Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 346
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableTowards a functional action-based account of Moralization( 2023-12)Morality has traditionally been considered to reflect a set of universal and objective values. However, more recent work investigating people’s subjective moral beliefs have revealed that substantial and meaningful variance can exist within and between individuals in their tendency to see attitudes or actions as morally relevant. Moralization describes the process underlying within-person variance in attribution of moral significance to actions or attitudes. In this thesis we build on recent work investigating the mechanisms of subjective moralization by proposing the action-based moralization account – a framework that conceptualises moralization as functional response to action-based uncertainty in the context of threat-appraisal. To evaluate the utility of this account as a functional theory of moralization, we apply a multi-method approach to investigate the relationship between threat-appraisal and moralization. Specifically, we find evidence of a relationship between individual differences in threat-sensitivity and tendency for moralization. Through an ecological momentary assessment study, we also find that within-person variation in the experience threat-appraisal related affect predicts moralization. Finally, in two representative sample studies in the U.S. and U.K we find that individual differences in subjective threat-appraisal of COVID-19 is positively associated with moralization of COVID-19 preventative behaviours. Finally, we investigate the longitudinal relationship between moralization and uncertainty reduction in the context of a real-world political event. We find that moralization is associated with prediction confidence at time 1, and predicts subjective belief confirmation at time 2. Collectively, these findings provide initial support for the action-based moralization account, and highlight the value of functional theories as a framework for understanding the precursors and outcomes of moralization.
-
ItemAn investigation of the holistic processing of faces( 2023-11)Whether it is due to the specific configuration of faces or our particular expertise with them, faces are seen to be a special class of object and, hence, processed differently compared to most other stimuli in our environment. One influential concept - holistic processing - has been used to describe how we process faces. In general, the concept of holistic processing is based on the idea that the entire face object is perceived and processed as a single unit instead of as individual parts or an aggregate of those parts. However, there is no single clear operationalisation of holistic processing in the literature, and the various experimental paradigms used seem to assess different aspects of processing. In this thesis, I explore the different ways holistic processing has been investigated and provide an in-depth examination of the underlying processing of composite faces. According to theories of information processing, holistic processing can be operationalised as a coactive architecture where all face information is combined into a single channel, which then drives decision-making in specific tasks. Coactive processing can be distinguished from other processing architectures such as serial and parallel processing using systems factorial technology and model-fitting. Overall, our composite faces were best fit by a mixture of serial and parallel processing, indicating little support for the argument that faces are processed holistically. We further investigate this mixture model and discuss how these results can be situated on a continuum which ranges from analytic, independent processing to complete, holistic processing.
-
ItemModelling the impact and organisational factors on work(University of Melbourne, 2009)
-
ItemThe psychosocial effects of a newly-diagnosed seizure in adulthood(University of Melbourne, 2009)
-
ItemThe neurological correlates of the k-complex(University of Melbourne, 2009)
-
Item
-
ItemSpatial learning and memory in a virtual environment : temporal lobe damage and neurotransmitter correlates(University of Melbourne, 2008)
-
Item
-
ItemYoung people dance : a case study of an effective contemporary dance education program and its participating youth(University of Melbourne, 2008)
-
ItemPreschool children's informal understanding of discrete and continuous quantity concepts(University of Melbourne, 2008)