King's College, Aberdeen

About: King's College, Aberdeen is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Poison control & Sedimentary depositional environment. The organization has 712 authors who have published 918 publications receiving 25421 citations. The organization is also known as: King's College, Aberdeen & The University and King's College of Aberdeen.

UK Local Action Zones and Changing Urban Governance

Abstract: This article deals with UK Education and Health Action Zones, area-based partnership programmes, taking account of New Labour's 'modernising government' agenda and the academic partnership literature. Formative zone experiences again highlight major obstacles to effective local partnership working, exacerbated by the essentially top-down nature of the initiatives, albeit accommodating realities on the ground. Despite at one level prioritising changes in process, political pressures for rapid results were not easily compatible with policy innovation and longer-term collaborative infrastructure. Whether relating to the broader macro patterns of change affecting UK urban local governance to which action zones are contributing, or to the specific micro dynamics of these particular partnership initiatives, tensions inherent in the above dilemmas are far from being resolved.

Self-prioritization and perceptual matching: The effects of temporal construal.

Abstract: Recent research has revealed that self-referential processing enhances perceptual judgments — the so-called self-prioritization effect. The extent and origin of this effect remains unknown, however. Noting the multifaceted nature of the self, here we hypothesized that temporal influences on self-construal (i.e., past/future-self continuity) may serve as an important determinant of stimulus prioritization. Specifically, as representations of the self increase in abstraction as a function of temporal distance (i.e., distance from now), self-prioritization may only emerge when stimuli are associated with the current self. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Self-relevance only enhanced performance in a standard perceptual-matching task when stimuli (i.e., geometric shapes) were connected with the current self; representations of the self in the future (Expts. 1 & 2) and past (Expt. 3) failed to facilitate decision making. To identify the processes underlying task performance, data were interrogated using a hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) approach. Results of these analyses revealed that self-prioritization was underpinned by a stimulus bias (i.e., rate of information uptake). Collectively, these findings elucidate when and how self-relevance influences decisional processing.