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The Role Of Resilience In Individual Innovation, Muhammad T. Amir

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Organisations in today‘s changing environment face significant challenges, requiring continual innovation. A critical factor in their response may be employees‘ resilience, the ability to apply high levels of effort and persistence while initiating, promoting and applying new ideas. However, despite growing evidence of the value of many positive psychological characteristics in organisational behaviour, the role of resilience in individual innovation has received little attention in the literature.

This thesis describes two studies of this issue. First, current perspectives and definitions of resilience were reviewed, revealing a need for an improved definition, a re-examination of its dimensions and a new measure. …

Cultural Responses To Pain In Uk Children Of Primary School Age: A Mixed-Methods Study., Pary M. Azize, Ruth Endacott, Allegra Cattani, Ann Humphreys

School of Nursing and Midwifery

Pain-measurement tools are often criticized for not addressing the influence of culture and ethnicity on pain. This study examined how children who speak English as a primary or additional language discuss pain. Two methods were used in six focus group interviews with 34 children aged 4-7 years: (i) use of drawings from the Pediatric Pain Inventory to capture the language used by children to describe pain; and (ii) observation of the children's placing of pain drawings on red/amber/green paper to denote perceived severity of pain. The findings demonstrated that children with English as an additional language used less elaborate language …

Development Of A Management Algorithm For Post-Operative Pain (Mapp) After Total Knee And Total Hip Replacement: Study Rationale And Design, Mari Botti, Bridie Kent, Tracey Bucknall, Maxine Duke, Megan Jane Johnstone, Julie Considine, Bernice Redley, Susan Hunter, Steiger R De, Marlene Holcombe, Emma Cohen

School of Nursing and Midwifery

No abstract provided.

Introduction: The No-Man’S-Land Of Displacement, Ak Smith, S Barkhof

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Carbon Monoxide Screening In Pregnancy: An Evaluation Study Of A Plymouth Pilot Intervention, Ea Stenhouse, G Letherby, O Corrigan, L Adams, A Bendall

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

What’S New In Icu Visiting Policies: Can We Continue To Keep The Doors Closed?, Alberto Giannini, Maité Garrouste-Orgeas, Jos M. Latour

School of Nursing and Midwifery

No abstract provided.

Implementing The Family-Centered Care Model, Parents’ Satisfaction And Experiences In Neonatology, I Dall’Oglio, A Portanova, M Fiori, O Gawronski, R Fida, A Cocchieri, G Rocco, E Tiozzo, Jm Latour

School of Nursing and Midwifery

No abstract provided.

The Multidimensional Depth Of The Image: Body-Environment-Artefact (A Philosophical Reflection For Graphic Design), Martyn Stuart Woodward

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

The Multidimensional Depth of the Image: Body-Environment-Artefact Current discourses within cultural studies are re-iterating the limitations of language to adequately describe the affective domains of corporeality and materiality in the study of cultural artefacts. Within the discourse of graphic design, however, there remains an enduring focus placed upon models of language and communication to understand the meaning of designed materials. Rather than upholding a focus upon language, this thesis undertakes a theoretical investigation to extend the literature available to the discourse of graphic design to better understand how visual materials ‘come to mean’ within the experience of an embodied subject …

Creative Music Neurotechnology With Symphony Of Minds Listening, E Miranda, D Lloyd, Z Josipovic, D Williams

School of Art, Design and Architecture

No abstract provided.

The Green Economy: Functional Domains And Theoretical Directions Of Enquiry, Ian Bailey, Federico Caprotti

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

No abstract provided.

Factors External To The Individual Encouraging Idea Generation In Sme Contexts, Graham Michael Perkins

Plymouth Business School Theses

This thesis sets out to explore factors external to the individual that encourage creative idea generation in SME environments, understanding their importance in a variety of organisational contexts. The original contribution to knowledge made by this thesis is the creation of a framework which aids understanding by splitting the various factors into those responsible for initiating and sustaining idea generation. Literature concerning creative idea generation is continuously developing and contains a broad spectrum of topics and understandings. Key amongst these are leadership, the nature of creative idea generation, theories such as the ‘strength of weak ties’, collective creativity and the …

The Role Of Underlying Mechanisms In Achieving Consistent Hybrid Combinations Of Competitive Advantages, Michael Zellner

Plymouth Business School Theses

This thesis takes a step beyond the current discussion on hybrid competitive strategies (HS) by identifying the underlying mechanisms and common elements of successful hybrid strategies. Reviewing empirical and theoretical literature revealed a significant gap in this respect. Therefore, the activity-based view of strategy is introduced to the discussion on HS. In a first step, four consistent and sustainable HS concepts are developed providing the basis for deriving specific HS models. A second step identifies commonalities among these HS types and theoretically derives a synthesized, common HS model. Thirdly, the critical realist stance was selected for answering this thesis’ research …

دور الإجماع الاستراتيجي لأعضاء مجالس ادارات الشركات العامة في تعزيز فاعلية القرارات الاستراتيجية, صالح عبد الرضا رشد, حيدر محمد قاسم العبادي

Muthanna Journal of Administrative and Economics Sciences

تتناول هذه الدراسة الدور الذي لعبه الإجماع الاستراتيجي لفريق الإدارة العليا ببعديه: الإجماع حول الأهداف الاستراتيجية، والإجماع حول الأسبقيات التنافسية في تعزيز فاعلية القرارات الاستراتيجية سواء ما يتصل بجودة تلك القرارات أو سرعتها. وقد اعتمدت الدراسة المنهج الوصفي التحليلي لاراء (146) من الرؤساء وأعضاء مجالس الإدارة لعدد من شركات القطاع العام في وزارة الصناعة والمعادن العراقية بلغ عددها (21) شركة. وأظهرت نتائج الدراسة وجود علاقة ارتباط وتأثير ذات دلالة معنوية بين الإجماع الاستراتيجي ببعديه وفاعلية القرارات الاستراتيجية للشركات المبحوثة. وخرجت الدراسة بمجموعة من التوصيات والمقترحات ذات الصلة بموضوعها، ومنها حاجة الشركات الصناعية لتطوير فلسفتها الخاصة وتوسيع اهتماماتها بالإجماع الاستراتيجي لمجالس …

Longitudinal Evaluation Of Quality Of Life In 288 Patients With Neurofibromatosis 2, Rosalie E. Ferner, Adam Shaw, D. Gareth Evans, Dympna Mcaleer, Dorothy Halliday, Allyson Parry, F. Lucy Raymond, Juliette Durie-Gair, C. Oliver Hanemann, Rachel Hornigold, Patrick Axon, John F. Golding

Peninsula Medical School

No abstract provided.

Differential Processing Of Consonants And Vowels In The Auditory Modality: A Cross-Linguistic Study, Luche C Delle, Silvana Poltrock, Jeremy Goslin, Boris New, Caroline Floccia, Thierry Nazzi

School of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Do Muscle Synergies Reduce The Dimensionality Of Behavior?, N Kuppuswamy, Cm Harris

School of Psychology

The muscle synergy hypothesis is an archetype of the notion of Dimensionality Reduction (DR) occurring in the central nervous system due to modular organization. Toward validating this hypothesis, it is important to understand if muscle synergies can reduce the state-space dimensionality while maintaining task control. In this paper we present a scheme for investigating this reduction utilizing the temporal muscle synergy formulation. Our approach is based on the observation that constraining the control input to a weighted combination of temporal muscle synergies also constrains the dynamic behavior of a system in a trajectory-specific manner. We compute this constrained reformulation of …

Self-Regulating Smoking And Snacking Through Physical Activity., Hwajung Oh, Adrian H. Taylor

Peninsula Medical School

OBJECTIVE: Emotional snacking contributes to weight gain after smoking cessation. Exercise acutely reduces cravings for cigarettes and snack food. This study examined if different exercise intensities acutely reduces snack and cigarette cravings and attentional bias (AB) to video clips of snacks and cigarettes among abstinent smokers. METHODS: Abstinent smokers (and snackers; N = 23) randomly did 15 mins of moderate and vigorous cycling and a passive control in a cross-over design. Visual initial AB (IAB) and maintained AB (MAB) were assessed pre- and after treatment while watching paired snacking/neutral or smoking/neutral video clips. Desire to snack and smoke were assessed …

Assessing The Relationship Between Eating Disorder Psychopathology And Autistic Traits In A Non-Clinical Adult Population, Amelia Myri Carton, Alastair D. Smith

School of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Thinking In Circuits: Toward Neurobiological Explanation In Cognitive Neuroscience., Friedemann Pulvermüller, Max Garagnani, Thomas Wennekers

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Cognitive theory has decomposed human mental abilities into cognitive (sub) systems, and cognitive neuroscience succeeded in disclosing a host of relationships between cognitive systems and specific structures of the human brain. However, an explanation of why specific functions are located in specific brain loci had still been missing, along with a neurobiological model that makes concrete the neuronal circuits that carry thoughts and meaning. Brain theory, in particular the Hebb-inspired neurocybernetic proposals by Braitenberg, now offers an avenue toward explaining brain-mind relationships and to spell out cognition in terms of neuron circuits in a neuromechanistic sense. Central to this endeavor …

Looking Forward Through The Past. Identification Of Fifty Priority Research Questions In Palaeoecology., A Seddon, A Mackay, A Baker, Et Al

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Priority question exercises are becoming an increasingly common tool to frame future agendas in conservation and ecological science. They are an effective way to identify research foci that advance the field and that also have high policy and conservation relevance. To date, there has been no coherent synthesis of key questions and priority research areas for palaeoecology, which combines biological, geochemical and molecular techniques in order to reconstruct past ecological and environmental systems on time-scales from decades to millions of years. We adapted a well-established methodology to identify 50 priority research questions in palaeoecology. Using a set of criteria designed …

A Biological, Latent Variable Model Of Health (Earlybird 68)., Michael E. Hyland, Alison N. Jeffery, Terence J. Wilkin

School of Psychology

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether factor analysis of a set of health-related biomarkers provides evidence of an underlying common dimension of variation, and to explore the relationship between this dimension of variation with positive and negative affect. METHOD: Twelve health-related metabolic, immune and body-composition biomarkers at ages 5, 7, 9, 11, 14 and 16years were obtained from the EarlyBird longitudinal cohort of 347 children and supplemented by positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) measured at age 16years. RESULTS: At each age, principal factor analysis revealed that nine of the 12 biomarkers consistently loaded on the first extracted factor, accounting for …

Fluency And Belief Bias In Deductive Reasoning: New Indices For Old Effects., Ies Trippas, Simon J. Handley, Michael F. Verde

School of Psychology

Models based on signal detection theory (SDT) have occupied a prominent role in domains such as perception, categorization, and memory. Recent work by Dube et al. (2010) suggests that the framework may also offer important insights in the domain of deductive reasoning. Belief bias in reasoning has traditionally been examined using indices based on raw endorsement rates-indices that critics have claimed are highly problematic. We discuss a new set of SDT indices fit for the investigation belief bias and apply them to new data examining the effect of perceptual disfluency on belief bias in syllogisms. In contrast to the traditional …

Using Forced Choice To Test Belief Bias In Syllogistic Reasoning., Dries Trippas, Michael F. Verde, Simon J. Handley

School of Psychology

In deductive reasoning, believable conclusions are more likely to be accepted regardless of their validity. Although many theories argue that this belief bias reflects a change in the quality of reasoning, distinguishing qualitative changes from simple response biases can be difficult (Dube, Rotello, & Heit, 2010). We introduced a novel procedure that controls for response bias. In Experiments 1 and 2, the task required judging which of two simultaneously presented syllogisms was valid. Surprisingly, there was no evidence for belief bias with this forced choice procedure. In Experiment 3, the procedure was modified so that only one set of premises …

Planning-Related Motor Processes Underlie Mental Practice And Imitation Learning., Patric Bach, Bassem Khalaf Allami, Mike Tucker, Rob Ellis

School of Psychology

It is still controversial whether mental practice-the internal rehearsal of movements to improve later performance-relies on processes engaged during physical motor performance and, if so, which processes these are. We report data from 5 experiments, in which participants mentally practiced complex rhythms with either feet or hands while using the same or different body parts to respond to unrelated sounds. We found that responses were impaired for those body parts that were concurrently used in mental practice, suggesting a binding of body-part-specific motor processes to action plans. This result was found when participants mentally trained to memorize the rhythms, to …

Gaba-Mediated Changes In Inter-Hemispheric Beta Frequency Activity In Early-Stage Parkinson's Disease, S. D. Hall, E. J. Prokic, C. J. Mcallister, K. C. Ronnqvist, A. C. Williams, N. Yamawaki, C. Witton, G. L. Woodhall, I. M. Stanford

School of Psychology

No abstract provided.

Development Of Sampling Efficiency And Internal Noise In Motion Detection And Discrimination In School-Aged Children, Hk Falkenberg, Wa Simpson, Gn Dutton

School of Psychology

The aim of this study was to use an equivalent noise (EN) to investigate the development and maturation of motion perception, and how the underlying limitations of sampling efficiency and internal noise effect motion detection and direction discrimination in school-aged children (5-14 years) and adults. Contrast energy thresholds of a 2 c/deg sinusoidal grating drifting at 1.0 or 6.0 Hz were measured as a function of added dynamic noise in three tasks: detection of a drifting grating; detection of the sum of two oppositely drifting gratings and direction discrimination of oppositely drifting gratings. Compared to the ideal observer, in both …

From Services To Civilian: The Geographies Of Veterans' Post-Military Lives, Agatha Herman, Richard Yarwood

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

No abstract provided.

Oculometric Variations During Mind Wandering, R Grandchamp, C Braboszcz, A Delorme

School of Psychology

A significant body of literature supports the contention that pupil size varies depending on cognitive load, affective state, and level of drowsiness. Here we assessed whether oculometric measures such as gaze position, blink frequency and pupil size were correlated with the occurrence and time course of self-reported mind-wandering episodes. We recorded the pupil size of two subjects engaged in a monotonous breath counting task while keeping their eyes on a fixation cross. This task is conducive to producing mind-wandering episodes. Each subject performed ten 20-min sessions, for total duration of about 4 h. Subjects were instructed to report spontaneous mind-wandering …

Learning To Pronounce First Words In Three Languages: An Investigation Of Caregiver And Infant Behavior Using A Computational Model Of An Infant., Ian S. Howard, Piers Messum

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Words are made up of speech sounds. Almost all accounts of child speech development assume that children learn the pronunciation of first language (L1) speech sounds by imitation, most claiming that the child performs some kind of auditory matching to the elements of ambient speech. However, there is evidence to support an alternative account and we investigate the non-imitative child behavior and well-attested caregiver behavior that this account posits using Elija, a computational model of an infant. Through unsupervised active learning, Elija began by discovering motor patterns, which produced sounds. In separate interaction experiments, native speakers of English, French and …

Phonitalia: A Phonological Lexicon For Italian., Jeremy Goslin, Claudia Galluzzi, Cristina Romani

School of Psychology

In this article, we present the first open-access lexical database that provides phonological representations for 120,000 Italian word forms. Each of these also includes syllable boundaries and stress markings and a comprehensive range of lexical statistics. Using data derived from this lexicon, we have also generated a set of derived databases and provided estimates of positional frequency use for Italian phonemes, syllables, syllable onsets and codas, and character and phoneme bigrams. These databases are freely available from phonitalia.org. This article describes the methods, content, and summarizing statistics for these databases. In a first application of this database, we also demonstrate …