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    Metabolising bigger-than-self distress through nondual enactive wisdom development : a layered autoethnographical study of embodied embedded psychological responses to biospheric and civilisational crises : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2022) Laurence, Nicholas Clyde
    The current thesis explores the question of how psychologists and other mental health professionals might assist clients experiencing bigger-than-self distress. Bigger-than-self distress is defined as psychological distress that relates to what I describe as the biospheric-civilisational meta-crisis, which comprises a compounding and interlinked set of social and environmental issues, some of which pose time-bound existential threats to the stability of our civilisation and the biosphere’s capacity to sustain it. The thesis begins with looking at the cognitive behavioural tradition and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and explores what further psychological assistance might be given for those whom these interventions are not enough. The thesis takes an autoethnographic approach, drawing on the author’s own experience of responding to bigger-than-self distress, and blends this with an enactivist theoretical account that seeks to link more closely together mindful understandings of experience with cognitive scientific theory and empirical literature. The author’s experience of engaging in mindfulness training broadened and deepened his perspective on bigger-than-self distress and the seeming necessity of an expanded container within which to hold and process it. This expanded container is expounded in the form of the Big History, Systems View of Life, and Theory of Knowledge perspectives, which provide an evolutionary, scientific, and cosmological account of history within which to situate the biosphere, humanity, and the civilisational-biospheric meta-crisis that is related to bigger-than-self distress. An updated view of cognition is also provided, which views cognition as self-organising, based on principles of relevance realisation, free energy minimisation, predictive processing, and which is profoundly embodied and embedded within its environment. From this expanded base, wisdom traditions from Western, Eastern, and Indigenous cultures are discussed with a view to being able to draw from these for novel interventions within the cognitive behavioural tradition that align with this updated version of cognition and context of cosmos, biosphere, humanity, and biospheric-civilisational meta-crisis. From there, interventions within clinical psychology and coaching (IFS and Aletheia Coaching, primarily) are presented as prototypical novel cognitive behavioural interventions that are aligned with this view of cognition. The novel ways of working with psychological content are applied to bigger-than-self distress via a new term that I label metabolisation. This overall way of working can be understood as enactive nondual wisdom development for bigger-than-self distress and helps to provide a cognitive scientific vocabulary for understanding psychological responses to bigger-than-self distress. Importantly, nondual enactive wisdom development is something that can only be enacted in real-world praxis, and so to guide clients through it requires clinicians to go through it experientially ahead of their clients: a philosophy that overall fits well with the reality of bigger-than-self distress and the meta-crisis being something that clinicians and clients alike are subsumed within.
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    Emotional determinants of test anxiety and academic performance : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2014) Chin, Edwin Chun-Hong
    The effect of test anxiety on academic performance has been studied extensively throughout the past few decades. Recent developments in test anxiety research have largely been based within the cognitive psychology framework, where different components of working memory were identified to mediate the relationship between test anxiety and test performance. Similarly, the field of educational psychology has expanded this area of research to identify the different pathways in which emotional states can serve both activating and deactivating roles towards learning and achievement. From the clinical psychology perspective, the connection between emotional experiences and thought processes is an integral part of assessment which then informs ways of intervention. However, there is limited research that explicitly examines the relationship between general emotional distress and more specific forms of test-related distress, such as the cognitive and physiological components of test anxiety. The Tripartite Model of Emotions (TME) is used to explore the connection between general emotional distress and test anxiety. The model proposed that the experiences of depression and anxiety are predisposed by a combination of three high-order dimensions of emotional distress: positive affect (or lack thereof), negative affect, and physiological hyperarousal. While researchers have identified these tripartite factors to be significant predictors of various health and performance outcomes, the degree to which the tripartite model may account for the experience of test anxiety, as well as the level of academic performance, remains unclear. In the present study, 642 secondary school students (aged 16-19) completed a questionnaire comprised of measures of test anxiety, depression, anxiety, and the tripartite dimensions. This enabled a cross-sectional investigation into the validity of the tripartite model of emotions, as well as how test anxiety may be predicted by the higher-order factors of emotional distress. The grade point averages of a sub-sample of 188 students were gathered, which enabled a prospective investigation into how these emotional variables influenced academic performance. Structural equation modeling was employed to simultaneously test the relationships among the aforementioned variables, and to identify an explanatory model for academic performance. There was support for the tripartite factors’ hypothesized influence on depression and test anxiety. Specifically, low levels of positive affect (PA) and high levels of negative affect (NA) influenced the experience of depressive symptoms, while high levels of negative affect and physiological hyperarousal (PH) influenced test anxiety symptoms. Negative affect was not revealed to have a direct influence on test performance. Rather, its influence may be mediated by more specific factors, including the cognitive and affective features of test anxiety. In the presence of test-related worries, negative affect may indirectly impair test performance. However, in the absence of such worries, there is potential for negative affect or the sense of emotional apprehension to facilitate better performance.