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This thesis investigates attitudes expressed by UK primary school educators towards children institutionally classified as English as an Additional Language (‘EAL’) in mainstream schools, an underexplored area. A Critical Discourse Analytical approach is adopted and Martin and White's (2005) APPRAISAL framework utilised for investigating discourses of attitudes is adopted to analyse the research interviews of fifteen participants drawn from six suburban schools in northern England. These participants include head teachers and deputies, EAL co-ordinators, an SEN co-ordinator, a Family Liaison Manager, class teachers, Bilingual Learning Assistants, and Higher Level Teaching Assistants. Their discourses of judgement are analysed in conjunction with Bourdieu’s theory of practice constructs (1977) in order to explore the entrenched linguistic and societal ideologies within them. Findings suggest that judgements of linguistic and social capital made by participants reveal aspects of their habitus, the series of dispositions guiding their behaviours and attitudes, while also showing that attitudes to language are often conflated with attitudes to other social identities. A monolingual ideology is engrained amongst educators, with (Standard) English uncontested in its dominance in education; discourses that expose the power of teachers in controlling what is seen as the legitimate language of the school. There are many contradictions present in participants’ discourses around the value of bi/ multi-lingualism and home language maintenance. Analysis of attitudinal discourse highlights the importance of school leadership for the creation of a positive school climate in working with children who speak languages beyond English. The significance of this work includes filling a research gap regarding studies on teachers’ attitudes and the contribution of a more positive designation for the children at the heart of this study. Recommendations for consciousness- and awareness-raising professional development are made. Observations are made regarding APPRAISAL for analysis for researchers using the framework, only recently applied to research interview data.

Clinicians constantly weigh the relative importance of multiple attributes when they make decisions about how to treat patients. The literature shows that this is generally done in a relatively informal manner using intuition rather than evidence-based medicine. Decision analysis methods and computer decision support systems (CDSS) have been developed to help implement evidence-based medicine and to aid clinicians in their decision making. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a methodology used to break complex problems into manageable pieces, allow data and judgement to bear on them and then reassemble them to present an overall picture of the problem. The aim of the study was to use MCDA to develop a model to aid practitioners to choose the most effective drug treatments for Parkinson's disease (PD). A CDSS was developed from this model. Two surveys were sent to 304 neurologists, 88 geriatricians as well as Parkinson's disease nurse specialists across the UK to determine the criteria for the model. The seven steps of developing a MCDA model were carried out. A value tree was created from the criteria established from the surveys. The drugs were scored for their performance against the criteria using data from clinical trials and the weights were determined by the clinician for each individual patient. Software was developed using Excel and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to implement the functions of the model. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to determine whether the model was suitable for use with individual PD patients and whether the software was quick and easy to use. A total of 68 criteria were generated from the surveys, which was reduced to 11 This showed that clinicians were perhaps using personal experience more than evidence-based medicine. Scoring the data on the drugs showed that some drugs performed either better or worse than expected. The weights were phrased so that users could use swing-weighting to weight the criteria for their importance to each patient. The combined scores and weights were calculated by Excel and the result returned on the screen to the user by VBA. An expert panel carried out the sensitivity analysis and showed that there were some issues with the scores developed, such as potential bias from the trials data and that not all the expected criteria were included in the model, for example bradykinesia and tremor were not included. However, the expert panel felt that the software was quick and easy to use and overall the principle of the model was approved, subject to some modifications. Therefore, a model was successfully developed for Parkinson's disease using MCDA and a CDSS developed to implement the model's functions. The model needs further refinement but has the potential to be successfully used in a clinical setting. MCDA could additionally be used to develop models for other diseases.

Gibbons (Hylobatidae), taxonomically apes, have been largely ignored in cognitive research. This is surprising given their unique phylogenetic position, being intermediate between the monkeys and great apes, and the available diversity of extant species. They are therefore, ideally placed to study the evolution of cognitive abilities in the hominoid line; they offer the opportunity to determine how the mental capacities of primates have changed through the transition from monkey to ape. This research aimed to begin to fill the void in our knowledge regarding the cognitive abilities of this family through investigations of their object manipulation and tool-use skills, relating the findings to the evolution of the hominoid brain. In a raking-in task, where the gibbons were presented with a tool that could be used to draw in an out-of-reach food item, these apes evidenced potentially insightful comprehension of object relationships when the tool and goal object were presented in direct alignment. They also proficiently used a rake to retrieve a reward while avoiding a trap that presented an impediment to goal attainment; however, in general, they required a period of learning to perform consistently. Once the necessary relationships between the tool and goal object were not physically situated in the task layout, as in true tool-use manipulation, the gibbons performed poorly. In a raking-in task where the necessary orientation for success had to be produced by the subject, no individual evidenced foresightful comprehension of the required action. There was some suggestion of learning the correct behaviour through associative processes. This finding was also supported by evidence from dipping experiments where the gibbons were provided with a transparent box containing a liquid reward and sticks that could be used as tools to access it. No individual developed dipping behaviour. The gibbons therefore, performed well on tasks when the salient relationships between tool and goal were directly perceivable. Once they became responsible for producing that relationship, performance was poor. When the necessary orientation between the tool and goal was not provided by the experimenter, the gibbons evidenced low motivation to manipulate the objects. Given the gibbons’ requirement for direct visual feedback to comprehend the causal interactions between objects, this likely hindered their learning process. Failure therefore on the true tool-use tasks may not represent a particular cognitive limitation in these apes. A consistent finding was that the hoolock gibbons (Bunopithecus) were the most attentive and effective of the four gibbon genera. This is potentially due to the more variable natural environment experienced by these apes, driving selection for greater exploratory tendencies and flexibility of behaviour. The findings from this, and other work on primate cognition, suggest that contrary to propositions put forward by proponents of modular accounts of hominid brain evolution, the cognitive architecture of non-human primates contains neural mechanisms capable of processing technical information that may not be completely encapsulated. Suggestions that no non-human possesses specialised cognitive machinery for understanding objects as tools are also challenged.

The Coolidge effect is a phenomenon in biology where exposure to novel mates increases mating motivations, usually among nonhuman males, and with some corresponding 'Coolidge-like' effects observed in human men. Online environments facilitate access to many novel social, romantic, and sexual partners, potentially generating what social psychologists refer to as an 'assessment mindset', where a large pool of online dating options orient daters towards novel mates in the hopes of finding an optimal partner, rather than committing to a current partner or romantic prospect. Chapter 2 in this thesis directly tests Finkel and colleagues' theory of an 'assessment mindset' by adapting an experimental design examining 'Coolidge-like' effects in human mate preference, which measures the attractiveness of familiar faces on second viewing and the attractiveness of these faces relative to novel faces, all after activating an experimental context related to the ability to choose between items (romantic dates or deserts). Findings in Chapter 2 suggest that this choice context alters social and romantic attraction to others, which may be relevant in the design of and experience with online dating sites. Further theories presented in a 2012 popular TEDx talk have hypothesised that the Coolidge effect explains men's responses to pornography, where a plethora of novel erotic stimuli influence men to prefer novel mates, which like the 'assessment mindset' in dating apps may affect the quality of their sexual and romantic relationships offline. Using the same experimental design with a different manipulation (pornographic images), we were able to directly test the claims in Wilson's TEDx talk in Chapter 3. In sum, our findings in Chapter 3 demonstrate that visual exposure/sexual arousal moderates attractiveness perceptions, however, greater nuance is required considering earlier claims. Testing these claims is important as choice and socializing are vital to a person's well-being, physical and psychological health, adjustment, and happiness (Chapter 1). Discussion and directions for further research, such as diversifying stimuli and participant samples, are then discussed (Chapter 4). Parts of this thesis are adapted from the following publications: Sculley, J.R., Ritchie, K.L., & Watkins, C.D. (2021). Having options alters the attractiveness of familiar versus novel faces: Sex differences and similarities. Computers in Human Behavior, 124, 106937. Sculley, J.R. & Watkins, C.D. (in press). The Great Porn Experiment V2.0: Sexual arousal reduces the salience of familiar women when heterosexual men judge their attractiveness. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Complex prospection, requiring projection of one’s mental self into a subjective future time, has been proposed to be uniquely human, with ongoing debate as to the criteria necessary for assessment of this ability. Focus on this dichotomous framework of future directed thinking, assessing whether non-human primates possess levels of prospection comparable to that displayed by humans, has detracted from assessment of the range of abilities and species specific adaptations found across primates. Current evidence for advanced prospection within non-human primates remains contested; however, the large apes have displayed greater proficiency at tasks requiring prospective cognition than monkeys. This thesis investigates components of prospective cognition within the small apes (Hylobatidae). Gibbons represent the only surviving divergence between large apes and monkeys. As such, assessment of basic prospection and component processes within gibbons allows for a clearer overview of the emergence of prospective abilities across the primate order. Here, 31 gibbons (Hoolock leuconedys, n = 9, Hylobates moloch, n = 9, Hylobates pileatus, n = 5, Nomascus leucogenys, n = 6, Symphalangus syndactylus, n = 2) were first assessed on their ability to attend to the functionally relevant features of two rakes. One functional and one non-functional rake were presented during a raking in task, requiring selection of a functional rake in order to draw in an out of reach food reward. Pilot testing provided little support for this ability; however, given further testing with rake sets presenting more distinctive perceptual differences, gibbons were found to reliably distinguish between functional and non-functional rakes. Some evidence was found for subjects transferring knowledge across different rake sets, with subjects reaching criterion level performance faster during later experiments. Once gibbons had learned the necessary skills to select a functional rake for reward retrieval, a series of experiments assessed their capacity for basic prospection. Subjects (H. leuconedys, n = 5, N. leucogenys, n = 3, H. pileatus, n = 3, S. syndactylus, n = 1) were again required to select between one functional and one non-functional rake; however, these rakes were now un-baited. This allowed for assessment of whether gibbons would select functional rakes for future use, with the selected rake being baited at a separate location following a time delay. Subjects reliably selected the functional rake when delays of up to five minutes were imposed between rake selection and reward retrieval. The increasing time delay did not greatly affect subjects’ performance, suggesting gibbons can relate temporally and spatially distinct events, displaying basic prospection. Finally, a preliminary investigation of self-control capacities within gibbons (H. leuconedys, n = 3, H. pileatus, n = 3, N. leucogenys, n = 2) was conducted. Self-control is an integral feature of much prospective behaviour without which an individual cannot inhibit current desires in favour of future ones. Individual differences were found; however, three gibbons refrained from selecting an immediately attainable small reward, instead selecting a rake functional for retrieval of a larger reward at a second location. Taken together, the current findings provide initial evidence of both basic prospection and self-control within the small apes.