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The thesis is an attempt to relate aspects of Rozanov's writing to the Russian tradition of the word, as exemplified in the work of writers and thinkers, contemporary and near-contemporary to Rozanov. The first part establishes key features of this tradition through the work of writers such as Ern, Losev, Mandel'shtam and Averintsev. The relevance of Bakhtin for a reading of Rozanov, and of Rozanov for reading Bakhtin, is argued through an extended comparison of the two writers in the context of the Russian tradition of the word. Aspects of Rozanov's thought and formal expression, such as silence, intonation and the resisting of definition are discussed in relation to this tradition. The role of intimate genres and the reader is discussed with reference to Dostoevskii, Rozanov and Bakhtin. Rozanov's use of letters, footnotes and the idea of manuscripts is examined as a part of his battle with received literary forms. The second part looks at these various aspects of Rozanov's work in relation to his contemporary context; to the writing of the obscure 'literary exiles' and that of Solov'ev and Merezhkovskii. Rozanov's particular sense of the word is argued to be crucial in his attitude towards these writers. Rozanov's involvement with the decadents is discussed, and his exemplification of themes of sectarianism and apocalypse in his writing. The thesis ends with a look at the paradoxes of Rozanov's own role as a writer supposedly in battle with literature, and the relation between his need for words and his need for belief.

This study investigated the effect of 30 minutes of stationary biking on ADHD performance on a combined flanker/go/no-go task. We had 22 people with ADHD participate and 27 controls. We did not find any effect of exercise on correct response time, error rates, or error-related positivity (Pe) amplitude. We also did not find a decrease amplitude in baseline error-related negativity (ERN) or Pe of the ADHD group. We did find an a marginal increase in the amplitude of ERN in both groups after exercise (t(19) = 1.72, p = 0.10, Cohen’s d = 0.37). We also found an increase in ADHD group’s positive mood only after exercise (t(20) = 4.15, p < 0.05, Cohen’s d = 0.98). Our study was limited by a participant attrition issue which caused as to change the analysis to only using the event related potential data from each participant’s first treatment. Despite these limitations, this study supports the need for further research investigating the potential of exercise as a supplement treatment for adult ADHD.

A negative voltage deflection in the brain waves is enhanced following error- and loss-related feedback in simple gambling and decision-making tasks. Investigators have assumed that the perceptual properties of the feedback stimuli are unimportant in explaining these effects of feedback. This assumption has been tested in the present study through a series of seven ERP experiments using gambling tasks. In the experiments, participants were asked to make a choice between several gambles and then received feedback indicating whether they won or lost during the trial. The perceptual properties of the feedback were manipulated. Consistent with previous research, neutral and loss feedback elicited a larger FRN than gain feedback, and there was no FRN difference between neutral and loss feedback. However, this FRN reward effect was modulated by the perceptual similarity among the feedback stimuli. When gain and neutral/loss feedback were similar to each other, the enhancement of the FRN following the neutral/loss-related feedback was smaller compared to when the gain and neutral/loss feedback were different from each other. In addition, perceptually salient feedback tended to produce a larger FRN effect than less perceptually salient feedback, and when the reward information was indicated by conjoined features, the FRN reward effect was diminished. Furthermore, the presence of perceptual interference in the feedback stimuli enhanced the FRN-like negativity. Letter strings comprised different letters elicited a larger FRN than those comprised identical letters, even when different letters were mapped to the same reward. This FRN congruency effect could not simply explained by the semantic interference. No FRN congruency effect was found when the reward information was unknown to the participants, suggesting that the perceptual mismatch that induced the FRN congruency effect has to be task-relevant. A perceptual mismatch model is proposed to explain all the experimental results.