently may be adversely impacted by viewing the Facebook newsfeed, idealisation of self attributes appears to benefit these individuals in terms of positivity of impressions formed by others. Findings suggest that social media engagement may hold advantages and disadvantages for users dependent on the type of activity engaged with and the individual differences variables of the user.

Self-compassion is increasingly recognised as beneficial in psychotherapy, but can also be experienced as threatening. Attachment priming has been shown to enhance affiliative behaviours even in those with insecure trait attachment styles, and to decrease arousal and threat sensitivity. The current study investigated (a) associations between self-criticism, self-compassion, fear of self-compassion and trait attachment insecurity, and (b) whether attachment-related security priming could promote state self-compassion and reduce physiological arousal when self-compassion induction was attempted by self-critical individuals. 49 participants with high levels of self-reported self-criticism completed either a 'secure' or a 'neutral' prime before undertaking a loving-kindness meditation. Participants' heart rate and skin conductance levels were collected at baseline and during the priming and meditation; participants also self-rated their levels of state self-criticism, state self-compassion and state attachment security at each of these points. Correlational analyses (Spearman's rho) found positive associations between trait self-criticism and trait attachment insecurity and between trait fear of self-compassion and trait attachment insecurity, although not between low trait self-compassion and trait attachment insecurity. Group and time differences were analysed using a combination of parametric (ANOVA, t-test) and non-parametric tests (Mann-Whitney U-test, Kruskal Wallis, Wilcoxon Signed Rank) as some data were not normally distributed). Attachment priming was shown to significantly enhance state self-compassion and also to significantly increase state attachment security and decrease state attachment avoidance, although not state self-criticism or state attachment anxiety, and to give some reductions in physiological arousal. This benefit, however, did not persist in subsequent exposure to loving-kindness meditation, although individuals not receiving attachment priming also showed some reduction of threat and activation of soothing systems from loving-kindness meditation. These findings suggest that attachment priming and loving-kindness meditation may increase self-compassion for some self-critical people, but there are not necessarily cumulative benefits from combining these practices.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.A.)--Denver Seminary, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 39-48).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 2001. / "December 2001." Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-120). Also available on the Internet.