The aim of this thesis was to increase understanding of how rumination, defined as the behaviours and thoughts that focus an individual’s attention on their depressive symptoms and on the implications of these symptoms (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991), affects the relationship between postnatal depressive symptoms and maternal sensitivity. Study 1 examined the impact of self-reported maternal rumination on perceived maternal attunement and mood, and the role of perceived social support and infant temperament in this relationship in a community sample of mothers (N = 203). Rumination mediated the relationship between maternal depressive symptoms and maternal responsiveness when infant negative affect was low but not high. Contrary to predictions, rumination did not mediate the relationship between social support and maternal attunement. Study 2 incorporated a second assessment point approximately six months later with the same sample. Prospective analyses were undertaken to examine the directional relationship between rumination and maternal attunement in the context of depressive symptoms. Unexpectedly, analyses revealed that maternal bonding prospectively predicted rumination at six months, after controlling for rumination at baseline. The converse relationship was not significant. This was contrary to the thesis hypothesis that increased rumination would predict impaired attunement at six months. Partially consistent with the thesis hypotheses, the relationship between rumination and maternal attunement was moderated by depressive symptoms at baseline; such that mothers who were low in depressive symptoms and had lower bonding at baseline reported higher levels of rumination at 6 months. Study 3 also explored the directional relationships between maternal mood, rumination and maternal attunement at a state level in a daily diary study with a community sample of mothers (N = 94) with infants aged between 3 and 14 months. Consistent with the findings of study 2, state maternal bonding at Time 1 predicted both state maternal rumination and state maternal mood at Time 2, and state rumination at Time 2 mediated the relationship between state bonding at Time 1 and state mood at Time 2. In the final study, the causal relationships between an experimentally induced state of ruminative thinking and observed maternal behaviours in a mother-infant interaction task were examined in a sample of dysphoric and non-dysphoric mothers (N = 79) and their infants. The analyses examined change in mother-infant interaction quality from baseline to post rumination induction, and subsequent change following an infant stressor task. Findings revealed a significant reduction in maternal sensitivity and mother-infant dyadic synchrony in the rumination group, but not the control group. For maternal sensitivity, the effect of rumination was exacerbated following the stressor task. Contrary to predictions, this relationship was not moderated by dysphoric symptoms. The findings of this thesis indicate that ruminative thinking directly impairs observed maternal behaviours, but that perceived poorer maternal attunement also increases self-reported ruminative thinking. The significance of these findings for theoretical explanations of rumination in a postnatal context are considered, and the clinical implications for parenting programmes and interventions for both mothers in the community as well as those considered at risk are discussed.

Objective: The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether maternal emotion recognition of infant faces in a facial morphing task differed by maternal attachment style, and if this was moderated by a secure attachment prime, such that it would ameliorate the effects of maternal attachment insecurity. Method: 87 mothers of children aged 0-18 months completed measures of global and mother-specific trait attachment, post-natal depression, mood and state attachment alongside 2 sessions of an emotion recognition task. This task was made up of short movies created from photographs of infant faces, changing from neutral to either happy or sad. It was designed to assess sensitivity (accuracy of responses and intensity of emotion required to recognize the emotion) to changes in emotions expressed in the faces of infants. Participants also underwent a prime manipulation that was either attachment-based (experimental group) or neutral (control group). Results: There were no significant effects for global attachment scores (i.e., avoidant, anxious). However, there was a significant interaction effect of condition x maternal avoidant attachment for accuracy of recognition of happy infant faces. Explication of this interaction yielded an unexpected finding: participants reporting avoidant attachment relationships with their own mothers were less accurate in recognizing happy infant faces following the attachment prime than participants with maternal avoidant attachment in the control condition. Conclusions: Future research directions suggest ways to improve strength of effects and variability in attachment insecurity. Clinical implications of the study center on the preliminary evidence presented that supports carefully selected and executed interventions for mothers with attachment problems.

The focal point of this thesis is on whether and how digital practices can challenge and reintroduce values and concepts related to self-awareness and spatial sensitivity. It uses prosuming practices of food and social media as a research and learning tool. Prosumption is a compound word formed by joining the words production and consumption and, in brief, it means producing for one’s own consumption. This study is conducted in the area of digital media and architecture. The main architectural interest lies in the way that place (and notions related to the private and public spheres) is perceived by its users and how this experience can be affected by prosuming social media platforms every day. In particular, this study explores if and how digital media, especially the prosuming of social media content, alters preestablished issues related to spatial sensitivity. A thorough critical examination of the prevailing views on these topics, as well as their evolution in time, is described. The present status of the matters studied is approached by a literature review and an empirical study using mainly phenomenological methods of approach. Food prosuming is explored first and the conclusions reached, related to self awareness and spatial sensitivity, are then further tested and attempts are then made to apply these to social media content prosuming. The research methods used involved in-depth interviews with 35 participants over a period of two years. Individuals who covered a spectrum of different ages, social groups and professional categories were selected for interview. Data relating to the documentation of prosuming practices of the participants, questionnaires, and personal reflections through blogging and social media practices were recorded. Furthermore, one intervention of public prosuming activity was also investigated. As it was found in food prosumerism, there is a significant difference if practiced occasionally and when practiced in the frame of habitual everydayness. This differentiation can be related to and affect issues such as privacy and the personal and social spheres. It was also found that while casual prosuming in the digital domain of social media involves aspects and values of the public domain, everydayness transforms these digital prosuming practices into familiar practices as they are habituated in the private domain. Schematically, this can be represented as: Public → Casual → Private. Everyday digital prosumerism cultivates and incorporates issues of the private domain, whereas by definition it should incorporate issues of the social domain. This is what in this thesis is referred to as issues of the public-private domain. This remark, though, affects the essence of spatial sensitivity, the understanding of the private and the social sphere and the values and tendencies involved. Our findings suggest that, in most cases of food prosuming, when sharing, the host aims to instil a specific mood for the event, to be responsible for the setting, the ambience, the atmosphere of the sharing experience with the guests and the facilitation of sharing. In the digital domain, the mood and ambience of the sharing setting might follow the same pattern as is facilitated by the host, but at the same time the process of sharing sets the mood in an accelerated process; it is co-created, continued or totally altered by the public private sphere. Prosumerism as explored so far is correlated positively to issues of selfactualization and personal wellbeing (Xie, Troye and Bagozzi, 2008). Do digital prosuming practices share the same qualities? Personal atmospheres today, or what we call in this thesis aetherspheres, incorporate values and issues cultivated and fed by the fused atmosphere of the physical and the digital domain, forming a new ethos of prosumerism and crafting new norms.

Lured by the promise of bigger sales, companies are increasingly looking to raise the volume of international trade. Consequently, the amount of bulk products carried in containers and transported overseas exploded because of the flexibility and reliability of this type of transportation. However, minimizing the logistics costs arising from the container flow management across different terminals has emerged asa major problem that companies and affiliated third-party logistics firms face routinely. The empty tankcontainer allocation problem occurs in the context of intermodal distribution systems management and transportation operations carried out by logistic service provider companies. This paper considers the time-evolving supply chain system of an international logistic service provider company that transports bulk products loaded in tank containers via road, rail and sea. In such system, unbalanced movements of loaded tank containers forces the company to reposition empty tank containers. The purpose of this paper is to develop a mathematical model that supports tactical decisions for flow management of empty tank containers. The problem involves dispatching empty tank containers of various types to the meet on-time delivery requirements and repositioning the other tank containers to storage facilities, depots and cleaning stations. To this aim, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) multiperiod optimization model is developed. The model is analyzed and developed step by step, and its functionality is demonstrated by conducting experiments on the network from our case study problem, within the boarders of Europe. The case study constitutes three different scenarios of empty tank container allocation. The computational experiments show that the model finds good quality solutions, and demonstrate that cost and modality improvements can be achieved in the network The sensitivity analysis employs a set of data from our case study and randomly selected data to highlight certain features of the model and provide some insights regarding the model’s behavior.

Thermal sensitivity has been of scientific interest for almost a century. Despite this, several research questions within this field remain unanswered, particularly regarding the specific distribution of thermal sensitivity to cold across the human body. Additionally, while exercise is known to cause a cold stimulus to be perceived as less unpleasant according to the principle of thermal alliesthesia, less has been reported on the effects of exercise on thermal sensitivity to cold. With applications mainly related to clothing insulation and design in mind, the present research project aimed to investigate thermal sensitivity to cold at whole body segments, as well as within body segments, at rest and during exercise. Additionally, a comparison of thermal sensitivity to cold between genders and between ethnic groups was also performed.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of Mindful Listening Instruction on Music Listening Sensitivity and Music Listening Enjoyment. The type of mindfulness investigated in this study was of the social-psychological type, which shares both commonalities with and distinctions from meditative mindfulness. Enhanced context awareness, openness to new information, situation in the present, awareness of novel distinctions, and awareness of multiple possible perspectives (cognitive flexibility) are components of social-psychological mindfulness. A pretest-posttest control group design was used for this study. Two different age groups of students were studied: fourth-grade students (N = 42) and undergraduate non-music major college students (N = 48). The fourth-grade participants in this study were selected from an elementary school in a large city in the Northeastern United States. The college students were selected from a large university in the Southeastern United States. Participants were randomized into either the experimental or control group. Gordon’s Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation and Advanced Measures of Music Audiation were used as a pretest for fourth-grade students and college students, respectively. The results showed no statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups. Student demographical information was also collected and reported. The treatment consisted of 10 lessons for fourth-grade students. Five of the 10 lessons were used with the college students. For each age level, participants in both groups, Mindful Listening and Control, received instruction using listening-map-based and non-listening-map-based lessons from the Share the Music textbook series. Students in the Mindful Listening groups also received listening instructions designed to promote mindful listening. Music Listening Sensitivity was measured using the phrasing test from the Sensitivity portion of Gordon’s Music Aptitude Profile (MAP-P), as well as the researcher-created Anderson Test of Music Listening Sensitivity (ATMLS). Music Listening Enjoyment was measured using students’ ratings of their Listening Enjoyment after each lesson on a seven-point Likert-type scale. Results indicated that Mindful Listening Instruction yielded higher scores, which were statistically significant (at α = .05), for Music Listening Sensitivity (as measured by both the ATMLS and the MAP-P) and Music Listening Enjoyment for fourth-grade and college-student participants.

A sensitive parent-child relationship is essential in ensuring the healthy mental and physical development of an individual. Parental sensitivity can be affected by parent characteristics, such parental competence and resources as well as child characteristics, such as negative reactivity. The combination of how these parent and infant factors predict parental sensitivity has not been examined with both mothers and fathers. The current study involved 30, 4-month old infants and their mothers and fathers. Parents completed questionnaires measuring infant temperament and parental competence. They also participated in a demographic interview to measure family resources, as well as a dyadic parent-infant face-to-face play task to measure parental sensitivity. Results involving mothers indicated a moderating effect of infant temperament (e.g., negative reactivity) on the associations between parental competence (e.g., self-efficacy) and parental sensitivity. Whereas for fathers, results indicated significant main effects of infant temperament (e.g., orienting) and parental competence (e.g., self-efficacy) on parental sensitivity. The current study gives evidence and support that it is a combination of both parent characteristics and infant characteristics that affects parental sensitivity. However, this combination of characteristics is different for mothers and fathers, indicating that different factors play a part in parenting behaviors for mothers and fathers.

<p>The Earths climate is changing at a higher rate, i.e between 1861 and 1994 the annual mean temperature in Scandinavia increased with 0,68º C and according to recent climate models the annual mean temperature is likely to rise with another 3º C during this century.</p><p>A warmer climate in many ways is associated with changing conditions for lake ecosystems. An expected higher water temperature and a stronger summer stratification of the water column increases the risk of anoxic conditions at the lake bottom. Thus anoxic conditions are likely to cause a phosphate leakage from the sediment, i.e. a higher internal loading of phosphate.</p><p>In this project, the extremely warm summer of 2002 has been used as an example for a possible scenario for a future climate. By comparing levels of phosphorus in the summer of 2002 with a ten-year median value, a phosphorus related sensitivity to climate change has been analyzed for 55 Swedish lakes. This sensitivity has then been related to several parameters of which in particular the lake morphometry and the land use in the catchment of the lake influenced the climatic sensitivity of the lake to climatic change.</p> / <p>Jordens klimat förändras i en allt snabbare takt. Mellan 1861 och 1994 steg årsmedeltemperaturen i Skandinavien med 0,68º C. Enligt aktuella klimatmodeller förväntas årsmedeltemperaturen i Skandinavien öka med ytterligare 3º C det närmaste seklet.</p><p>Ett varmare klimat innebär på flera sätt nya förutsättningar för ekosystemen. Genom höjda vattentemperaturer och en starkare stratifikation sommartid ökar risken för syrefria förhållanden i sjöar. Då sedimentet under syrefria förhållanden kan läcka fosfat innebär detta en ökad internbelastning av fosfor.</p><p>I detta projekt har den extremt varma sommaren 2002 använts som ett möjligt framtida klimat. Genom att jämföra fosforhalter sommaren 2002 med ett medianvärde för 10 år har den fosforrelaterade känsligheten för klimatförändringar kunnat analyseras för 55 svenska sjöar. Denna känslighet har sedan relaterats till diverse parametrar så som sjöns morfometri och avrinningsområdets sammansättning.</p>

Signal reception and production form the basis of animal communication, and are largely constrained by environmental biophysical factors such as environmental light. However, the role of environmental light in producing variation in either signal reception or production has not been fully investigated. Using two distinct environmental light treatments, as well as a third treatment for a sampling of adults, I recorded corneal electroretinograms, lens transmission, and spectral reflectance of the body pattern of juvenile and adult Nile tilapia to chart the effect of environmental light on visual sensitivity and body colouration throughout ontogeny. Environmental light had an age-dependent effect on spectral sensitivity and an age-independent effect on spectral reflectance. Spectral sensitivity in juveniles reared under a broad-spectrum light treatment and a red-shifted light treatment differed mostly at short wavelengths, where the irradiance of the two environmental light treatments differed the most. In contrast, adults reared under the two environmental light treatments did not differ in spectral sensitivity. Lens transmission did not differ significantly between environmental light treatments, indicating that differences in spectral sensitivity of juveniles originated in the retina. Both juveniles and adults reared under the two environmental light treatments differed in spectral reflectance, and adults transferred to the third environmental light treatment differed in spectral reflectance from their counterparts reared under the two original treatments. These results demonstrate that environmental light plays a large role in shaping signal reception in juveniles and signal production throughout ontogeny, suggesting that environmental light has the capacity to drive ecological speciation. / Thesis (Master, Biology) -- Queen's University, 2012-12-03 11:32:59.441

Resveratrol (RSV) is a natural compound that improves mitochondrial function and metabolic health in animal models. Thus far, RSV’s effects on metabolic outcomes in humans are controversial, and RSV’s acute mechanism has not yet been confirmed in vivo. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of an acute dose of RSV on insulin sensitivity and fatty acid oxidation, and to determine RSV’s mechanism of action in human skeletal muscle and adipose tissue. Overweight males (n=8; BMI, 30.5±3.6; VO2peak, 34.0±7.3 ml/kg) reported to the lab on 2 occasions and were provided a breakfast supplemented with 0.3g of RSV or a placebo pill. Experiments were performed in random order using a double blind crossover design. Gas exchange measures, blood samples, and skeletal muscle and adipose tissue biopsies were obtained before and 2 hours after the supplement meal. RSV acutely improved insulin sensitivity, but had no effect on fatty acid oxidation. Additionally, RSV supplementation had no effect on the intracellular signaling of key proteins proposed to mediate its effects in skeletal muscle and adipose tissue. Taken together, these results suggest a single dose of RSV can acutely enhance insulin sensitivity, but its mechanism of action is not conserved across species, and its intracellular signaling pathway is different in humans than previously thought. Due to its insulin sensitizing effect, RSV retains its clinical value, but further research is required to determine its most useful application for human metabolic health. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-06-06 13:30:03.522