Thesis (M.S.M.)--Regis University, Denver, Colo., 2006. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Mar. 27, 2006). Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)-University of Queensland, 1999. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 13, 2009). Includes bibliographical references and index.

Texte remanié de: Th. 3e cycle--Droit de la Santé--Bordeaux I, 1982. / En appendice, choix de documents. Bibliogr., 16 p.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-133).

Since the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the deficit reduction measures introduced by the British government from 2011, a new strategic deinstitutionalized model of community engagement has begun to emerge to address issues of social justice and environmental concern. Cloke (2011) identifies this new space of engagement as ‘rapprochement’. This research develops this concept, arguing that this organic, radical, social enterprise form of partnership offers the Established Church1 a potential means to engage in community-based social action in a postwelfare, post-regeneration age. A redistribution of power that seeks to enable agency and release enterprise, innovation and hope is at the heart of this new community-based model of partnership. These innovative enterprises are particularly evident in inner urban areas, although it is a model also appropriate for suburban and rural communities. This fresh model of partnership is a consequence of a developing nexus between rapprochement and austerity. Rapprochement emerges in what Habermas (2001 onwards) identifies as the postsecular. This acknowledges that religion, despite expectations to the contrary (Wilson 1982; Bruce 2002), continues to have a significant role in the public square. The global financial crisis and austerity measures imposed by the last two governments (2010-2015; 2015-2017) reflect a neo-liberal ideology leaving those least able to cope increasingly vulnerable and in need of support. A hermeneutic ethnographic approach accesses the experiences of leaders engaged in public, private and third sector organizations in a time of on-going austerity and considers their knowledge and understanding of partnership working. Data consists of 14 interviews and is triangulated with participant observation in two partnerships identified as examples of rapprochement. Case study helps clarify understandings of this new form of partnership. Dynamics characterizing these organic partnerships include a deep respect for hermeneutical integrity; a desire to create a sense of place, rather than space; a transformative form of hospitality and a style of leadership that enables the different stakeholders to acquire and develop a sense of agency. Innovative frameworks clarifying these dynamics include ideas of postsecularity, progressive localism, smart pluralism, and enablement. Alongside terms like personal responsibility, passion and vision, usual in partnership vocabulary, the research uncovered a more nuanced and sophisticated lexicon. This includes terms such as autonomy, brokering and process enablers. Rapprochement primarily encapsulates a person’s love for their neighbour. Those engaged in these partnerships practise a welcome engendering inclusivity, which offers a fresh theological understanding of hospitality. It also suggests a distinct theological understanding of leadership, espousing a model that draws others in, helping them to discover their gifts and constantly expanding and sharing leadership. This strategic deinstitutionalized model of partnership offers the Established Church an opportunity to join with others and to show, through praxis and community engagement, God’s bias for the poor and his longing for their enablement.

abstract: This study investigated the effect of two different preparation methods on hitting performance in a high&ndashfidelity; baseball batting simulation. Novice and expert players participated in one of three conditions: observation (viewing a video of the goal action), visualization (hearing a script of the goal action), or a no&ndashpreparation; control group. Each participant completed three different hitting tasks: pull hit, opposite&ndashfield; hit, and sacrifice fly. Experts had more successful hits, overall, than novices. The number of successful hits was significantly higher for both the observation and visualization conditions than for the control. In most cases, performance was best in the observation condition. Experts demonstrated greater effects from the mental preparation techniques compared to novices. However, these effects were mediated by task difficulty. The difference between experts and novices, as well as the difference between the observation and visualization conditions was greater for the more difficult hitting task (opposite&ndashfield; hitting) than for the easier hitting task (sacrifice fly). These effects of mental preparation were associated with significant changes in batting kinematics (e.g., changes in point of bat/ball contact and swing direction). The results indicate that mental preparation can improve directional hitting ability in baseball with the optimal preparation methods depending on skill&ndashlevel; and task difficulty. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Applied Psychology 2010

Wittgenstein once asked, "What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" What would be left is, presumably, the quality of 'agency,' which differentiates between legitimate actions and mere behaviors. In my dissertation I investigate the way we conceive of this quality and recommend a change of the prevalent model for one that is developed in a more empirically informed way. Most current work in ethics employs a historically acquired and folk-psychology approved notion of agency. On this view, the distinction between actions and behaviors is fairly clear-cut. Actions proper are characteristic of human beings. They are 'rational' in either the deliberative process that preceded it or in terms of their efficacy; they are launched `autonomously' by the agent's self rather than influenced by context, emotion or habit. These, and a few other conditions have to be fulfilled for an act to earn the badge of an action; falling short of that standard disqualifies it, or, at the very least renders it an imperfect, faulty instance of agency. An agent is thus typically viewed as a disembodied, rational source of conduct, who can withhold her desires and choose between different courses of action using some form of deliberation. I submit that this model survives neither due to its empirical adequacy nor because it is otherwise valuable for ethics (or, more generally, for understanding human behavior). Rather, there is (I argue), a certain widespread philosophical attitude that determines its persistence--a general longing for the stability of the self and an orderly, controllable relationship between the agent and the world. I call the proponents of this attitude "tortoises" and offer a critique of their main claims. I conclude that we must alter this model. The empirical results from psychology and neuroscience suggest that an agent is best viewed as a bundle of modules that are governed by different rules. None of them is "more" the agent than another, but all operate to achieve a state of homeostasis between so the different processes within the agent and the environment.

This participatory action research study evaluated whether, bringing people who have chronic pain together in collaborative learning communities can have an impact upon the way they manage their chronic pain. Participatory action research has been used with other patient groups, but not with people who have chronic pain. People who have chronic pain are often marginalised and restricted from playing a fuller role in society. In this thesis, I consider these processes to be indicators that people with chronic pain may be experiencing a form of social oppression. This justifies the use of participatory action research methods with this group, as these methods are intended to promote wellness and produce liberation from social oppression. A Dionysian inquiry was established in order to promote consciousness-raising among participants in learning communities. Three learning communities were initiated and two were sustained. Nine participants fully immersed in the learning communities. They reported feelings of liberation, identified ways in which their involvement in the learning community had caused them to change their attitudes and acted to improve their situation. This is my original contribution to knowledge, as this demonstrates that the generation of learning communities using PAR, with a Dionysian approach among people who have chronic pain is feasible. This has not been previously published in the literature. Three action cycles have been identified and are discussed in this thesis. These demonstrate the consciousness-raising and individual action that characterised transformation as a result of collaboration. In participatory action research, the production of an action cycle is viewed as the generation of new emergent knowledge, when viewed through the lens of critical theory. Although this knowledge is limited to the learning community and in this study is participant specific. Subsequent findings that emerge from this inquiry, identify that lived experience of chronic pain may be a product of civilised oppression, from which participants might become liberated using consciousness-raising techniques. These findings are significant, as the articulation of chronic pain as an oppressive force and the possible structures by which this is enacted, has seldom occurred in the literature. Without a discussion around oppression and pain and considering ways to raise awareness, people who experience chronic pain are unlikely to overcome these obstructions and attain empowerment.

The way we act upon the world influences our visual perception of it. For instance, previous work has found visual perceptual enhancement at the targets of upcoming saccades (e.g. Deubel & Schneider, 1996) and pointing movements (e.g. Deubel, Schneider, & Paprotta, 1998). Visual perceptual enhancement has also been found along the trajectories of manual movements (Festman, Adam, Pratt, & Fischer, 2013a, 2013b), but the area surrounding static hands have also been found to receive perceptual enhancement (Reed, Grubb, & Steele, 2006). The initial question addressed by the present thesis was whether the preparation of a manual movement would also induce perceptual enhancement at the effector location (i.e. the movement’s start point). In other words, do people not only attend where they are going, but also where they are coming from? To address this question, the novel aspect of our task was that participants not only had to select the movement target, but also the moving hand. Across the eight experiments of the present thesis we applied variations on a popular experimental task, asking our participants to conduct pointing movements and studying how this influenced their allocation of visuospatial attention. This was measured by recording whether they could successfully identify a discrimination target (DT), with the discrimination rates at different locations taken to index the amount of attention allocated there. Our first four experiments found evidence for enhancement at the starting point of a movement, but this effect was inconsistent and appeared to compete with other mechanisms for orienting attention. For example, our first experiment found enhancement only at the target location, which may have been induced by having used predictable locations for the DT, whereas Experiment 4 found only an enhancement at both hands, static and responding, which might have been due to the ability to plan the movements in advance. Since in each trial in Experiment 4 participants had to execute one movement out of only two possibilities, this may have allowed them to pre-program both movements before each trial and execute them from memory. In Experiment 5 we increased the number of potential movement targets in order to increase the difficulty of target selection and reduce movement predictability, while also lowering the DT presentation times. Under this more challenging paradigm we found perceptual enhancement only at the movement target, but also that the perceptual task was too difficult for half of our participants. Did we fail to induce enhancement at multiple locations because of the specific task our participants were executing, or due to a general inability to do so within this more challenging version of the experimental paradigm? To address this question we decided to test whether we could still induce perceptual enhancement at two locations within these experimental parameters, but attempting to replicate the work of Baldauf, Wolf and Deubel (2006). They had reported that carrying out pointing sequences resulted in parallel allocation of attention to all movement targets before movement onset. We repeatedly failed to find any enhancement at any location, even when we increased the presentation times to durations used in the earlier experiments. In our final experiment we mounted a more direct replication of Baldauf et al (2006), and we also conducted a preliminary calibration stage in which we attempted to adjust the DT’s presentation time to each participant’s level of ability by assessing their perceptual performance. This calibration was only successful in a third of our participants, with the majority still finding the perceptual task too challenging within the range of exposure times used. Furthermore, even amongst those participants selected for their good perceptual performance in the calibration task, we found visual enhancement only at the first movement target during the two-step pointing sequence. This calls into question not only the general replicability of the work of Baldauf et al. (2006), but also Deubel et al. (1998). On the whole, our findings suggest that although the pattern of attentional allocation is influenced by action planning, including the starting point of a movement, this is but one of many competing factors. Furthermore they call into question the general replicability of previous high-profile results, and call for a greater acknowledgement and investigation of the possible role of extensive practice in yielding some of the results found in the literature. The thesis concludes with suggestions for future work.