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The terminology around personal data is used inconsistently, the concepts are unclear, and there is a poor understanding of their relationships. As a result, debate is hindered and individuals are increasingly concerned about the wider and more pervasive set of digital services that create inconceivable amounts of data which are collected, curated, matched, and compared by corporate and governmental actors. This research focuses on all data descriptive of an individual, named the digitally extended self, how it may be categorised, modelled, and accessed, then the issues associated with that access. A lexicological analysis of the terms used to describe personal data is conducted, and used to identify common concepts, proposing a model of the digitally extended self, showing how these concepts of personal data fit together. The model is then validated against key publications. The author's personal data was collected, using an auto digital ethnographic method, from a purposive sample of organisations representing a range of sectors in the UK then snowballing to the rest of the EU and beyond. An analysis of this data, and the process used to collect it, is conducted, demonstrating that individuals cannot discover their full digitally extended self. Variations between categories of data, organisational sectors and location of the organization are examined. Reasons for these variations are explored through nine semi-structured interviews with experts including legislators, IT management, Data Protection Officers, and a think tank director. Content analysis of the interview transcription points to a lack of willingness and capability as the reasons for the poor performance and lack of transparency, evident in government bodies. There are four claims to original knowledge; first the categorisation and model of personal data; second, the analysis showing variations in organisational performance; third, the analysis illustrating the impossibility of knowing one's own digitally extended self, and fourth, an assessment of, and reasons for, the poor performance of government organisations in responding to subject access requests.

Judgments of others' emotions and empathy in response to these emotions are shaped by the characteristics of the expresser, including which groups they belong to. To date, most research has taken one of the two approaches to examine the influence of group membership on emotion judgments and empathy. First, a lot of past research has exposed participants to members of real-world group categories (e.g., racial, gender, or political groups) and tracked whether these categories influence how participants judge and respond to emotions. This approach has mostly refrained from generalising findings to unexamined intergroup contexts and from providing insights into group processes more broadly. Second, an equal amount of research effort has gone into exposing participants to members of novel group categories associated with arbitrary labels and tracking whether these categories influence how participants judge and respond to emotions. This approach has mostly interpreted findings in terms of "ingroups" and "outgroups", thus implying that all ingroups and outgroups should be expected to exert similar influence. Both of these approaches make it difficult to identify meaningful contextual variability across intergroup contexts and to systematise how 'abstract features' of particular ingroups and outgroups, their relations, and the environments in which they operate might affect emotion judgments and empathy. For instance, should groups be expected to influence emotion judgments and empathy regardless of the specific relations between them (e.g., whether the relations are cooperative or competitive), or do intra- and intergroup relations meaningfully shape these psychological processes? To offer a more precise answer to the question of when (i.e., 'in which intergroup contexts') intergroup biases in emotion judgments and empathy are likely to occur, the present thesis examines the influence of 'group relations' alongside 'group category membership' on empathy and judgments of facial expressions. Chapter 1 reviews relevant literature, introduces the analytic lens ('feature-oriented thinking about groups'), and outlines the seven experiments comprising this thesis. Chapter 2 investigates how group category membership and coalitional relations (i.e., competition, cooperation) influence judgments of facial expressions of emotion and whether there are any attentional and physiological markers associated with the processing of social information in intergroup contexts. Whereas Chapter 2 focuses on judgments of facial expressions, Chapter 3 investigates people's subjective perceptions of social norms surrounding intergroup empathy (i.e., 'intergroup empathic norms') and how these perceptions vary as a function of how relevant group relations are perceived. Chapter 4 expands on Chapter 3 to examine the causal influence of intergroup empathic norms on one's own intergroup empathy. Specifically, Chapter 4 explores the mechanisms through which intergroup empathic norms achieve their influence, the preferences people display when faced with ingroup and outgroup norms that demand misaligned emotional reactions (intergroup apathy versus intergroup empathy), and the ways in which observable emotions can serve as cues of the underlying relations between groups. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the theoretical and practical implications of this body of work and outlines novel directions for research looking at the interplay between socio-affective and group processes. Overall, this thesis shows that intergroup biases in emotion judgments and empathy depend not only on the general distinction between ingroups and outgroups but also on the specific relations between the ingroups and outgroups under consideration. This thesis also highlights the need for features of groups, group relations, and group environments to be more meaningfully incorporated into social psychological research and theorising.

This thesis has two objectives: Investigating effects of sharing one's own emotions with other people across different stressors and exploring bivalent emotions in interpersonal and intergroup contexts. Chapter One presents a general introduction to the theoretical foundation which my pursuit of the two lines of research stems from. Chapter Two presents Project 1, an online study (Study 1) that captured social sharing behaviour during a relatively early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic using prospective questionnaires. Results suggested that social sharing was associated with emotion-improving effects. Chapter Three presents Project 2, which involved two online experimental studies confirming that interpersonal encouragement of reconstrual, rather than of recounting, generally yielded more positive effects across stressors varying in time span (interpersonal conflicts vs. COVID-19 news; Study 2A) or induced specific emotion (angry vs. regretful conflicts; Study 2B). Chapter Four, switching the thesis's focus to questions relevant to bivalent emotions, presents Project 3, an online study (Study 3) which explored motives for and affective outcomes of sharing this kind of emotional experience using prospective questionnaires. Results showed that motives and outcomes associated with sharing bivalent emotions were similar to those associated with sharing negative emotions. Chapter Five presents Project 4, an online experimental investigation of bivalent emotions (Study 4) that moved beyond into the framework of social cognition. Despite the new insights into the dehumanisation literature, this study failed to provide evidence that presenting outgroups' bivalent, rather than univalent, emotions helped improve intergroup relations. Finally, Chapter Six presents a general discussion about the main findings from the above four projects, the limitations observed throughout my DPhil research, and the implications and future research directions indicated by the research reported in this thesis.

Impairments in emotion processing are one of the key diagnostic social symptoms of autism. Proposed explanatory mechanisms include atypical visual perceptual processes (e.g., social attention) and physiological responses to socioemotional stimuli (e.g., other people's faces). However, experimental evidence for these processes has been highly equivocal, and prevailing models have been unable to account for the documented individual differences observed in these processes. Chapter 1 reviews the current conceptualisation of autism and outlines the theoretical context of my research, highlighting key hypotheses and mechanisms underlying emotion processing in autism which will be explored throughout the thesis. In particular, the potential explanatory role of the "alexithymia hypothesis" is discussed. Alexithymia is a condition frequently co-occurring with (but not unique to) autism and is linked to individual differences in socioemotional processes that have been implicated in autism (e.g., social attention, emotion processing, physiological responses). This thesis will therefore investigate the contribution of alexithymia to several aspects of socioemotional functioning thought to be linked to autism. Chapter 2 investigated the spatiotemporal dynamics of gaze allocation to faces during emotion processing tasks in autism and alexithymia, and contrasted traditional social attention hypotheses to recent applications of Bayesian accounts of autism to social attention processes. Evidence from traditional and novel methods revealed that atypical eye gaze during emotion processing is best predicted by alexithymia in both autistic and non-autistic individuals. Specifically, alexithymia affected the non-linear temporal patterns of gaze allocation to faces and predicted reduced modulation of eye gaze to cued visual exploration of emotions. The alexithymia effect is argued to reflect imprecise emotion concepts and priors for spatiotemporal dynamics of facial expressions. This proposal was supported by three additional experiments in Chapter 3 linking alexithymia to atypical modulation of social attention and emotion processing by stimulus dynamics, and by task- and emotion- relevant priors. Chapter 4 focused on exploring the potential role of alexithymia in disrupting links between physiological responding and emotion processing proposed by arousal-based models of autism and alexithymia. A novel approach capitalising on multimodal recording of physiological responses, was used to characterise multivariate profiles of physiological mobilisation to emotions. This approach provided evidence for alexithymia, not autism, driven effects on atypical physiological mobilisation to emotions, and puts forth a novel hypothesis with implications for autonomic and interoceptive accounts of alexithymia, autism and emotion. One remaining challenge to the alexithymia hypothesis has been the possibility that alexithymia may simply reflect expected variation within the already multifaceted autism phenotype. In Chapter 5, two large-scale studies of clinical and non-clinical samples used confirmatory factor analysis and network psychometric modelling to address this remaining question. Results suggested separate underlying latent factors for alexithymia and autism, as well as separate clusters of symptoms which highlighted structural and dimensional distinctions of the two conditions. In Chapter 6, I discuss the implications of this body of work for theory and practice and outline novel directions for research on autism, alexithymia and socioemotional processes. Combined, this body of work provides the most extensive test of the alexithymia hypothesis and highlights the specific mechanisms through which alexithymia affects socio-emotional processes in autism. This work also offers a model for studying typical and atypical socioemotional processes and several methodological and conceptual advances with implications for basic and applied research on socioemotional processes.

Multiethnic people constitute an increasingly prominent share of the population in the UK and beyond. Nevertheless, most research on intergroup relations continues to focus on people on either side of a clearly defined group divide. The aim of this thesis is to integrate multiethnic populations into research on intergroup relations and to investigate a question that is often raised about multiethnic individuals: whether they build bridges between members of different monoethnic groups. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical and empirical context of my research, as well as the multi-method approach adopted throughout this thesis. Across three empirical chapters, I then present research on monoethnic individuals’ context-level exposure to multiethnic people, and on their individual-level contact experiences with multiethnic friends. This thesis includes research conducted in England, South Africa, and the US, and combines experimental, social network, and multi-level survey data. Chapter 2 investigates whether the presence alone of multiethnic individuals in a social environment can improve relations between members of different monoethnic groups. I report that context-level exposure to multiethnic people is unlikely to affect monoethnic individuals’ intergroup relations. Chapter 3 addresses further the bridge- building potential of multiethnics by studying their location within friendship networks and how they are evaluated by monoethnics. I find that multiethnics tend to be evaluated with intermediate levels of favourability, that they often occupy broker positions within their friendship networks, but that this may have both positive and negative implications for intergroup relations. Chapter 4 focusses on monoethnic individuals’ contact experiences with multiethnic friends and suggests that the bridge-building potential of multiethnic individuals may be realised most effectively through direct and indirect intergroup contact. I discuss these findings further in Chapter 5, which also addresses the implications of my research for our understanding of intergroup relations in the increasingly heterogeneous societies of the 21st century.

Research reported in this thesis investigates the relationship repair function of the emotion of guilt. Chapter 2 presents Studies 1 - 3 which assessed the effects of delivering an apology on experienced guilt. Study 1 aimed to extend previous findings that practical repair of material damage reduced guilt independently of whether it is carried out by the transgressor or someone else by introducing an additional manipulation of apology (relationship repair). However, participants reported having delivered an apology even when the instructions did not mention apologising. Study 2 improved the apology manipulation and showed that it reduced guilt as predicted. Study 3 used a directly involving laboratory task to induce guilt and confirmed that apology had an independent effect on guilt. The separate effect of practical repair on guilt shown in previous research was replicated across all 3 of these studies. Chapter 3 focused on investigating the effect of self-punishment on guilt reduction in a laboratory experiment (Study 4). Findings indicated that guilt was alleviated more when the victim was present when shock levels were set than when they were absent. Further, guilt was alleviated more when the transgressor, rather than the experimenter, set the intensity of the shocks. Chapter 4 reports on Studies 5 and 6 which examined the interaction between different means of guilt communication. These studies assessed both the extent to which guilt elicited the means of guilt communication, and in turn, the extent to which these means of guilt communication affected guilt. Study 5 was a laboratory experiment and it included an apology manipulation similar to that used in Study 3, in addition to the self-punishment manipulation used in Study 4. One of the aims of this study was to see whether the modified self-punishment measurement would give clearer results on the effect of victim's presence on intensity of electric shocks. The other aim was to examine if the effects of apology and communicated self-punishment on guilt would interact. Findings reported no effects of the manipulated factors on guilt. However, apology reduced the intensity of intended self-punishment as expected. In Study 6, participants had to imagine that they were participating in an adapted version of study 5. In addition to manipulations of apology and intended self-punishment, a manipulation of practical repair similar to the one used in Study 3 was added. This study investigated if the expected guilt-alleviating effects of apology and self-punishment were independent of practical repair. Findings indicated that participants increased the intensity of shocks when they knew that the shock level would be communicated to the victim. Moreover, results showed that when participants communicated their intention to punish themselves, guilt reduced if they apologised or if the victim's material damage got repaired. Overall, this thesis took steps towards extending the body of knowledge on interaction of inter- and intra-personal effects on guilt by testing new hypotheses and building on previous research.

Schadenfreude is a German word, which describes the pleasure that people take in someone else's misfortune. The aim of the present research was to investigate the social functions of intergroup schadenfreude. Chapter 2 presents Studies 1-3, focusing on the social functions of experiencing intergroup schadenfreude in the context of football tournaments, using both concurrent and retrospective methods. Study 1 did not find any relation between change in perceived relative status and intergroup schadenfreude, possibly because of the sample's low domain interest and identification. However, schadenfreude was positively associated with change in status in Study 2 and with change in performance evaluation in Study 3 as expected. Also, across all three studies, intergroup schadenfreude was associated with consequences corresponding to its social distancing (e.g., distance from or dislike of the outgroup and intention to humiliate its members) and social affiliation functions (e.g., intention to celebrate with ingroup members). Importantly, schadenfreude mediated the effects of change in status (Study 2) and performance evaluation (Study 3) on these consequences. Chapter 3 presents Studies 4 and 5, which investigated whether social status is specifically associated with intergroup schadenfreude, and examined whether this social concern helps to differentiate intergroup schadenfreude from victorious joy (i.e., happiness about a third-party's victory). I developed a new experimental paradigm to manipulate participants' concern for status to elicit feelings of intergroup schadenfreude. I also manipulated participants' concern for external rewards associated with the third-party's victory to prompt victorious joy. However, in both studies, the concern for external rewards was the main influence on both intergroup schadenfreude and victorious joy, although a multivariate interaction between the two motives affected these emotions in Study 4. Hence, these studies suggest that status may be only one of the many motives underlying intergroup schadenfreude. Chapter 4 presents Study 6, which was a vignette-based study investigating the social affiliation functions of sharing intergroup schadenfreude as a function of ingroup identification. Participants read tweets from an ingroup member expressing either intergroup schadenfreude or victorious joy. Identification was also manipulated. However, results showed that recipients of intergroup schadenfreude messages formed more negative impressions of the tweeter and intended to distance themselves from him/her more than recipients of victorious joy messages. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the findings, contributions, and limitations of these six studies and discusses directions for future research. Overall, this thesis went beyond the current focus on the antecedents of schadenfreude and took steps towards the development of a social-functional account of intergroup schadenfreude.

Background: Adolescence is a period during which humans undergo significant changes in the social cognitive domain - changes that are likely to be adaptive, by allowing adolescents to respond adequately to new challenges as they gain independence from the family, and establish themselves in society. Recent neuroscience data suggest protracted maturation of key brain circuits during adolescence, which are involved in the underlying cognitive processes of social understanding. While these age-associated changes are commonly recognised to arise from a biological program unravelling across time, it is also possible that development is driven by experience. To date, few studies have empirically studied the development of social cognition in adolescence, especially as compared to infancy and childhood. Outstanding questions also remain on whether variability in the experience of adolescence, such as is present across different cultures, can modulate the expression of adolescent-associated maturational changes in social cognition. Aims: The purpose of this thesis was i) to investigate developmental changes in social cognition during adolescence, and ii) to examine sociocultural factors that may influence this ability and its developmental trajectory. Methods: In total, 668 young people (aged 9 to 21 years) from the United Kingdom, China, and Malaysia took part in the studies outlined in this thesis. In Chapter 2 (UK: N = 226; China: N = 175; Malaysia: N = 225), the self-construal scale (Singelis, 1994) was administered to explore the adolescent 'self' as an independent entity as well as an interdependent social agent across all cultures. Chapters 3 and 4 consisted of a battery of cognitive and affective theory of mind as well as domain general cognitive tasks, which were completed by adolescents from the UK (N = 188) and China (N = 116). In Chapter 5, a novel social networks paradigm was used with a Game Theory task to investigate the impact of social reciprocity on cooperative investment in authentic adolescent school-based networks from the UK (5 classes; N = 70) and Malaysia (7 classes; N = 147). Results: First, young people from different cultures were characterised by culture-dependent construals of the self. In particular, youths from China defined themselves as more interdependent, i.e. in relation to others and in terms of social roles, than those from the UK and Malaysia. Second, although Chinese adolescents reported overall lower performance, they showed similar age associated changes in cognitive and affective theory of mind as UK adolescents. Finally, social reciprocity predicted cooperative investment behaviour within authentic adolescent networks in both the UK and Malaysia. Interestingly, there were no age effects or differences between cultures in the impact of social reciprocity on cooperative behaviour. Conclusions: Results from this combination of studies paint a multifaceted picture of adolescent social cognition across cultures. They suggest a complex interplay of factors both at the individual and sociocultural level that give rise to the sophisticated ability of social cognition as it matures across adolescence. They also highlight methodological issues in multicultural research.

Most affect research has focused on "actual affect", with relatively limited consideration given to "ideal affect", that is the states that people value and would ideally like to feel (Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006). The present research investigated sources of variation in ideal affect, particularly focusing on cultural and context-dependent factors that shape affective preferences. Studies 1 and 2 focused on cultural variations in ideal affect, whereas Studies 3, 4 and 5 focused on sources of variation in context-dependent ideal affect. In Studies 1 and 2, I investigated affective preferences in Brazil, Greece Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Zambia. Results demonstrated an effect of cultural variables on ideal affect. Specifically, ideal high arousal positive (HAP) states were predicted by independent self-construal and influence goals, consistent with previous research. Extending previous work, results also found that power distance and beliefs about emotional expression independently predicted ideal HAP. Ideal low arousal positive affect (LAP) was predicted by interdependent self-construal in line with prior findings. Uncertainty avoidance was also an independent predictor of ideal LAP. In investigating context-dependent ideal affect, I focused on assessing whether an influence target's characteristics in an interpersonal persuasion context would affect ideal affect. In Study 3, results demonstrated that knowledge of an influence target's motivational orientation had an effect on preferences for LAP. However, this effect was not replicated in Studies 4 or 5. Overall, these 5 studies found some support for previous factors that have been identified in shaping ideal affect, while identifying additional sources of cultural variation and pointing to the possibility that another person may influence affective preferences in an interpersonal situation.

The chief aim of this thesis was to investigate the effect of emotions on negotiation outcomes. Using the social functional account as a framework (Keltner & Haidt, 1999), I investigated the effect of anger, contempt, sadness, embarrassment, and shame on bargaining outcomes. In addition, this thesis has also investigated the effect of status and relevance of emotions. Chapter 2 presents Studies 1 and 2. Study 1 was a lab study investigating the effect of the other person's status (high vs. low) and emotion (contempt, anger or neutral) on negotiation concessions. As expected, participants gave more concessions to angry partners than to contemptuous partners. Unexpectedly, participants also gave more concessions to low status partners than to high status partners. Study 2 extended study 1 with the inclusion of sadness. The results showed no significant effect of emotion or status on concessions. Chapter 3 presents Studies 3 and 4, which used vignettes and were designed to extend and replicate the findings of Studies 1 and 2. Study 3 investigated the effect of emotion (anger, contempt, sadness, and neutral emotion) and partner status (high vs. low) on concessions. Participants gave more concessions to angry partners (as in study 1) but status had no effect on concessions. Study 4 used a different status manipulation (own status vs. other status). The results showed a similar pattern to Studies 1 and 3, in terms of concessions to angry partners. Like Study 3, Study 4 also showed that perceptions of partner's emotion stability mediated the effect of emotion on concessions. Moreover, more concessions were given to high status partners than low status partners, and perceptions of partners' agreeableness mediated this relationship. Chapter 4 presents two Studies 5 and 6, which were online experiments investigating the effects of emotion (embarrassment and shame) and their relevance to the task (task relevant and irrelevant emotion) on behaviour in an ultimatum game. The results showed that emotion and relevance had a significant interactive effect on participants' satisfaction and fairness ratings. Participants accepted more offers in the task irrelevant condition and made larger offers to proposers in the shame condition. Study 6 included a control condition, and changed the emotion manipulation slightly. The results of this study failed to replicate those obtained in Study 5. To summarise the findings of this thesis, Chapter 5 presents the general discussion, implications, contributions, limitations, and future directions for research. Overall, the results found that partner's emotions affect the perceptions of partner's personality and concessions in negotiations.

This thesis investigates individual and interpersonal predictions of future affect and explores their relation to implicit theories of emotion, prediction recall, debiasing, and focalism. Studies 1, 2, and 3 assessed affect predictions to upcoming reasoning tests and academic results, and Studies 4, 5, and 6 concerned predictions for self-identified events. The first study investigated the influence of implicit theories of emotion (ITE; Tamir, John, Srivastava, & Gross, 2007) on impact bias and prediction recall manipulating ITE between participant pairs who predicted and reported their affective reactions to feedback on a test of reasoning skills. Neither impact bias nor recalled predictions were affected by the manipulation. Recalled affect predictions differed from original affect predictions, but were not influenced by experienced affect. Study 2 further investigated the effects of target event timing on impact bias and affect prediction recall. The results showed no differences between individual and interpersonal impact biases across conditions. Again, recalled predictions differed from original predictions, and were not influenced by experienced affect. Study 3 investigated the influence of prior information about impact bias on interpersonal affective forecasting involving real-world exam results. The results demonstrated no differences in predictions due to information, however, significantly less unhappiness was predicted for participants’ friends compared to self-predictions. Study 4 examined the effect of different de-biasing information on affective predictions. The results demonstrated no differences in affective predictions by condition and found that participants’ ITE were not associated to affect predictions. Study 5 examined individual and interpersonal affect predictions using a between-subjects design in place of the within-subjects design. The results demonstrated no differences between the affect predictions made for self and for friends, and ITE were not associated with predictions. Study 6 examined the impact bias in interpersonal affective forecasting and the role of focalism. The results demonstrated distinctions between individual and interpersonal affecting forecasting with individual impact bias for positive reactions for negative events and individual and interpersonal reverse impact bias for calm emotional reactions to positive events. Immune neglect was found not to be associated with predictions. Overall, the studies found evidence for similar individual and interpersonal predictions which are resistant to influence.

The main objective of this thesis was to examine gender differences in co-rumination using observational, experimental, and diary methods. At the start of this project there were no existing studies which had assessed co-rumination in this way and this thesis intended to be an exploratory investigation of co-rumination using these methods. Rose (2002) defined co-rumination as ‘excessively discussing problems within a dyadic relationship’ (p. 1830) and used it to explain why females have closer, more supportive, friendships (Rose & Rudolph, 2006) but are also more susceptible to depression (Weissman & Klerman, 1977). Her findings suggest that co-rumination has maladaptive outcomes for females (increased depression and anxiety) but not for males. The six studies within this thesis aimed to investigate the outcomes of co-rumination using adult (Studies 1- 4), adolescent (Studies 5 and 6) and child samples (Study 6). The first three studies within this thesis assessed co-rumination using dyadic analyses of observational and experimental data. The results of these studies indicated that scores from the co-rumination questionnaire (CRQ) and the co-rumination coding scheme (CRCS) were associated with affect, but that the co-rumination manipulation used in Study 3 had no effect on levels of affect. CRCS was mainly predictive of depressive outcomes whereas CRQ was predictive of both depressive and anxious outcomes. The research indicated that CRQ scores positively correlated across the two dyad members. However, each dyad member’s score showed different associations with affect, depending on whether the dyad member was presenting his or her own problem for discussion. The diary studies indicated that co-rumination was best assessed using daily items which were more predictive of changes in positive and negative affect than the CRQ. It was clear from the studies within this thesis that co-rumination did not only have negative outcomes for females, and that future research should examine the outcomes of co-ruminative discussions for males and females. It was suggested that future researchers should conduct similar experimental research to Study 3 but that they should include multiple co-ruminative interactions and more immediate assessments of co-rumination in the days following a co-ruminative interaction.

This thesis investigates the effectiveness of English language assessment in the Foundation Programme (FP) and its predictive validity for academic achievement in the First Year (FY) at two Colleges of Applied Sciences (CAS) in Oman. The objectives of this study are threefold: (1) Identify how well the FP assessment has met its stated and unstated objectives and evaluate its intended and unintended outcomes using impact evaluation approaches. (2) Study the predictive validity of FP assessment and analyse the linguistic needs of FY academic courses and assessment. (3) Investigate how FP assessment and its impact are perceived by students and teachers. The research design was influenced by Messick‟s (1989; 1994; 1996) unitary concept of validity, by Norris (2006; 2008; 2009) views on validity evaluation and by Owen‟s (2007) ideas on impact evaluation. The study was conducted in two phases using five different methods: questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, document analysis and a correlational study. In the first phase, 184 students completed a questionnaire and 106 of these participated in 12 focus groups, whilst 27 teachers completed a different questionnaire and 19 of these were interviewed. The aim of this phase was to explore the perceptions of the students and teachers on the FP assessment instruments in terms of their validity and reliability, structure, and political and social impact. The findings indicated a general positive perception of the instruments, though more so for the Academic English Skills course (AES) than the General English Skills course (GES). There were also calls for increasing the quantity and quality of the assessment instruments. The political impact of the English language FP assessment was strongly felt by the participants. In the second phase, 176 students completed a questionnaire and 83 of them participated in 15 focus groups; 29 teachers completed a different questionnaire and of these 23 teachers were interviewed. The main focus was on students and teachers‟ perceptions of FP assessment, and how language accuracy should be considered in marking academic written courses. One finding was that most students in FY tended to face difficulties not only in English but also in what could be called „study skills‟; some of these were attributed to the leniency of FP assessment exit criteria. Throughout the two phases, 118 documents on FP assessment at CAS were thematically analysed. The objective was to understand the official procedures prescribed for writing and using assessment instruments in FP and compare them against actual test papers and classroom practices. The findings revealed the use of norm-referenced assessment instead of criterion referenced, incompatibility between what was assessed and what was taught, inconsistency in using assessment criteria and in the unhelpful verbatim replication of national assessment standards. The predictive validity studies generally found a low overall correlation between students‟ scores in English language assessment instruments and their scores in academic courses. The findings of this study are in line with most but not all previous studies. The strength of predictive validity was dependent on a number of variables especially the students‟ specializations, and their self-evaluations of their own English language levels. Some recommendations are offered for the reform of entry requirements of the Omani higher education.

Across international boundaries, linguistic and cultural diversity among pupils present teachers with pedagogic challenges. Research on teachers’ perceptions (e.g. Pajares, 1992; Woods, 1996; Farrell, 2005) suggests that the beliefs that teachers hold impact significantly on their classroom practices. This study adds to the existing body of international literature on teacher beliefs and literacy practices by exploring teachers’ perceptions about the reading literacy needs of EAL pupils and how these were met in Scottish secondary mainstream classroom contexts. In Scotland, policy specifies a Framework for Inclusion where pupils learning English as an additional language (hereafter EAL) are placed in mainstream classrooms. Schools are encouraged to play a key role in making sure that the needs of such pupils are addressed in an effort to raise achievement. A sociocultural theoretical lens was used to examine the shared and divergent beliefs and reading literacy practices of sixteen mainstream English teachers; five EAL teachers; and five head/depute head teachers across three local authorities. Participants’ responses communicated an undifferentiated understanding of the distinctive reading literacy needs of EAL pupils. The majority of teachers foregrounded reading as a set of universal skills that emphasised a knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Ill-fitting policies and teachers’ experiences within the varying school contexts appeared to mediate how EAL pupils’ needs were constructed. Findings concerning the beliefs and practices of these teachers revealed that there was a lack of available ways of thinking about how to meet the reading literacy needs of EAL pupils effectively; such a lack impacted on the quality and number of learning opportunities EAL pupils had as they faced the reading literacy demands of mainstream classrooms. Teachers also highlighted their uncertainty about how to meet the reading literacy needs of such pupils effectively and this seemed to impact on how they constructed their identities as teachers within linguistically and culturally diverse classroom settings. In contrast, an overview of classroom literacy practices revealed that teachers enacted confident identities as they operated out of a secure knowledge base for developing reading literacy in monolingual English speaking classrooms. The study concludes with a discussion of the limitations related to the research design, and outlines the implications of the findings for policy, classroom literacy practices, and teachers’ professional development opportunities. It is argued that Scottish schools are no longer monolingual, monocultural environments, but rather cross-cultural sites. It is recommended that policy needs to reconceptualise and broaden how second language development is framed within its documents. It is also suggested that secondary classroom contexts address the importance of multidimensional critical literacy practices as a way to challenge the dominant undifferentiated constructions that permeate teachers’ beliefs about the development of reading literacy for pupils learning EAL. Such changes would position EAL pupils as legitimate participants in classroom literacy practices. The thesis concludes with a consideration of teacher identity and emphasises the need of ITE providers to provide a continuum of provision for pre-service and in-service teachers to enable them to develop the necessary knowledge and practices that would support the growing numbers of pupils learning EAL.

People turn to others for help and advice during hard times. Early psychologists suggested a ‘talking cure’ as a remedy for emotional turmoil (e.g., Freud, 1916–7/1963; Rogers, 1942). Likewise, folk psychology often sees heart-to-heart conversations as a win-win proposition that brings relief to the afflicted person and reinforces social bonds at the time of need. However, talking about problems does not always help (e.g., Rimé, 2009; Rimé, Mesquita, Boca, & Philppot, 1991; Rimé, Philippot, Boca, & Mesquita, 1992; Rose, 2002). In some cases, problem-talk can be a lose-lose proposition that drags both discussants into depression (Rose, 2002; Rose, Carlson, & Waller, 2007). This thesis examines co-rumination (Rose, 2002), a case of emotional sharing that hurts people instead of helping them, on three levels of analysis (individuals, dyads, and groups). At the individual level, I sketch the life course of co-rumination and replicate earlier findings of gender differences. Furthermore, online survey data (N = 464) links co-rumination with agreeableness and neuroticism. I also demonstrate that co-rumination can be assessed with a brief measure that is 66% shorter than the original. At the dyadic level, data from recorded conversations between romantic couples show that face-to-face co-rumination influences people’s real-time emotional trajectories in complex ways. Furthermore, observer-ratings of the conversations suggest that third-parties can detect co-rumination, even from silent videos. Finally, I study how people react to others’ negative mood and co-rumination in a real social context by longitudinally following two cohorts of students and modelling their interactions with social network analysis tools. These models show that co-rumination appears to elicit social rejection from others, implying a possible pathway to depression via loneliness imposed on the co-ruminators.

The main objective of this thesis was to investigate the proposition that moral emotions act as antecedents of political attitudes. My approach (Chapter 1) stems from moral foundations theory, which proposes that liberals and conservatives have different moral values (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). Chapter 2 presents Study 1, an experimental test of the hypothesis that induced disgust leads participants to adopt more left-wing economic attitudes in comparison to a control condition (sadness). Results supported this hypothesis. Chapter 3 reviews emotion-regulation theories, and presents Study 2, which investigated whether emotion-regulation strategies, disgust sensitivity (DS-R), and private body consciousness (PBC) moderate the effects found in Study 1. As predicted, disgust led to more left-wing economic attitudes, but this was only the case for high-PBC and high-DS-R participants. Chapter 4 presents Study 3, which replicated Study 2, and showed dissociations between the effects of disgust on economic and social attitudes. Chapter 5 presents a cross-sectional investigation (Study 4) that tested for associations between the predisposition to experience disgust and both social and economic attitudes. As predicted, core disgust and pathogen disgust were associated with left-wing economic attitudes and these effects applied only to British participants, and not non-British participants. Chapter 6 presents Study 5 – an experiment investigating the relationship between disgust and prejudiced attitudes towards outgroups. Induced disgust led to more prejudiced attitudes towards a novel group than both sadness and neutral emotion. Chapter 7 is focused on two self-conscious moral emotions: guilt and shame. Study 6, presented in this chapter, found a positive association between guilt proneness and left-wing economic attitudes, and a relationship between shame proneness and social-conservative attitudes. Study 7 failed to reveal causal relationships between incidental guilt and shame and political attitudes. Chapter 8 presents the general discussion addressing limitations, implications, and future research directions.

Although there have been a large number of studies on the use of L1 and L2, there seem to be few on L1 use in Chinese university EFL classrooms, especially investigating the language use of those who teach English to students at different proficiency levels or teach different types of English courses. This thesis aims to analyze four Chinese EFL teachers’ actual use of L1 and L2, to understand their attitudes and beliefs regarding this issue, and their own perceptions of and reasons for their language use, and to explore possible influencing factors. The reading-and-writing lessons and the listening-and-speaking lessons of these four teachers, who were teaching non-English major students at four different levels, were observed and recorded. All the observed lessons were subjected to quantitative analysis with the aim of providing a clear picture of the distribution of their L1 and L2 use. Some episodes selected from these lessons were subjected to further detailed analysis, in order to provide an account of the circumstances, functions, and grammatical patterns of their language use, as well as their language use across different frames of classroom discourse. The teachers were interviewed subsequently about their general beliefs on the use of L1 in L2 teaching and learning. Separately, in a stimulated recall interview, they were invited to provide comments specifically on their language use in the selected episodes that were replayed to them. The quantitative findings show that the amount of the teachers’ L1 use was not necessarily closely related to their students’ English proficiency levels, although the teacher of the students at the lowest level used the highest amount of Chinese in her lessons. However, a noteworthy finding was that all four teachers used more Chinese in the reading-and-writing lessons than in the listening-and-speaking lessons, although with substantial individual variation. The qualitative analysis of classroom data indicates that these teachers switched often at unit boundaries, but rarely at clause boundaries. They also switched frequently within units, especially within noun phrases, and the ‘Chinese determiner + English noun’ pattern is the main one they had in common. Furthermore, the teachers used Chinese as the matrix language in their mixed utterances in most cases, and these mixed utterances nearly always fitted Myers-Scotton’s Morpheme Order principle and System Morpheme principle. The teachers were also found to use Chinese in a variety of circumstances, such as talking about lesson plans or examinations, dealing with exercises, analyzing text, teaching vocabulary, checking the students’ comprehension or retention, giving the students advice on learning, telling anecdotes and assigning homework. The functions for which they used Chinese could be divided into four main categories: facilitating developing lesson content; supporting students and carrying out classroom management; delivering information related to teaching agenda or examinations; and facilitating communication beyond language learning and teaching. The most frequent function common to all four teachers was translation. Furthermore, the study used four different ‘frames’ to analyze classroom discourse, and found that the teachers used the L1 with varying frequency across these frames. Moreover, although all four teachers believed that using the L1 was beneficial to L2 learning, their attitudes towards the medium of instruction were different. While two advocated using the L1, the other two expressed a preference for speaking English-only and perceived their L1 use as a compromise or an expedient. The teachers reported many reasons for their L1 use. The factors that affected their language use consisted of both immediate classroom factors, such as functions of utterances, students’ language use, students’ perceived mood, students’ background knowledge, the difficulty of lesson content, time limitations, teachers’ awareness of their own L1 use, and teachers’ state of mind at a particular moment in a lesson, and relatively static factors, such as the university policy, students’ L2 abilities, teaching objectives, teachers’ beliefs regarding L1 use, and teachers’ L2 abilities. Through its detailed analysis of the teachers’ language use, as well as their relevant beliefs and decision-making, this thesis hopes to make a contribution to L2 teachers’ professional development and L2 teaching, especially in helping to establish a pedagogically principled approach to L1 and L2 use.

Traditionally, language policy (LP) has been conceptualised as a notion separate from that of practice. That is, language practices have usually been studied with a view to evaluate the extent to which a LP is (or is not) implemented (e.g. Martin, 2005; Johnson, 2009). Recently, however, Spolsky (2004, 2007, 2008a) has argued that policy and practice need not be seen as distinct and that, in fact, there is policy in language practices themselves (I use the term ‘practiced language policy’). Therefore, Spolsky’s claim represents a decisive development in the field of LP research. However, this proposal remains essentially programmatic since Spolsky does not indicate how practiced language policies can be investigated. The aim of this thesis is to address this methodological gap. The main claim of the thesis is that Conversation Analysis (CA) – a method specifically developed to describe conversational practices – can be used to investigate practiced language policies. In order to support this claim, a case study has been conducted on the language practices of an induction classroom for newly-arrived immigrant children in France. In the thesis, a broad view of CA is adopted, incorporating both sequential and categorisation analysis (Membership Categorisation Analysis). More specifically, I have used the conversation analytic approach to code-switching (as developed over the last few years by researchers such as Auer, 1984; Li Wei, 2002; Gafaranga, 2009; Bonacina and Gafaranga, 2010) and investigated a corpus of audio-recorded classroom interactions I collected in the above mentioned setting. Observation of these interactions revealed a number of “norms of interaction” (Hymes, 1972) the classroom participants orient to in order to go about the routine business of talking in an orderly fashion. For example, it was observed that each of the languages available can potentially be adopted as the “medium of classroom interaction” (Bonacina and Gafaranga, 2010) depending on who is doing being the language teacher. When no one is doing being the language teacher, it was observed, a key determinant of language choice is participants’ language preference. Finally, in the absence of any shared preferred language, French was adopted. The practiced language policy of this induction classroom consists of the set of such interactional norms. It is because CA can be used to discover and describe such interactional norms that this thesis claims it can be used to investigate practiced language policies in this induction classroom and in other settings as well. In summary, this thesis is primarily a contribution to the field of LP research. It starts from recent proposals in the field, especially by Spolsky (2004, 2007, 2008a), that there is policy in practices and shows how this programmatically formulated proposal can be implemented. More specifically the thesis shows that and how CA can be used to discover a practiced language policy. The research reported here has adopted a case study methodology, investigating language choice practices in a multilingual educational setting. It therefore contributes to the study of bilingual classroom talk, albeit indirectly. This is particularly the case as there has been very few, if any, studies of bilingual classroom talk which combine both sequential and categorisation analysis.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of using Arabic (L1) as a language of questions and answers in testing reading comprehension in English (L2), and to explore student and teacher opinions about this. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed. To collect the quantitative data, one hundred and forty-four students were given a reading comprehension test. Both multiple-choice and short-answer questions were used. The subjects were second-year English department undergraduate Saudi students and final-year secondary school Saudi students. Other factors including gender and five reading sub-skills were considered. Twelve students and four English-language teachers participated in semi-structured interviews, the source of the qualitative data. The findings of this study indicate that, for the population, test types and test levels investigated, there is no clear case for having reading comprehension questions and answers in L1. The use of Arabic in the English reading comprehension tests did not improve the performance of students. Interview responses were mixed, but with no consensus in favour of Arabic. Limitations of this study are discussed, and recommendations for further research in testing reading comprehension in English as a foreign language are presented.

The research was multi-method as it combined qualitative semi-structured interviews with quantitative surveys. The thesis concludes by discussing cultural implications for the formation of trust among business people in the UK and China, and future research directions.