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Previous empirical research demonstrated that major depressive disorder (MDD) had a profound impact on adults. What remained unaddressed in the research was the ability of those with MDD to form positive responses during challenging life events. The purpose of this exploratory quantitative study was to examine the cognitive ability of MDD patients to form positive responses on a standardized psychological assessment. This study, guided by Beck's cognitive theory of depression, was designed to determine whether depressed individuals were prone to negativity and had decreased ability to form positive responses to challenging situations. A 2x2 ANOVA was used to analyze 116 participants who voluntarily completed the Changes in Outlook Questionnaire (CiOQ). Results indicated that the group diagnosed with MDD scored significantly lower than a control group on the positive response scale of the CiOQ and that men diagnosed with MDD scored significantly lower than women diagnosed with MDD on the positive response scale of the CiOQ. This research has positive social change implications in that practitioners may use the findings in developing more effective treatments to help those with MDD to learn to form positive responses in the midst of challenging life events. Practitioners may also develop their ability to recognize when men with MDD are depressed by using the CiOQ to obtain written responses from individuals who do not verbalize depression. This research may also be useful for future research and application within the field.

This study expanded on the existing empirical research on forgiveness and specifically ho'oponopono, a traditional Hawaiian forgiveness process. An extensive literature review revealed that while forgiveness has gained in popularity among researchers and clinicians, few therapeutic process-based models have been researched. Furthermore, ho'oponopono has not been studied as a process-based approach to forgiveness. Therefore, the purpose of the present between-groups, within-groups, repeated measures study was to assess the effects of the application of ho'oponopono (focused on a specific transgressor) on levels of unforgiveness, as measured by the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM). The participants (N = 79) were randomly divided into a test group and a control group. Both groups completed the TRIM twice and the test group engaged in the process of ho'oponopono between the pre- and post-test assessments. Two separate paired-sample t tests were used to examine the control group (n = 39) and the test group (n = 40), and a 1-way ANOVA was conducted between groups to examine the effectiveness of ho'oponopono with the test group in comparison to the control group. The results demonstrated that those who engaged in the ho'oponopono process subsequently experienced a statistically significant reduction in unforgiveness, whereas those in the control group showed no statistically significant change in negative affect over the course of the study. Based on these findings and by validating ho'oponopono as an effective therapeutic forgiveness method, this study lays the groundwork for future research of this specific forgiveness process. Strong implications for positive social change through the application of ho'oponopono include improved health, and improved interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships.

Previous research done in the area of eating disorders suggests many different variables, such as cognitive, biological, and social, that are thought to influence eating disorder development and maintenance. The present study attempts to combine cognitive and sociocultural research findings, memory recall and critical body comments, in an effort to see how, if at all, these two variables affect eating disorder symptomology. Participants for this study were 120 female students that were recruited via Study Board. Participants completed the demographics form, the Eating Disorder Inventory-3 RF, and the Social Hassles Questionnaire. The participants then watched an E-prime presentation of different positive, negative, and neutral appearance and non-appearance related words. After this presentation, participants completed a word recall task in which they wrote down as many of the words from the presentation as they could remember. Results were consistent with previous research that has found a relationship between remembering a critical comment and subsequent negative emotions/ experiences and also research that has found a negative relationship between high body dissatisfaction and number of positive words recalled. Results also showed that eating disorder symptomology predicts less recall of positive words. Results from the present study shed light on the need for better treatment for those suffering from eating disorders or any amount of eating pathology, especially treatments aimed at increasing positive ways of thinking.

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<p> Choosing specific implementational details is one of the most important aspects of creating and evaluating a model. In order to properly model cognitive processes, choices for these details must be made based on empirical research. Unfortunately, modelers are often forced to make decisions in the absence of relevant data. My work investigates the effects of these decisions. Looking at infant speech segmentation, I incorporate empirical research into model choices regarding model input, inference, and evaluation. First, I use experimental results to argue for syllables as a basic unit for early segmentation and show that the segmentation task is less difficult than previously thought. I then explore the role of various inference algorithms, each of which produces testable predictions. Lastly, I argue that standard methods of model evaluation make unrealistic assumptions about the goal of learning. Evaluating models in terms of their ability to support additional learning tasks shows that gold standard performance alone is an insufficient metric for measuring segmentation quality. In each of these three instances, I treat model design decisions as free parameters whose impact must be evaluated. By following this approach, future researchers can better gauge the success or failure of cognitive models. </p>

<p> BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: While it is well known that sensory impairment is indicative of poor outcome following stroke, we do not know its true prevalence nor do we understand how brain lesions influence sensory impairment or how sensory impairment influences functional status. The current project analyzed an existing de-identified database to address three specific aims: 1) To determine the prevalence of impairments of absolute and just noticeable difference sensory thresholds in chronic stroke, 2) To determine the relationship of specific lesion characteristics to impaired sensory thresholds in chronic stroke, and 3) To determine the correlation between impaired sensory thresholds and functional status in the chronic phase of stroke. METHODS: Absolute and just noticeable difference sensory thresholds were assessed for eleven perceptual continua spanning five sensory domains in 110 subjects (76 normal controls, 21 with right hemisphere lesions, 13 with left hemisphere lesions). Lesion volume and subtraction analysis were performed with the MRIcroN software. RESULTS: Subjects with right hemisphere lesions had a greater percentage of failures on threshold assessments that subjects with left hemisphere lesions (p=0.004) and normal control subjects (p&lt;0.0001). Subjects with right hemisphere lesions had greater severity of impairment on threshold assessments than subjects with left hemisphere lesions (p=0.003) and normal control subjects (p&lt;0.0001). Lesion volume was not correlated with impaired sensory thresholds, instead lesions of the caudate nucleus were common to subjects with a high percentage of failures on threshold assessments. Impaired sensory thresholds correlated with stroke severity as defined by the NIHSS (r=0.39, p&lt;0.03) and transfer scores on the Barthel Index (r=-0.55, p=0.02).</p>

Little research has been carried out in order to understand the mechanisms underlying the perception of polyphonic music. Perception of polyphonic music involves thematic recognition, that is, recognition of instances of theme through polyphonic voices, whether they appear unaccompanied, transposed, altered or not. There are many questions still open to debate concerning thematic recognition in the polyphonic domain. One of them, in particular, is the question of whether or not cognitive mechanisms of segmentation and thematic reinforcement facilitate thematic recognition in polyphonic music. This dissertation proposes a connectionist model to investigate the role of segmentation and thematic reinforcement in thematic recognition in polyphonic music. The model comprises two stages. The first stage consists of a supervised artificial neural model to segment musical pieces in accordance with three cases of rhythmic segmentation. The supervised model is trained and tested on sets of contrived patterns, and successfully applied to six musical pieces from J. S. Bach. The second stage consists of an original unsupervised artificial neural model to perform thematic recognition. The unsupervised model is trained and assessed on a four-part fugue from J. S. Bach. The research carried out in this dissertation contributes into two distinct fields. Firstly, it contributes to the field of artificial neural networks. The original unsupervised model encodes and manipulates context information effectively, and that enables it to perform sequence classification and discrimination efficiently. It has application in cognitive domains which demand classifying either a set of sequences of vectors in time or sub-sequences within a unique and large sequence of vectors in time. Secondly, the research contributes to the field of music perception. The results obtained by the connectionist model suggest, along with other important conclusions, that thematic recognition in polyphony is not facilitated by segmentation, but otherwise, facilitated by thematic reinforcement.