Processing of emotional expression in subliminal and low-visibility images

This thesis investigated the processing of emotional stimuli by the visual system, and how the processing of emotions interacts with visual awareness. Emotions have been given ‘special’ status by some previous research, with evidence that the processing of emotions may be relatively independent of striate cortex, and less affected by disruption to awareness than processing of emotionally neutral images. Yet the extent to which emotions are ‘special’ remains questionable. This thesis focused on the processing of emotional stimuli when activity in V1 was disrupted using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and whether emotional properties of stimuli can be reliably discriminated, or affect subsequent responses, when visibility is low. Two of the experiments reported in this thesis disrupted activity in V1 using TMS, Experiment 1 with single pulses in an online design, and Experiment 2 with theta burst stimulation in an offline design. Experiment 1 found that a single pulse of TMS 70-130 ms following a presentation of a body posture image disrupted processing of neutral but not emotional postures in an area of the visual field that corresponded to the disruption. Experiment 2 did not find any convincing evidence of disruption to processing of neutral or emotional faces. From Experiment 1 it would appear that emotional body posture images were relatively unaffected by TMS, and appeared to be robust to disruption to V1. Experiment 2 did not add to this as there was no evidence of disruption in any condition. Experiments 3 and 4 used visual masking to disrupt awareness of emotional and neutral faces. Both experiments used a varying interval between the face and the mask stimuli to systematically vary the visibility of the faces. Overall, the shortest SOA produced the lowest level of visibility, and this level of visibility was arguably outside awareness. In Experiment 3, participants’ ability to discriminate properties of emotional faces under low visibility conditions was greater than their ability to discriminate the orientation of the face. This was despite the orientation discrimination being much easier at higher levels of visibility. Experiment 4 used a gender discrimination task, with emotion providing a redundant cue to the decision (present half of the time). Despite showing a strong linear masking function for the neutral faces, there was no evidence of any emotion advantage. Overall, Experiment 3 gave some evidence of an emotion advantage under low visibility conditions, but this effect was fairly small and not replicated in Experiment 4. Finally, Experiments 5-8 used low visibility emotional faces to prime responses to subsequent emotional faces (Experiments 5 and 6) or words (Experiments 7 and 8). In Experiments 5, 7 and 8 there was some evidence of emotional priming effects, although these effects varied considerably across the different designs used. There was evidence for meaningful processing of the emotional prime faces, but this processing only led to small and variable effects on subsequent responses. In summary, this thesis found some evidence that the processing of emotional stimuli was relatively robust to disruption in V1 with TMS. Attempts to find evidence for robust processing of emotional stimuli when disrupted with backwards masking was less successful, with at best mixed results from discrimination tasks and priming experiments. Whether emotional stimuli are processed by a separate route(s) in the brain is still very much open to debate, but the findings of this thesis offers small and inconsistent evidence for a brain network for processing emotions that is relatively independent of V1 and visual awareness. The network and nature of brain structures involved in the processing of subliminal and low visibility processing of emotions remains somewhat elusive.ESR

Disability, poverty, and schooling in developing countries : results from 11 household surveys

This paper analyzes the relationship between whether a young person has a disability, the poverty status of their household, and their school participation using 11 household surveys from nine developing countries. Between 1 and 2 percent of the population is identified as having a disability. Youth with disabilities sometimes live in poorer households, but the extent of this concentration is typically neither large nor statistically significant. However, youth with disabilities are almost always substantially less likely to start school, and in some countries have lower transition rates resulting in lower schooling attainment. The order of magnitude of the school participation disability deficit is often larger than those associated with other characteristics such as gender, rural residence, or economic status differentials.Social Cohesion,Social Protections&Assistance,Gender and Law,Primary Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

The structure of social disparities in education : gender and wealth

Using internationally comparable household data sets (Demographic and Health Surveys), the author investigates how gender and wealth interact to generate within country inequalities in educational enrollment and attainment. He carries out multivariate analysis to assess the partial relationship between educational outcomes and gender, wealth, household characteristics (including level of education of adults, in the households), and community characteristics (including the presence of schools in the community). He finds that: 1) women are at a great educational disadvantage in countries in South Asia and North, Western, and Central Africa. 2) Gender gaps are large in a subset of countries, but wealth gaps are large in almost all of the countries studied. Moreover, in some countries where there is a heavy female disadvantage in enrollment (Egypt, India, Morocco, Niger, and Pakistan), wealth interacts with gender to exacerbate the gap in the educational outcomes. In India, for example, where there is a 2.5 percentage point difference between male and female enrollment for children from the richest households, the difference is 34 percentage points for children from the poorest households. 3) The education level of adults in the household has a significant impact on the enrollment of children in all the countries studied, even after controlling for wealth. The effect of the educational level of adult female is larger than that of the education level of adult males in some, but not all, of the countries studied. 4) The presence of a primary and a secondary school in the community has a significant relationship with enrollment in some countries only (notably in Western and Central Africa). The relationship appears not to systematically differ by children's gender.Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Early Childhood Development,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Poverty Assessment,Early Childhood Development

If you build it, will they come? School availability and school enrollment in 21 poor countries

Increasing the supply of schools is commonly advocated as a policy intervention to promote schooling. Analysis of the relationship between the school enrollment of 6 to 14 year olds and the distance to primary and secondary schools in 21 rural areas in low-income countries (including some of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa) reveals that the two are often statistically significantly related. However, the magnitudes of the associations are small. Simulating big reductions in distance yields only small increases in average school participation, and only small reductions in within-country inequality. The data are mostly cross-sectional and therefore it is difficult to assess the degree to which results might be driven by endogenous school placement. Data can be geographically matched over time in three of the study countries and under some assumptions the results from these countries are consistent with no substantial bias in the cross-sectional estimates. Although increasing school availability by decreasing the average distance to schools can be a tool for increasing enrollments, it cannot be expected to have a substantial effect. Other interventions, such as those geared toward increasing the demand for schooling or increasing the quality of schooling should be prioritized.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Teaching and Learning,Public Health Promotion,Primary Education,Education Reform and Management,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Education Reform and Management,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Education

University College London: Library DDA works PPG15 justification. Conservation strategy report.

Introduction: This report has been prepared for the Estates and Facilities Division of University College London (UCL). UCL needs to make alterations to the Wilkins building to improve access to the library (on its upper floors) by the end of the year in order to comply with the terms of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). In December 2003 Alan Baxter & Associates produced draft Management Guidelines for UCL which identified what is significant about the UCL buildings and to help streamline the process of gaining future listed building consents. This report is based on these Management Guidelines but includes information from the recent opening-up works. The Wilkins Building is Grade I listed. The new access proposals involve removing a staircase, one of which was inserted by TL Donaldson in 1849-51, and installing a lift (along with a new staircase) to provide access for the mobility impaired to the library. This report has been written to accompany an application for listed building consent, and to demonstrate that the alterations are required by the DDA, and are justifiable in terms of the criteria set out in PPG15. Although the proposed works affect only one part of the building, it is important to see them in the wider context of the building. This document begins by outlining the history of the Wilkins building as a whole, from its construction in 1827-9, through various modifications (notably by Donaldson), its reconstruction and restoration by A E Richardson following war damage, to its present day form (Sections 2 and 3). Section 4 also looks at the building as a whole, defining what elements of it contribute most particularly to the ‘outstanding’ architectural and historic importance given by its Grade I listing. These wider sections allow the current proposals to be assessed both for their impact on and the access benefits that they will bring to the building as a whole. Section 5 therefore focuses on the proposals to provide Disability Access to the library, describing and justifying them according to the criteria of PPG15, showing how they achieve an acceptable balance between the legitimate access requirements of those with disabilities and the special architectural and historic importance of the building

What educational production functions really show : a positive theory of education spending

The accumulated results of empirical studies show that the public sector typically chooses spending on inputs such that the productivity of additional spending on books and instructional materials is 10 to 100 times larger than that of additional spending on teacher inputs (for example, higher wages, small class size). The authors argue that this pervasive and systemic deviation of actual spending from the technical optimum requires a political, not economic or technical, explanation. The evidence is consistent only with a class of positive models in which public spending choices are directly influenced by a desire for higher spending on teacher inputs, over and above their role in producing educational outputs. This desire could be due either to teacher power, or bureaucratic budget-maximizing behavior, or political patronage. The authors conclude by exploring the implications of these positive political models of educational spending behavior for various types of proposed educational reforms (localized control, parental participation, vouchers, and so on) which requires an examination of how the proposed reforms shift the relative powers of the stakeholders in the educational system: students and parents, educators, bureaucrats, and politicians.Economic Theory&Research,Curriculum&Instruction,Teaching and Learning,Environmental Economics&Policies,Fiscal&Monetary Policy,Curriculum&Instruction,Teaching and Learning,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Gender and Education

Estimating wealth effects without expenditure data - or tears : with an application to educational enrollments in states of India

This paper has an empirical and overtly methodological goal. The authors propose and defend a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures. They construct an index based on indicators of household assets, solving the vexing problem of choosing the appropriate weights by allowing them to be determined by the statistical procedure of principal components. While the data for India cannot be used to compare alternative approaches they use data from Indonesia, Nepal, and Pakistan which have both expenditures and asset variables for the same households. With these data the authors show that not only is there a correspondence between a classification of households based on the asset index and consumption expenditures but also that the evidence is consistent with the asset index being a better proxy for predicting enrollments--apparently less subject to measurement error for this purpose--than consumption expenditures. The relationship between household wealth and educational enrollment of children can be estimated without expenditure data. A method for doing so - which uses an index based on household asset ownership indicators- is proposed and defended in this paper. In India, children from the wealthiest households are over 30 percentage points more likely to be in school than those from the poorest households.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Consumption,Health Economics&Finance,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism

The effect of household wealth on educational attainment : demographic and health survey evidence

Primary Education,Earth Sciences&GIS,Economic Theory&Research,Roads&Highways,Teaching and Learning,Roads&Highways,Poverty Assessment,Primary Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Earth Sciences&GIS

Child mortality and public spending on health : how much does money matter?

The authors use cross-national data to examine the impact on child (under 5) and infant mortality of both nonhealth (economic, cultural, and educational) factors and public spending on health. They come up with two striking findings: 1) Roughly 95 percent of cross-national variation in mortality can be explained by a country's per capita income, the distribution of income, the extent of women's education, the level of ethnic fragmentation, and the predominant religion. 2) Public spending on health has relatively little impact, with a coefficient that is numerically small and statistically insignificant at conventional levels. Independent variations in public spending explain less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the observed differences in mortality across countries. The estimates imply that for a developing country at average income levels, actual public spending per child death averted is $50,000 to$100,000. This contrasts markedly with a typical range of estimates for the cost-effectiveness of medical interventions to avert the main causes of child mortality of $10 to$4,000. They outline three possible explanations for this divergence between the actual and apparent potential of public spending: the allocation of public spending, the net impact of additional public supply, and public sector efficacy.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Public Health Promotion,Early Child and Children's Health,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Inequality

Assessing asset indices

This paper compares how results using various methods to construct asset indices match results using per capita expenditures. The analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes are quite robust to the specific economic status measure used. The measures-most significantly per capita expenditures versus the class of asset indices-do not, however, yield identical household rankings. Two factors stand out in predicting the degree of congruence in rankings between per capita expenditures and an asset index. First is the extent to which per capita expenditures can be explained by observed household and community characteristics. In settings with small transitory shocks to expenditure, or with little measurement error in expenditure, the rankings yielded by the alternative approaches are most similar. Second is the extent to which expenditures are dominated by individually consumed goods such as food. Asset indices are typically derived from indicators of goods which are effectively public at the household level, while expenditures are often dominated by food, an almost exclusively private good. In settings where private goods such as food are the main component of expenditures, asset indices and per capita consumption yield the least similar results, although adjusting for economies of scale in household expenditures reconciles the results somewhat.Access to Finance,Investment and Investment Climate,Population Policies,Debt Markets,Health Systems Development&Reform