No description available.

A Bell in the Storm - Persistent unexplained pain and the language of the uncanny in the creative neurophenomenal reference is a doctoral work comprised of three parts. Part 1 is an exegesis Persistent unexplained pain and the language of the uncanny in the creative neurophenomenal reference; Part 2 is The Plays, A Bell in the Storm (produced by deckchair theatre in May, 2005) and the radio play To Fall Without Landing (produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission for Radio National in October 2005); and, Part 3 the book of monochord poems, Secrets of the Driftwood.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elder’s trilogy consisting of her 1610, 1622 and 1649 paintings is a self referential series based on the artist’s own feelings of betrayal by the men in her life. These works are comprised of her first canvas showing youthful fear, and a very importantly timed work in mid-career symbolizing commercial success. In these, she relates the Apocryphal tale of Susanna and the Elders to events that are happening to Gentileschi at each stage of her life and career, aging the figures of Susanna and the Elders along with the appropriate time in her own life. In the final canvas of the trilogy, Gentileschi brings the work to full circle, using the story to make peace with her past by visualizing a reconciliation with her father Orazio, from whom she had been estranged from her most of her career, both as parent and as artistic mentor.

The present study investigated the reliability and robustness of a new mnemonic strategy - self-imagination - in a group of memory-impaired individuals with neurological damage. Despite severe memory deficits, almost all of the participants demonstrated a self-imagination effect (SIE) for recognition memory in study 1. Moreover, the ability to benefit from self-imagination was not affected by the severity of the memory deficit. In study 3, more than half of the participants showed a SIE on a task of event-based prospective memory. The data from study 2 suggest the SIE is not attributable to semantic processing or emotional processing and indicate that self-imagination is distinct from other mnemonic strategies. Overall the findings from the present study implicate self-imagination as a new and effective mnemonic strategy. The data also indicate that when it comes to memory there is something special about processing information in relation to the self.

This thesis compiles a working corpus of Anglo-Saxon self-referential inscribed artifacts to examine how the inscriptions and supports utilize self-reference to push the viewer to understand the social and cultural significance of such objects. The inscriptions fall into two broad categories: personal inscriptions reinforce the prestige of the makers, owners, and commissioners associated with them, while impersonal inscriptions authorize philosophical and social discourse through the adoption of literary and oral types (i.e. genres). In addition to an analysis of specific artifacts—ranging from diminutive rings to monumental stone crosses—I provide a quantitative analysis that illustrates the different uses of languages, scripts, and object types. As opposed to literary texts, self-referential inscribed objects create internally complete hermeneutic units that connect the text’s discursive meaning with the function and significance of the thing itself. The inscriptions and their supports structure knowledge about Anglo-Saxon social relationships, liturgical practices, and cultural wisdom.

No description available.

Prior research suggests that aspects of self-knowledge are relatively intact in many memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury. Therefore, cognitive strategies that rely on preserved mechanisms of the self may be particularly effective in this population. The three studies presented in this dissertation investigated the practical utility and mnemonic mechanisms of a novel cognitive strategy designed to capitalize on self-referential processing: self-imagination. Study 1 investigated the effect of self-imagining on cued recall in memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury and healthy controls. Sixteen patients and sixteen healthy controls intentionally encoded word pairs under four separate conditions: visual imagery, semantic elaboration, other person imagining, and self-imagining. The results revealed that self-imagining enhanced cued recall more than the other encoding conditions in patients and healthy controls. Study 2 was an initial investigation of the effect of self-imagining on free recall. Twenty healthy adults intentionally encoded word pairs under four conditions: self-imagining, a self-descriptiveness task thought to rely on access to semantic information in self-knowledge, an autobiographical memory task requiring retrieval of a self-relevant episodic memory, and a structural processing task. The results demonstrated that self-imagining improved free recall more than the other encoding conditions in healthy adults. Study 3 investigated the effect of self-imagining on free recall in memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury and healthy controls. Fifteen patients and fifteen healthy controls intentionally encoded personality trait adjectives under five conditions: a self-imagining task, a self-descriptiveness task, an episodic autobiographical memory task, a semantic elaboration task, and a phonemic processing task. The results revealed that the advantage of self-imagining over the other cognitive strategies extended to free recall in patients. Furthermore, the results indicated that the mnemonic benefit of self-imagining was partly attributable to preserved mechanisms associated with the retrieval of semantic information in self-knowledge. The findings from this dissertation indicate that self-imagining is a self-referential cognitive strategy that generates robust and reliable mnemonic improvement in memory-impaired patients with acquired brain injury and healthy controls. Cognitive strategies that involve preserved mnemonic mechanisms of the self, such as self-imagination, may provide a new direction in cognitive rehabilitation.

No description available.

Depression is a common psychopathology that causes affective, behavioral, and cognitive dysfunction and is present across cultural identities. To reduce the dysfunction and treat the symptoms that arise from depression, researchers have created positive psychological interventions (PPIs), which are empirically supported interventions that cause a positive change by targeting a positive variable. In the current study, I created a new PPI, the Best-Self PPI, that draws from elements of optimism, coherence, and character strengths PPIs. Specifically, I hypothesized that the Best-Self PPI would work by positively biasing self-referential processing, which may predict depression and psychological well-being. Participants (n = 133) were undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 32 (M = 19.97, SD = 1.66). Participants were primarily female (n = 85; 63.91%) and White (n = 87; 65.41%) and completed either the Best-Self PPI or wrote about a childhood memory (T1, +0 Days), completed the Self-Referential Encoding Task (T2 +1 Day), and then completed a set of outcome measures (T3, +8 Days). Although the intervention appeared to have no effect on depression, well-being, or affect compared to the control group, I found that: 1) self-referential processing bias partially mediates the relationship between self-critical rumination and depression, 2) self-referential processing bias and state self-esteem fully explain the relationship between self-critical rumination and depression, and 3) self-esteem fully explains the relationship between self-critical rumination and psychological well-being. The results provide new empirical evidence for why some interventions may reduce depression and promote psychological well-being through changes in self-evaluations. I encourage researchers to use the evidence in the current study that modifying self-referential processing and state self-esteem may affect depression and psychological well-being to improve existing interventions and create new interventions to promote psychological well-being above and beyond the elimination of suffering.

No description available.