As a psychotherapist working in the field of eating disorders, I have a long-standing interest in accessing the subjective expertise of a wider group of sufferers, including what it is like and what it means to suffer from anorexia, the factors that help to support recovery and the role psychotherapy plays in contributing towards the recovery process. This study provides a timely addition to the literature on the nature and role of psychotherapy as a treatment for anorexia. Studies that explore the sufferer’s understanding and experience of developing anorexia are extremely limited and a gap exists in examining the role of psychotherapy from the recipient’s position and the ways in which psychotherapy supports an individual's recovery process. However, as this thesis demonstrates, people who have suffered and recovered from anorexia hold valuable information on the factors that support recovery and their expertise as recipients of psychotherapy has much to teach clinicians and researchers in the field of eating disorders. The theoretical foundation of this study conceptualises experience in relation to its narration. I recruited twelve participants drawn from across Scotland who provided narrative data during a focus group and a semi structured individual interview. Participants provided experiential accounts on developing anorexia, on recovery and the role of psychotherapy in their recovery process. A phenomenological approach to data analysis was deployed using Smith et al’s (2009) Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a methodological guide. Drawing upon an IPA methodology I identified a number of central themes. Within accounts of developing anorexia, themes relating to interpersonal attachment, trauma and/or identity played a central role in the illness beliefs and experiences of participants. Within accounts of recovery, participants offered two main framings. The first defined recovery as an achievable completion point, signally the end of illness. The second defined recovery as an on-going process concerned more with the management of anorexia than the elimination of it. Factors that support recovery included those that are integral to the individual participant as well as those that are made available by their environment. In accounts of the role of psychotherapy, a number of common factors across participants’ experiences of psychotherapy were identified spanning support, learning and action factors. In addition, the quality of the therapeutic relationship with the psychotherapist played a crucial role in supporting the recovery process. I argue that participant beliefs about and experiences of recovery directly relate to their understandings and perceptions about what precipitated anorexia. Recovery took place when changes could be made in relation to these significant themes and psychotherapy was most effective when it addressed these issues as part of the psychotherapy process. The findings from this study point to the importance of working with the subjective understandings and beliefs sufferers have about their illness experience as a key objective within psychotherapy practice. They also underline the significance of a strong therapeutic relationship as a key component of the recovery process.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Talking GPS Locating System (TGLS) was developed to facilitate recovery of airborne targets by vocalizing and transmitting their Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates to surface recovery teams following target splashdown. The airborne portion of the TGLS includes an off-the-shelf five-channel GPS receiver board, a GPS antenna, a microcontroller board with voice sample/playback circuitry, and a transmitter with antenna. Also part of the TGLS is a Record/Test Unit (RTU) which is used for pre-launch voice recording and ground tests. Upon splashdown, the TGLS is energized, the GPS receiver is initialized, and an optional homing tone burst -- periodically interrupted by a voice message relaying target and GPS receiver status -- is transmitted. Once the receiver has output valid longitude and latitude information to the microcontroller, this position is vocalized as the GPS status portion of the broadcast message. Just one intelligible reception of this message by any inexpensive, properly-tuned voice receiver will allow recovery teams to vector to within 25 to 100 meters of the target regardless of weather conditions or the time of day.

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of "work" as a reinforcing stimulus in a behavior modification program designed to eliminate disruptive talking. A response-cost procedure was established whereby the reinforcement was made contingent upon the behavior of eight students with learning disabilities.

In this thesis I examine men's talk about food. I argue that many academic knowledges of food have adopted a realist epistemological stance that is problematic with regards to the functional and constructive nature of language. Consequently, I propose a focus upon how language is used to construct food in talk. I also argue that gender has been highlighted by much research as of significance in relation to food, but that men have been subject to very little in-depth study. I therefore propose a need to examine men's accounts of food. Employing a discursive action approach, I examine accounts produced by eight men. In talk about meat, I argue speakers reject the proposition that meat is essential, but also acknowledge its significance for health. I propose they downplay salad as a central feature of diet yet deny that it is objected to. I also suggest that respondents seem sensitive to a number of negative inferences relating to the consumption of sweets and biscuits. Additionally, speakers downplay the likelihood of buying slimming foods and characterise weight as un-problematic. However, they also stress that their weight is monitored. Similarly, respondents reject feeling guilty about food but demonstrate that their food consumption is not unregulated. In relation to cooking and shopping, I propose speakers deny that they are responsible for these tasks within the household. However, I also suggest that they display a sensitivity to potentially negative inferences, such as inequity, that may arise in connection with this state of affairs. Finally, I assert that participants deny eating at fast food restaurants and stress their variable explanations they produce. To conclude I highlight the complexity of food as a topic of study and consider the utility of a discourse analytic approach to men's accounts in this area.

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Objectives. People suffering from mental health conditions, often do not seek professional help. One of the reasons for this is that they do not consider talking-therapies sufficiently effective. It has been shown that among physical health conditions the rate at which people recover by themselves from a condition, as compared to those who do not (i.e. baseline-risk), unduly influences how effective people judge respective treatments. Treatments for conditions from which many people recover by themselves are considered as more effective than they actually are, as people credit the treatments for those that have recovered by themselves; the reverse is true for conditions from which many people do not recover by themselves. People may judge talking-therapy on the basis of the baseline-risk, to the detriment of the actual treatment effect of talking-therapy, conceptualised as the absolute or relative reduction of risk. Design. A mixed factorial within-between subjects experiment. Participants. A general population sample (N=202), in which 75.8% of participants had symptoms of depression and anxiety indicating a mental health condition. Methods. Participants took part in a web-based experiment during which they were shown six vignettes about common mental health conditions and the effect of talking-therapy on these compared to no treatment. The six vignettes varied in the baseline-risk (high vs. low), the absolute risk reduction (high vs. low), and the relative risk reduction (high vs. low). The dependent variable was the perceived effectiveness of talking-therapy, measured on a visual analogue scale from 0 (ineffective) to 100 (extremely effective). Analysis of covariance was conducted to control for potential confounding variables, including numeracy and mood. Results. Talking-therapies were judged on the basis of the baseline-risk of the condition. A higher baseline-risk was associated with a lower perceived effectiveness. This impact of the baseline-risk was not moderated by numeracy or mood. Talking-therapies were also judged on the basis of the absolute risk reduction but not by the relative risk reduction. There was some evidence that those with lower numeracy were less sensitive to differences in the treatment effect, that is, their judgments of effectiveness decreased less with a decreasing treatment effect. Conclusion. The evidence suggests that the effectiveness of talking-therapy is influenced by the baseline-risk of common mental health conditions. To address people's judgement that talking-therapy is insufficiently effective may require considering the negative impact of the high baseline-risk inherent to common mental health conditions. In turn, this may increase uptake of talking-therapy for common mental health conditions.

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No / In this work we propose a talking head system for animating facial expressions using a template face generated from partial differential equations (PDE). It uses a set of pre configured curves to calculate an internal template surface face. This surface is then used to associate various facial features with a given 3D face object. Motion retargeting is then used to transfer the deformations in these areas from the template to the target object. The procedure is continued until all the expressions in the database are calculated and transferred to the target 3D human face object. Additionally the system interacts with the user using an artificial intelligence (AI) chatter bot to generate response from a given text. Speech and facial animation are synchronized using the Microsoft Speech API, where the response from the AI bot is converted to speech.

Sociality is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. The key to sociality is coordination, that is, the bringing of people "into a common action, movement or condition" [134]. Coordination is, at base, how social creatures get social things done in the world. Being social creatures, we engage in highly coordinative activities in everyday life"two girls play hopscotch together, a group of musicians play jazz in a jam session and a father teaches a son how to ride a bicycle. Even mundane actions such as greetings, answering a phone call, and asking a question to ask a question by saying "Can I ask you a question?" are complex and intricate. Actors not only need to plan and perform situated actions, but also need to process the responding actions----even unforeseen ones----from the other party in real time and adjust their own subsequent actions. Yet, we expertly coordinate with each other in performing highly intricate coordinative actions. In this work, I look at how people coordinate joint activities at the moment of interaction and aim to unveil a range of coordinative issues, using "methodologies and approaches that fundamentally question the mainstream frameworks that define what counts as knowledge" (p.2, [80]) in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). To investigate computer mediated interactions among co-located people, I examine different interactional choices people make in the course of carrying out their joint activities, and the consequences of their choices. By investigating co-located groups as they played a collaborative, problem-solving game using distributed technologies in experimental settings, I (1) provide critical case reports which question and challenge non-discussed, often-taken-for-granted assumptions about face-to-face interactions and coordination, and (2) tie the observations to the creation of higher level constructs which, in turn, can affect subsequent design choices. More specifically, I ran two studies to look at how co-located people coordinate and manage their attention, tasks at hand, and joint activities in an experimental setting. I asked triads to work on a Sudoku puzzle collectively as a team. I varied support for the deictic mechanism in the software as well as form factors of mediating technology. My research findings show that: (1) different tools support different deictic behaviors. Explicit support for pointing is desirable to support complex reference tasks, but may not be needed for simpler ones. On the other hand, users without sophisticated explicit support may give up the attempt to engaged in complex reference. (2) talk is diagnostic of user satisfaction but lack of talk is not diagnostic of dissatisfaction. Therefore, designers must be careful in their use of talk as a measurement of collaboration. (3) the more people talk about complex relationships in the puzzle, the higher their increase in positive emotion. Either engaging with the problem at hand is rewarding or having the ability to engage with the problem effectively enough to speak about it is engaging. (4) amount of talk is related to form factor. People in both computer conditions talked less about the specifics oF the game board than people in the paper condition, but only people in the laptop condition experienced a significant decrease in positive emotion. (5) different mediating technologies afford different types of non-response situations. The most common occurrences of non-responses were precipitated by speakers talking to themselves in the computer conditions. Participants did not talk to themselves much in the paper condition. Differences in technology form factors may influence people's behaviors and emotion differently. These findings represent a portrait of how different technologies provide different interactional possibilities for people. With my quantitative and qualitative analyses I do not make bold and futile claims such as "using a highlighter tool will make users collaborate more efficiently," or "making people talk more will make the group perform better." I, instead, illustrate the interactional choices people made in the presence of given technological conditions and how their choices eventuated in situ. I then propose processlessness as an idea for preparing designs that are open to multiple interactional possibilities, and nudgers as an idea for enabling and aiding users to create and design their own situated experiences. / Ph. D.

Indigeneity plays a central role in planning for diversity and creating inclusive cities in Canada. In the public domain, racism remains prominent in cities and presents challenges to the realization by urban Aboriginal peoples and Newcomers of their aspirations in urban society. In Winnipeg, an Aboriginal-led organisation has initiated partnerships with Newcomer settlement organisations to bring both groups together to build intercultural relationships. A case study of the United Against Racism/Aboriginal Youth Circle component of Ka Ni Kanichihk (KNK) provides the opportunity to examine the effects of its partnerships on the following matters: promoting cross-cultural understanding and friendships, changing negative perceptions and building confidence among Aboriginal peoples and Newcomers vis-a-vis each other, and help indirectly to facilitate Newcomer integration into neighbourhoods predominantly occupied by Aboriginal peoples in Winnipeg. An analysis of the data gathered on the partnership programs revealed that prior to participating in these programs there were negative preconceptions about one another based on false impressions. The programming has facilitated the sharing of cultures and ideas. This has also helped members of both groups to value their cultural differences and similar history of colonialism where they exist, develop a shared understanding of the racism that confronts Aboriginal peoples and racialized Newcomers, break down stereotypes, and build friendships. This thesis reveals that in the short term, the programs and partnerships of KNK are contributing to better cross-cultural understanding and relations within a multiculturalism framework, and that in the long term they have the potential to contribute to better cross-cultural understanding and relations within an intercultural framework. The cross-cultural networks being developed bode well for the potential of developing instrumental policy and advocacy partnerships in addressing common issues faced by Aboriginals and Newcomers through progressive urban policy in Canadian cities.