Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 169-174). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 56-59).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2005. / Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 139 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-185).

Thesis (doctoral)--La Salle University, 2003. / ProQuest dissertations and theses ; AAT 3108298. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-129).

Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file viewed on (June 27, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

The frame-of-reference (FOR) effect refers to the finding that validities for personality measures can be improved by asking respondents to consider how they behave in a particular context (e.g., "at work"). Recently, Lievens, De Corte, and Schollaert (2008) demonstrated that a FOR serves to reduce within-person inconsistencies in responding, which then improves the reliability and validity of personality measures. Despite this important step forward in FOR research, Lievens et al. note that there is still very little known with regard to how respondents complete non-contextualized personality inventories (i.e., inventories where no FOR is provided). The present studies sought to fill this significant gap in the literature by addressing the question: Do people think of themselves in particular situations or contexts when responding to non-contextualized personality inventories and, if so, what are these contexts? In addition, does the use of context vary by the personality dimension being studied? Two studies were conducted in order to fully address these Research Questions. The first of these studies was a qualitative study which examined the number and types of contexts spontaneously generated by test-takers for non-contextualized personality items. Twenty-eight interviews were conducted with college students who held a variety of life roles (e.g., student, employee, parent, spouse). Interview data demonstrated that participants considered themselves in general, at school, at work, with friends, with family, at home, and in other more specific situations (e.g., driving a car) when responding to non-contextualized inventories. Data for Study 2 were collected from 463 college students using a self-report methodology that asked participants to indicate which FORs they were using in responding to the same non-contextualized inventory used in Study 1. Results indicated significant differences in FOR endorsement across factors, such that participants endorsed the highest number of FORs for agreeableness items and the lowest number of FORs for openness to experience items. In addition, there were significant differences in the use of FORs within factors such that, for example, the "With Family" FOR was used most frequently for agreeableness but the "At School" FOR was used most frequently for openness to experience. Finally, results of Study 2 indicated that while the using more FORs in responding may increase error variances, it does not have a substantial impact on the factor structure of the Big 5. The present studies contribute to the literature by being the first to examine the role that situations play in responding to a non-contextualized inventory, and they do so using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition, the present studies represent a person-centric approach to the study of I/O psychology in that they focus on the individual experience as the basis for research.

Thesis (M.Tech.: Homoeopathy)-Dept. of Homeopathy, Durban Institute of Technology, 2006 xvii, 168 leaves / It was my perception, after having worked in the Complementary and Alternative Medicines Industry, that the knowledge and understanding of homeopathy by retail providers, was poor. Considering that pharmacies also sold over-the- counter homeopathic medicine, I felt it would be of value to do an empirical study in order to obtain more accurate data on this topic.

The aim of this thesis is to study the effect that linguistic context exerts on the activation and processing of word meaning over time. Previous studies have demonstrated that a biasing context makes it possible to predict upcoming words. The context causes the pre-activation of expected words and facilitates their processing when they are encountered. The interaction of context and word meaning can be described in terms of feature overlap: as the context unfolds, the semantic features of the processed words are activated and words that match those features are pre-activated and thus processed more quickly when encountered. The aim of the experiments in this thesis is to test a key prediction of this account, viz., that the facilitation effect is additive and occurs together with the unfolding context. Our first contribution is to analyse the effect of an increasing amount of biasing context on the pre-activation of the meaning of a critical word. In a self-paced reading study, we investigate the amount of biasing information required to boost word processing: at least two biasing words are required to significantly reduce the time to read the critical word. In a complementary visual world experiment we study the effect of context as it unfolds over time. We identify a ceiling effect after the first biasing word: when the expected word has been pre-activated, an increasing amount of context does not produce any additional significant facilitation effect. Our second contribution is to model the activation effect observed in the previous experiments using a bag-of-words distributional semantic model. The similarity scores generated by the model significantly correlate with the association scores produced by humans. When we use point-wise multiplication to combine contextual word vectors, the model provides a computational implementation of feature overlap theory, successfully predicting reading times. Our third contribution is to analyse the effect of context on semantically similar words. In another visual world experiment, we show that words that are semantically similar generate similar eye-movements towards a related object depicted on the screen. A coherent context pre-activates the critical word and therefore increases the expectations towards it. This experiment also tested the cognitive validity of a distributional model of semantics by using this model to generate the critical words for the experimental materials used.

I am living in a world of strangers. Growing up, I was told to never talk to them. As an adult, I have grown self-centered, spending my days filtering the external into my own internal truths. In doing so, a boundary has been set between my brain and everything beyond it. For different reasons I have stayed quiet over the years, and formed opinions of strangers by means of observation; but now, finally, I am reaching out. I am going to places I would not normally go to, slowing down enough to notice, and trying something different. I am trying to talk to strangers, trying to get them to open up to me in a world where a lot of us have curled the focus inward. I am trying to explore, trying to overcome, approach, dig deeper, and above all, learn something that makes each one of us familiar. / Kelly Ann Gregorio. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011.