Positive health-related behaviour is particularly important for liver transplant recipients’ (LTRs) recovery. However, non-adherence in adolescents post-transplant is thought to be greater than, or equal to, 50%. Literature searches have found limited research into the area of young adults’ experiences of having a donated liver. Knowing more of their experience seems important to help inform practice to improve adherence and ultimately save lives. The present study aimed to construct a grounded theory of young adults’ experiences of having a liver transplant, in order to better understand how young adults may adjust following such experiences. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve liver transplant recipients (LTRs; five female, seven male). Data were analysed using constructivist grounded theory. A model was constructed to capture the dynamic interactions between thirteen categories, resulting in four main themes: Finding Identity Post-Transplant, Carrying Responsibility, Unseen, Unspoken or Misunderstood Challenges and Adjusting to Life After Transplant. The study highlights the importance of the themes in psychological adjustment post-transplant. Understanding this process is imperative in order to improve health-related behaviours in a cohort with traditionally poor adherence. Implications for further research and clinical practice are discussed, including educating LTRs to raise their levels of self-efficacy, which have a positive impact on adherence.

Literature suggests that there are a growing number of ‘mental health professionals’ speaking out about their own experiences of using mental health services. Research suggests that these professionals face dilemmas when constructing their identity because they are drawing on two identities that are viewed as fundamentally different, i.e. ‘mental health professionals’ as powerful and ‘mental health service users’ as powerless. This study aimed to explore how ‘mental health professionals’ who are/have been ‘mental health service users’ construct their identity using a social constructionist epistemology, which views identity as fluid and continuously renegotiated in social contexts (Davies & Harré, 1990; Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Ten participants who self-identified as ‘mental health professionals’ who are/have been ‘mental health service users’ volunteered to take part. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis. Participants constructed their identity in a variety of ways, including as separate identities, i.e. a ‘professional identity’ and a ‘patient/mental health service user identity’ constructions, switching between the two in different contexts, therefore developing an ‘un-integrated identity’. Participants also developed an ‘integrated identity’ construction in some professional contexts. These results are discussed and implications for clinical practice and future research are explored.

Face adaptation techniques have been used extensively to investigate how faces are processed. It has even been suggested that face adaptation is functional in calibrating the visual system to the diet of faces to which an observer is exposed. Yet most adaptation studies to date have used unfamiliar faces: few have used faces with real world familiarity. Familiar faces have more abstractive representations than unfamiliar faces. The experiments in this thesis therefore examined face adaptation for familiar faces. Chapters 2 and 3 explored the role of explicit recognition of familiar faces in producing face identity after-effects (FIAEs). Chapter 2 used composite faces (the top half of a celebrity's face paired with the bottom half of an unfamiliar face) as adaptors and showed that only recognised composites produced significant adaptation. In Chapter 3 the adaptors were cryptic faces (unfamiliar faces subtly transformed towards a celebrity's face) and faces of celebrity's siblings. Unrecognised cryptic and sibling faces produced FIAEs for their related celebrity, but only when adapting and testing on the same viewpoint. Adaptation only transferred across viewpoint when a face was explicitly recognised. Chapter 4 demonstrated that face adaptation could occur for ecologically valid, personally familiar stimuli, a necessary pre-requisite if adaptation is functional in calibrating face processing mechanisms. A video of a lecturer's face produced FIAEs equivalent to that produced by static images. Chapters 5 and 6 used a different type of after-effect, the face distortion after-effect (FDAE), to explore the stability of our representations for personally familiar faces, and showed that even representations of highly familiar faces can be affected by exposure to distorted faces. The work presented here shows that it is important to take facial familiarity into account when investigating face adaptation effects, as well as increasing our understanding of how familiarity affects the representations of faces.