This sequential, mixed methods study explored students' attitudes towards collaborative learning and their responses to collaborative learning problems in relation to their identity salience. Identities are motivators of human actions that impact an individual's self-esteem and behavioral tendencies (Stryker, 1968). An individual has three identity aspects that are related to different behavioral tendencies: individual, relational, and collective aspects. The identity aspect that an individual acts out across a variety of situations is their identity salience. Implied by the identity salience theory, students' behaviors may be detrimental or beneficial to the effectiveness of collaborative learning based on their identity salience. Results of the study revealed a possible relationship between students' identity salience and their attitudes, prior experiences, working preferences, and priorities in collaborative learning. In addition, results of the study also disclosed students' behavioral tendencies in dealing with collaborative learning problems including group tension, the free-rider effect, and role taking in relation to students' identity salience. Findings of this study can be used to support further investigations on personalized student grouping for effective collaborative learning. / Ph. D.

According to terror management theory, awareness of death affects diverse aspects of human thought and behavior. Studies have shown that older and younger adults differ in how they respond to reminders of their mortality. The present study investigated one hypothesized explanation for these findings: Age-related differences in the tendency to make correspondent inferences. The correspondence bias was assessed in younger and older samples after death-related, negative, or neutral primes. Younger adults displayed increased correspondent inferences following mortality primes, whereas older adults' inferences were not affected by the reminder of death. As in prior research, age differences were evident in control conditions; however, age differences were eliminated in the death condition. Results support the existence of age-related differences in responses to mortality, with only younger adults displaying increased reliance on simplistic information structuring after a death reminder.

Faculty of Humanities; School of Psychology; MA Dissertation / This study aimed to explore Blau’s (1989) Career Commitment Scale, Greenhaus’ (1971) Career Salience Scale, Kanungo’s (1982) Job Involvement Questionnaire and how each of these outdated instruments may confound the concepts of career commitment, career salience, and job involvement. A thorough analysis of the literature pertaining to these concepts was conducted in line with the definition of a career and how it has evolved over the years. Blau’s (1989) Career Commitment Scale, Greenhaus’ (1971) Career Salience Scale, and Kanungo’s (1982) Job Involvement Questionnaire were all administered to a sample of 145 full-time store level employees at a large retail organisation in the Gauteng region. After conducting correlations, partial correlations, and a factor analysis, the results from this study identified that there is a need for revising the three scales under investigation as the correlations found evidence to suggest convergence whilst the factor analysis discovered a lack of discriminant validity amongst the three instruments. Having discussed these results, the implications for this work were mentioned, both theoretically and practically. Limitations of the study were acknowledged and future research directions were suggested.

This dissertation contains reports of three separate studies in which the connections between work role salience, family role salience, stereotype threat, and work-family conflict were explored. In the first study, findings from a systematic review of the role salience literature were reported. Following a search of four Human Resource Development (HRD) journals, the PsycINFO database, and the Academic Search Complete database, 69 articles and papers were identified for inclusion in the literature review. The literature mostly pertained to career development, with a notable emphasis on life-span, life-space theory. Though, very little of the research in the sample of literature pertained specifically to how individuals negotiate their lives as they occupy multiple life roles. In the second study, meta-analytic techniques were used to identify the nature of the relationships between work role salience, family role salience, and work-family conflict. Hypothesized relationships were based on conservation of resources theory. Data were collected from fourteen papers and articles to test the hypothesized relationships. Work role salience was positively related to work-family conflict (ρ = 0.151; p < 0.01) and family role salience was negatively related to work interference with family (ρ = -0.049; p ≤ 0.05). Family role salience appeared to support healthy involvement in both the work and family roles while work family salience appeared to deplete the necessary resources to balance work and family roles satisfactorily. The third study was an introduction of stereotype threat as a potential moderator of the role salience and work-family conflict relationships. Data were collected from 727 individuals who responded to an online survey. MANOVA was used to conclude that White and Black/African-American participants differed in their responses to the work-family conflict and stereotype threat scales. Regression analyses were used to assess the moderating effects of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat moderated the relationships between parental role salience and family interference with work. Future research efforts should include further examination of the similarities and differences in how the variables interact across racial boundaries and the mechanism(s) by which the stereotype threat affects role salience and work-family conflict relationships.

Finding the way in known and unknown city environments is a task that all pedestrians carry out regularly. Current technology allows the use of smart devices as aids that can give automatic verbal route directions on the basis of the pedestrian's current position. Many such systems only give route directions, but are unable to interact with the user to answer clarifications or understand other verbal input. Furthermore, they rely mainly on conveying the quantitative information that can be derived directly from geographic map representations: 'In 300 meters, turn into High Street'. However, humans are reasoning about space predominantly in a qualitative manner, and it is less cognitively demanding for them to understand route directions that express such qualitative information, such as 'At the church, turn left' or 'You will see a café'. This thesis addresses three challenges that an interactive wayfinding system faces in the context of natural language generation and understanding: in a given situation, it must decide on whether it is appropriate to give an instruction based on a relative direction, it must be able to select salient landmarks, and it must be able to resolve the user's references to objects. In order to address these challenges, this thesis takes a data-driven approach: data was collected in a large-scale city environment to derive decision-making models from pedestrians' behavior. As a representation for the geographical environment, all studies use the crowd-sourced Openstreetmap database. The thesis presents methodologies on how the geographical and language data can be utilized to derive models that can be incorporated into an automatic route direction system. / <p>QC 20160516</p>

Previous comparative research into the determinants of voting using aggregate data has suffered from two limitations: it relied predominantly on country-level data; and it seldom ventured beyond a consideration of one or two types of elections. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we use an original dataset in which data are aggregated to sub-national units; and include examples of national, sub-national, and supra-national elections. A total of 66 elections between 1995 and 2008 are included, drawn from ten Western European countries: Belgium, England, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. For each country, the same sub-national geographical units are used for all election types, allowing the direct comparison of the effects of our selected institutional and socio-demographic variables. We find that the effects of the institutional determinants of voting are substantially and systematically reduced as the salience of the election type increases. For the socio-demographic variables, no such systematic relationship with salience is found. However, for some variables, the direction of effect is the opposite for European Parliament elections to that found for Municipal and Lower House elections, and supports the idea that EP elections differ sufficiently from sub-national, second-order elections to justify their ‘third-order’ classification. When we turn our attention to the effects of the socio-demographic variables in five individual countries, we find that the results are often consistent across different types of elections, and for all five countries. However, we also find that the effects of some variables have different effects in different countries. In these cases, we suggest explanations which relate turnout differences to wider political and social factors.

In this study, a theory that identified salience and immediacy as two constructs that significantly determine questionnaire response rates was tested. This theory emphasized the importance of identifying and rating factors that impact the immediacy and salience of a questionnaire to a specific population. It was proposed that factors that make a questionnaire highly immediate and salient to a given population should be identified first, and then implemented into the construction and administration of the questionnaire. In this way, researchers can manipulate the variables, which will maximize the response rate for their specific population before distribution. A questionnaire that is highly immediate and salient to a given population was estimated to achieve a response rate of 80% or higher. The immediacy and salience of several manipulable variables of a questionnaire were rated by a sample characteristically similar to the target population. Three treatments of the questionnaire were sent to three randomly assigned groups of the population. These treatments varied from low, moderate, to high immediacy and salience based on the ratings. An analysis of the ratings revealed a very strong direct relationship between salience and immediacy. Variables of the questionnaire were rated very similarly between the two constructs. Contrary to Christensen's theory, different levels of immediacy and salience were not found to interact. However, a direct relationship was found between immediacy and salience levels, and final response rates, which was consistent with the theory. The order of response rate percentages for each treatment group reflected the degree of immediacy and salience as measured by the raters.

Discrimination between similar stimuli is enhanced more by intermixed pre-exposure than by blocked pre-exposure to those stimuli. The salience modulation account of this intermixed-blocked effect proposes that the unique elements of intermixed stimuli are more salient than those of blocked stimuli. The inhibition account proposes that inhibitory links between the unique elements of intermixed stimuli enhance discrimination. The current thesis evaluated the two accounts in their ability to explain this effect in humans. In Experiments 1 and 2, categorisation and same-different judgements were more accurate for intermixed than for blocked stimuli. This indicates that intermixed pre-exposure decreases generalisation and increases discriminability more than does blocked pre-exposure. In Experiments 3 ?? 5, same-different judgements were more accurate when at least one of the two stimuli was intermixed. This enhanced discrimination was not confined to two stimuli that had been directly intermixed. These results are better explained by salience modulation than by inhibition. Experiments 6 ?? 8 employed dot probe tasks, in which a grid stimulus was followed immediately by a probe. Neither intermixed nor blocked stimuli showed facilitated reaction times when the probe appeared in the location of the unique element. In Experiments 9 ?? 11 participants learned to categorise the intermixed unique elements more successfully than the blocked unique elements, but only when the unique elements were presented on a novel background during categorisation. Experiments 6 ?? 11 provide weak evidence that the intermixed unique elements are more salient than their blocked counterparts. In Experiment 12, participants were presented with the shape and location of a given unique element, and were required to select the correct colour. Performance was more accurate for intermixed than for blocked unique elements. In Experiment 13, participants learned to categorise intermixed, blocked and novel unique elements. Performance was better for intermixed than for blocked and novel unique elements, which did not differ. None of the proposed mechanisms for salience modulation anticipate these results. The intermixed-blocked effect in human perceptual learning is better explained by salience modulation than by inhibition. However, the salience modulation accounts that have been proposed received little support. An alternative account of salience modulation is considered.

Creative behaviors are part of an average consumer's everyday life. For example, amateur people buy various art and craft supplies from stores like Michael's, purchase studio time to make pottery, and collect camera accessories to help demonstrate their originality in photography. Usually the final creative product can be preserved for a long period of time. These creative activities are avidly pursued primarily because they provide consumers with enjoyment and a sense of fulfillment. I am coining the term "creation-oriented consumption" to refer to this phenomenon, which is one specific type of creative consumption.Terror management theory is used to examine why people engage in creation-oriented consumption. I hypothesize that mortality salience boosts the intention to engage in creation-oriented consumption; and under mortality salience, weakened afterlife belief increases the intention for this type of consumption.Three experimental studies are conducted, each adopting a somewhat different perspective. Study 1 gauges intention to engage in creation-oriented consumption against inaction. It finds that mortality salience increases interest in creation-oriented consumption; and that under mortality salience, weakened afterlife belief increases interest in creation-oriented consumption. Study 2 examines durable creation-oriented consumption's appeal relative to other activities, namely, non-creative activities and creative consumption that does not leave durable traces. The proposed effect of mortality salience is observed only when individuals possess a low level of chronic afterlife belief. Unexpectedly, interest in creative consumption is reduced under mortality salience. Consistent with study 1, study 2 finds that under mortality salience, weakened afterlife belief raises interest in creation-oriented consumption. Study 3 replicates the finding of study 2 that mortality salience dampens general interest in creativity. Taken together, these studies suggest that although creation-oriented consumption ameliorates existential anxiety, it is not the most effective one in the short term.Apart from the major hypotheses, this dissertation also investigates some boundary conditions. Two of the three studies find that the question of whether creative consumption leaves a durable trace is of significance.

Discrimination between similar stimuli is enhanced more by intermixed pre-exposure than by blocked pre-exposure to those stimuli. The salience modulation account of this intermixed-blocked effect proposes that the unique elements of intermixed stimuli are more salient than those of blocked stimuli. The inhibition account proposes that inhibitory links between the unique elements of intermixed stimuli enhance discrimination. The current thesis evaluated the two accounts in their ability to explain this effect in humans. In Experiments 1 and 2, categorisation and same-different judgements were more accurate for intermixed than for blocked stimuli. This indicates that intermixed pre-exposure decreases generalisation and increases discriminability more than does blocked pre-exposure. In Experiments 3 ?? 5, same-different judgements were more accurate when at least one of the two stimuli was intermixed. This enhanced discrimination was not confined to two stimuli that had been directly intermixed. These results are better explained by salience modulation than by inhibition. Experiments 6 ?? 8 employed dot probe tasks, in which a grid stimulus was followed immediately by a probe. Neither intermixed nor blocked stimuli showed facilitated reaction times when the probe appeared in the location of the unique element. In Experiments 9 ?? 11 participants learned to categorise the intermixed unique elements more successfully than the blocked unique elements, but only when the unique elements were presented on a novel background during categorisation. Experiments 6 ?? 11 provide weak evidence that the intermixed unique elements are more salient than their blocked counterparts. In Experiment 12, participants were presented with the shape and location of a given unique element, and were required to select the correct colour. Performance was more accurate for intermixed than for blocked unique elements. In Experiment 13, participants learned to categorise intermixed, blocked and novel unique elements. Performance was better for intermixed than for blocked and novel unique elements, which did not differ. None of the proposed mechanisms for salience modulation anticipate these results. The intermixed-blocked effect in human perceptual learning is better explained by salience modulation than by inhibition. However, the salience modulation accounts that have been proposed received little support. An alternative account of salience modulation is considered.