1.
Sjölander-Lindqvist, Annelie
(author)
Local Environment at Stake : The Hallandsås Railway Tunnel in a Social and Cultural Context
2004
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
A major trend in facility siting research focuses on economic and psychological aspects of land-use regarding the location of potentially hazardous technological facilities including storage for high-level radioactive waste, landfills, chemical plants, large-scale dams, or waste incinerators. Such facilities frequently have profound environmental impact and are often understood by local citizens as intrusions on their environment that threaten landscape, place, and community. This investigation of local responses to facility siting is grounded in social anthropological theories of landscape and place. The study addresses the social and cultural impacts of the building of a railway tunnel through the Hallandsås ridge in an agricultural area in the southwest of Sweden. This tunnel project has met with technological difficulties and environmental problems such as a lowered groundwater table and toxic contamination of groundwater, soil, and surface water. A principal concern in this dissertation is how homeowners’ perceptions and views of the landscape, place, and locality—that is, their local environment—has been affected by the building of a tunnel beneath their farms and homesteads. The four articles on which the thesis build are derived from anthropological fieldwork carried out among local residents affected by the Hallandsås tunnel project. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, collaborative photography, nature walks, and participant observation at public meetings, between the years 1999 and 2003. The main findings of the study suggest that the construction of the tunnel and the subsequent environmental consequences have given rise to an increased sense among affected residents of the fragility and uncertainty of life systems and people’s livelihoods. Feelings of uncertainty regarding the future of the community and the landscape have stimulated a discourse about local history and collective memories bearing on the local environment. Shared responsibility for nature and the local environment is another theme. The building of the Hallandsås railway tunnel has both reinforced local identity within the rural community of affected residents and incited conflict as to how the natural resources of the area should be understood and interpreted. Groundwater issues play a central role in land-use disputes generated by the tunnel project. Groundwater serves as a ‘boundary object’ bordering the domains of the concerned parties: the local community and the Swedish National Rail Administration.
2.
Oliva, Manuel
(author)
Attention and Learning through the Eyes of the Emotional Brain
2018
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic) abstract
The present thesis consists of four articles that address cognitive-emotional interactions as measured through eye movements and pupil dilation.Social facilitation-inhibition is an effect that describes changes in performance (enhancement or impairment) when individuals complete tasks in social presence compared to when they perform the same tasks in solitary conditions. Along this line, Paper I and II focus on the effect of social presence in low and high level tasks, such as eye movements and learning, respectively. These are the first evidence showing that social presence influences the attentional control of eye movements.The locus coeruleus is a brain structure that is active during arousal and stress, as well as during cognitive and attentional processes. In addition, this structure is almost the sole network mediating pupil dilation in conditions of constant luminance. Therefore, the activity of the locus coeruleus can be indirectly traced through changes in pupil size. In Paper III we investigated the role of the locus coeruleus, as measured through fluctuations in pupil size, during the process of emotion recognition. The results of this paper indicated that pupil dilation reveals the time course of decision making on emotional tasks. In Paper IV, the role of the locus coeruleus was investigated in the context of selective attention. The results revealed that pupil size predicts the efficiency of selective attentionin conditions of low perceptual load (i.e., tasks few stimuli and/or simple stimuli) but not in conditions of high perceptual load (i.e., higher number of stimuli and/or more complex stimuli).Finally, since no single theory has emerged that can account for social facilitation-inhibition, I argue in the introduction of the thesis that the locus coeruleus may be involved in mediating cognitive-emotional functions, including social facilitation-inhibition.
