It is suggested that people’s perceptions that they are inevitably tied to the social systems within which they operate motivate them to justify these systems. Evidence is obtained across four experimental studies using a ...

Unilateral neglect is a disorder in which patients behave as if the left half of space has ceased to exist. The disorder typically arises from right hemisphere brain damage involving the inferior parietal and superior ...

The thesis introduces a novel search paradigm, and explores a previously unreported behavioural error detectable in this paradigm. In particular, the ‘Unpacking Task’ is introduced – a search task in which participants use ...

In daily life, memories of one’s personal past are often retrieved involuntarily (i.e., unintentionally and effortlessly). Termed involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs), recent evidence suggests that these are often ...

With the rapid advancements in technology, researchers are seeking new ways to incorporate modern high-tech solutions such as virtual reality into treatment paradigms for stress. The current experiment explores the beneficial ...

The goal of this dissertation is to examine circumstances that encourage optimal encoding in memory. To accomplish this, several encoding manipulations were examined in the context of intentional forgetting. The typically ...

Disclosure of personal distress is linked to important inter- and intrapersonal benefits. However, people who tend to view self-disclosure as being risky are likely to conceal their feelings and forgo opportunities to ...

The dangerous health effects of smoking during pregnancy and during the postpartum period are well-established, yet a significant proportion of pregnant women continue to smoke despite being aware of the health risks and ...

My dissertation includes three papers. Paper one investigates preschoolers’ appreciation of how people become owners. In two experiments, 70 3-to-5-year-olds were asked to explain why a character owns, likes, or uses certain ...

The following experiments considered the general phenomenon of behavioural adaptation in response to statistical regularities—which we refer to as probability learning (PL). In particular, these experiments focused on ...