This interdisciplinary thesis explores the connection between mental health and lifestyle in the eighteenth century. The thesis draws upon scholarly and medical writings on melancholy, from Robert Burton‘s Anatomy of Melancholy (1622) onwards, and consider these works alongside eighteenth-century literary representations and biographical testimonies from those suffering from melancholy. The thesis provides a new perspective and understanding of the terms in which depression and other associated nervous illnesses were medicalised in the eighteenth century. I argue against recent scholarly work which regards melancholy as a label interchangeable with nervous illnesses such as vapours, spleen and hysteria. I argue that in the eighteenth century melancholy was a clearly identified medical condition in its own right and that it was a depressive illness which can be closely related to today‘s depression. The thesis argues that there is a direct link between idleness and the melancholy state of mind and that a depressed state of mind was often the result of an idle lifestyle. Melancholy is also considered in relation to gender and the idle lifestyle that many females were forced to adopt. It then focuses upon three prominent literary figures: Samuel Johnson, William Shenstone and William Cowper, all of whom suffered from depression. The thesis considers Johnson‘s preoccupation with idleness as a symptom of his melancholy, a notion that has received little critical attention. Shenstone‘s experience is used to illustrate the depressing effect that a retired lifestyle could have on the individual. I argue that his melancholy was largely caused by the conflict created between his decision to live the idle lifestyle of a country gentleman and his desire to remain amongst society. Finally I re-evaluate the account of the mental turmoil expressed by Cowper in his spiritual autobiography Adelphi and provide evidence that suggests Cowper may have feigned the symptoms of religious melancholy in an attempt to resist the pressures placed upon him to follow a profession. Ultimately the thesis reveals that, in the eighteenth century, idleness was regarded as a major cause of, and symptom of, melancholy. Idleness was also seen as an obstruction to one of the most widely prescribed methods of cure for melancholy: occupation.

Functional neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory have grown dramatically in recent years. These studies are important because they can investigate the neural correlates of processes that are difficult to study using laboratory stimuli, including: (i) complex constructive processes, (ii) recollective qualities of emotion and vividness, and (iii) remote memory retrieval. Constructing autobiographical memories involves search, monitoring and self-referential processes that are associated with activity in separable prefrontal regions. The contributions of emotion and vividness have been linked to the amygdala and visual cortex respectively. Finally, there is evidence that recent and remote autobiographical memories might activate the hippocampus equally, which has implications for memory-consolidation theories. The rapid development of innovative methods for eliciting personal memories in the scanner provides the opportunity to delve into the functional neuroanatomy of our personal past. / Dissertation

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often accompanied by atypical visual attention to faces. Previous studies have identified some predictors of atypical visual attention in ASD but very few have explored the role of conversational context. In this study, the fixation patterns of 19 typically developing (TD) children and 18 children with ASD were assessed during a SKYPED conversation where participants were asked to converse about mundane vs. emotion-laden topics. We hypothesized that 1) children with ASD would visually attend less to the eye region and more to the mouth region of the face compared to TD children and that 2) this effect would be exaggerated in the emotion-laden conversation. With regard to hypothesis 1, we found no difference between groups for either number of fixations or fixation time; however, children with ASD did evidence significantly more off-screen looking time compared to their TD peers. An additional analysis showed that compared to the TD group, the ASD group also had greater average fixation durations when looking at their speaking partner's face (both eyes and mouth) across conversational contexts. In support of hypothesis 2, eye tracking data (corrected for amount of time during conversation) revealed two interaction effects. Compared to the TD group, the ASD group showed 1) a decreased number of fixations to eyes and 2) an increased fixation time to mouths but only in the emotion-laden conversation. We also examined variables that predicted decreased number of eye fixations and increased mouth-looking in ASD in the emotion-laden conversation. Change scores (to be understood as the degree of visual attention shifting from the mundane to the emotion-laden condition) for the ASD group negatively correlated with age, perceptual reasoning skills, verbal ability, general IQ, theory of mind (ToM) competence, executive function (EF) subscales, and positively correlated with autism severity. Cognitive mechanisms at play and implications for theory and clinical practice are considered.

Topic models allow the probabilistic modeling of term frequency occurrences in documents. The fitted model can be used to estimate the similarity between documents as well as between a set of specified keywords using an additional layer of latent variables which are referred to as topics. The R package topicmodels provides basic infrastructure for fitting topic models based on data structures from the text mining package tm. The package includes interfaces to two algorithms for fitting topic models: the variational expectation-maximization algorithm provided by David M. Blei and co-authors and an algorithm using Gibbs sampling by Xuan-Hieu Phan and co-authors.

In recent years there has been an increased interest in domain adaptation techniques for statistical machine translation (SMT) to deal with the growing amount of data from different sources. Topic modelling techniques applied to SMT are closely related to the field of domain adaptation but more flexible in dealing with unstructured text. Topic models can capture latent structure in texts and are therefore particularly suitable for modelling structure in between and beyond corpus boundaries, which are often arbitrary. In this thesis, the main focus is on dynamic translation model adaptation to texts of unknown origin, which is a typical scenario for an online MT engine translating web documents. We introduce a new bilingual topic model for SMT that takes the entire document context into account and for the first time directly estimates topic-dependent phrase translation probabilities in a Bayesian fashion. We demonstrate our model’s ability to improve over several domain adaptation baselines and further provide evidence for the advantages of bilingual topic modelling for SMT over the more common monolingual topic modelling. We also show improved performance when deriving further adapted translation features from the same model which measure different aspects of topical relatedness. We introduce another new topic model for SMT which exploits the distributional nature of phrase pair meaning by modelling topic distributions over phrase pairs using their distributional profiles. Using this model, we explore combinations of local and global contextual information and demonstrate the usefulness of different levels of contextual information, which had not been previously examined for SMT. We also show that combining this model with a topic model trained at the document-level further improves performance. Our dynamic topic adaptation approach performs competitively in comparison with two supervised domain-adapted systems. Finally, we shed light on the relationship between domain adaptation and topic adaptation and propose to combine multi-domain adaptation and topic adaptation in a framework that entails automatic prediction of domain labels at the document level. We show that while each technique provides complementary benefits to the overall performance, there is an amount of overlap between domain and topic adaptation. This can be exploited to build systems that require less adaptation effort at runtime.

This thesis examines the role of the British merchant firm Jardine, Matheson & Co. (Jardine Matheson) in promoting and facilitating Chinese migration into and around the British Empire between 1833 and 1853. It argues that existing historiography on Chinese migration has focused too heavily on the late-nineteenth century and has paid insufficient attention to earlier experiments with Chinese labour. The case study of Jardine Matheson also emphasises the varied roles played by commercial organisations in the British Empire. Existing work has focused on the role of the firm’s partners either as opium traders or elite businessmen in colonial Hong Kong, with little analysis of their interest and involvement in Chinese migration. By examining Jardine Matheson’s archive of letters and accounts, official colonial correspondence, parliamentary papers, newspapers, books, journals and periodicals, the thesis will shed light on both the changing perceptions and uses of Chinese migrant labour in various imperial contexts from the 1830s to the 1850s. Chinese migration to different colonial destinations, including Singapore, Assam, New South Wales and Ceylon, will be examined comparatively. The colonial case studies examined in the thesis demonstrate how imperial experiments with Chinese labour in the mid nineteenth century were dependent on the resources and networks of Jardine Matheson on the China coast. The firm’s publishing network simultaneously circulated ideas about Chinese migrants that were reproduced across the British Empire. Additionally, Anglo-Chinese contact zones that developed over the 1830s and 1840s were crucial to the formation of stereotypes about a specifically Chinese ethnic character and systems of onward migration to global destinations. This thesis demonstrates the importance of Jardine Matheson – as well as connected Western commercial organisations and individuals – in facilitating Chinese migration and creating demand for Chinese labour during a period of rapid change in the British Empire.

This work examines the role of private elites in addition to public actors in West German-American relations in the post-World War II era and thus joins the ranks of the “new diplomatic history” field. It studies the Atlantik Brücke and the American Council on Germany (ACG) from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s – a history that has hitherto been neglected. The focus on private elites and their contributions to fledgling public-private networks within each country and across the Atlantic helps to shed light on the ways hostilities between West Germany and the US were addressed. Based on original archival research and applying tools of Social Network Analysis (SNA), this thesis starts from the assumption that international relations are conducted by elites. These elites are not only composed of democratically legitimized politicians and diplomats. Private actors representing business, industry, media, and academia are also involved, albeit hidden from public scrutiny. Private actors are enabled to do so because they are integral parts of dense state-private networks. The state-private network concept is innovatively transferred to the transnational level. The network term emphasises the fact that those connections are neither limited in quantitative terms nor are they confined to national boundaries. The analysis illuminates three sustainable achievements of the ACG and Atlantik-Brücke. Firstly, they contributed to forging a bipartisan foreign policy consensus at whose core has been a strong West-German-American relationship. Key in achieving this was the redirection of West German Social Democracy away from anti-militarism, neutralism, and socialism. Secondly, in fulfilling an elite coordination function, the organisations helped to secure the transatlantic partnership consensus by conveying it into business, trade and 2 industry circles in the US as well as in West Germany. Thirdly, by utilizing their manifold links to media and academia they assisted in manifesting this consensus in public discourse.

by Li Ho Cheung, William. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-88). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Acknowledgements --- p.vi / Table of Contents --- p.vii / List of Tables --- p.viii / List of Appendices --- p.x / Chapter Chapter 1 : --- Introduction and Literature Review --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2 : --- Method --- p.31 / Chapter Chapter 3 : --- Results --- p.48 / Chapter Chapter 4 : --- Discussion --- p.60 / Reference --- p.82 / Appendices --- p.89

This thesis examines the relationship between fictional depictions of rape and legal and social realities between 1700 and 1765, and argues that these contexts are essential to reconstruct contemporary understandings of rape in this period. Rape was presented differently in legislation, legal texts, trials and literature, reflecting the varied ideas of what constituted a rape. The research begins by asking why the statutory definition of rape was inconsistent with legal practice, and how clear the legal conventions of rape were in contemporary society. This leads to a series of case studies investigating why Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Samuel Richardson were interested in rape, how their depictions of rape relate to legal realities and were informed by their own legal knowledge, and what form of interpretation the authors invite. The geographical focus on London is occasioned by the selection of trials, largely heard at the Old Bailey, and texts published in London, but acknowledges the wider national readership for the texts and trials, which were often reported in the press and/or published. The historical parameters reflect the decline in standardized legal education and increased reliance on legal texts from 1700, and the lack of a significant contemporary legal treatise to guide interpretations of statutory and common law until the publication of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769). This study contributes to existing scholarship on rape in the eighteenth century. Criticism in this area has begun to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to this subject. This thesis combines legal and non-legal sources to inform its analysis, suggesting that critical approaches need to use a wider range of sources to reconstruct the context in which contemporary portrayals of rape were situated. Part two of this thesis offers new readings of canonical works, showing how Pope, Defoe, Richardson, Smollett and Fielding engaged with wider contextual legal discourse in their works, and explores their reasons for doing so. These case studies assert the importance of legal and social contexts, offer new ways of interpreting rape in literature, and show that literary authors negotiated and presented ideas of rape in a variety of ways in their texts, influencing public perceptions of the nature and illegality of such acts.

"Similarity is a central cognitive mechanism for humans which enables a broad range of perceptual and abstraction processes, including recognizing and categorizing objects, drawing parallelism, and predicting outcomes. It has been studied computationally through models designed to replicate human judgment. The work presented in this dissertation leverages general purpose semantic networks to derive similarity measures in a problem-independent manner. We model both general and relational similarity using connectivity between concepts within semantic networks. Our first contribution is to model general similarity using concept connectivity, which we use to partition vocabularies into topics without the need of document corpora. We apply this model to derive topics from unstructured dialog, specifically enabling an early literacy primer application to support parents in having better conversations with their young children, as they are using the primer together. Second, we model relational similarity in proportional analogies. To do so, we derive relational parallelism by searching in semantic networks for similar path pairs that connect either side of this analogy statement. We then derive human readable explanations from the resulting similar path pair. We show that our model can answer broad-vocabulary analogy questions designed for human test takers with high confidence. The third contribution is to enable symbolic plan repair in robot planning through object substitution. When a failure occurs due to unforeseen changes in the environment, such as missing objects, we enable the planning domain to be extended with a number of alternative objects such that the plan can be repaired and execution to continue. To evaluate this type of similarity, we use both general and relational similarity. We demonstrate that the task context is essential in establishing which objects are interchangeable."