"Character" has become a front-and-center topic in contemporary discourse, but this term does not have a fixed meaning. Character may be simply defined by what someone does not do, but a more active and thorough definition is necessary, one that addresses certain vital questions. Is character a singular characteristic of an individual, or is it composed of different aspects? Does character--however we define it--exist in degrees, or is it simply something one happens to have? How can character be developed? Can it be learned? Relatedly, can it be taught, and who might be the most effective teacher? What roles are played by family, schools, the media, religion, and the larger culture? This groundbreaking handbook of character strengths and virtues is the first progress report from a prestigious group of researchers who have undertaken the systematic classification and measurement of widely valued positive traits. They approach good character in terms of separate strengths-authenticity, persistence, kindness, gratitude, hope, humor, and so on-each of which exists in degrees.
Character Strengths and Virtues classifies twenty-four specific strengths under six broad virtues that consistently emerge across history and culture: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Each strength is thoroughly examined in its own chapter, with special attention to its meaning, explanation, measurement, causes, correlates, consequences, and development across the life span, as well as to strategies for its deliberate cultivation. This book demands the attention of anyone interested in psychology and what it can teach about the good life.

"A remarkable book. Whether you are an educator, parent, or simply a curious reader, you will come to see, hear, and understand children in new ways." -Howard Gardner, author of Multiple Intelligences Adults easily recognize children's imagination at work as they play. Yet most of us know little about what really goes on inside their heads as they encounter the problems and complexities of the world around them. Susan Engel brings together an extraordinary body of research to explain how toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary-aged children think. A young girl's bug collection reveals how children ask questions and organize information. Watching a boy scoop mud illuminates the process of invention. When a child ponders the mystery of death, we witness how ideas are built. But adults shouldn't just stand around watching. When parents are creative, it can rub off. Engel shows how parents and teachers can stimulate children's curiosity by presenting them with mysteries to solve, feeding their sense of mastery and nourishing their natural hunger to learn. "A fascinating read for parents who wonder, simply, what is my child thinking? Why do they love collecting? Where did that idea come from? A celebration of children's innovation and sense of wonder." -Emily Oster, author of Expecting Better "Combining insight, scientific acumen, and exquisite narrative, The Intellectual Lives of Children allows readers to peer into the minds of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers as they explore and learn in everyday moments, emphasizing what constitutes real learning." -Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Science

As her mother slips into the fog of dementia, a philosopher grapples with the unbreakable links between our bodies and our sense of self. Vanessa wakes from a coma having forgotten ten years of her life. Toussaint, is haunted by voices. Thomas no longer knows how to answer questions and Claire, a retired teacher loses the use of her right hand because of an inexplicable pain. Noga Arikha began studying these patients and their confounding symptoms in order to explore how our physical experiences inform our identities. Soon after she began her work, the question took on unexpected urgency, as Arikha's own mother began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease. Weaving together stories of her subjects' troubles and her mother's decline, Arikha searches for some meaning in the science she has set out to study. She explores how the self studies itself and how it loses itself, delving into the scientific research that can help us understand how deeply interconnected are our minds and bodies. The result is an unforgettable journey across the ever-shifting boundaries between ourselves and each other.

Toward a Holistic Intelligence: Life on the Other Side of the Digital Barrier is a critical examination of how the Internet, our current digital age, and people's continuous use of digital devices is adversely affecting their thought processes, working memories, attention spans, and overall level of intelligence. In doing so, it explores how a larger intelligence based primarily on direct insight and creative absorption, qualities which are integrally part of people's emotive and sensorial lives, might allow for a clearer exploration of their world and themselves at a time in which our cognitive lives are being so thoroughly abrogated by the Internet and its resultant technologies.

Combing cutting edge science and educational philosophy, The Wisdom of the Body offers practical, effective advice for anyone interested in how humans learn and think. With compelling arguments in favor of an embodied approach to school, Shonstrom illuminates the power of learning through physical, sensory experiences, and challenges traditional approaches in education by offering dynamic, ground-breaking examples of how an embodied pedagogy could revolutionize learning.

Whenever you get dressed, carry objects, write, draw, or gesture, you express knowledge about how to get things done with your hands. Ironically, that knowledge is often difficult to express. Typically you can't say what you know. Still, it would be enormously useful to identify the knowledge underlying manual control. The design of equipment and transportation systems might better anticipate the abilities and limitations of users, and methods of teaching and rehabilitating skills might improve. This book, the first on the cognitive psychology of manual control, uncovers the hidden knowledge that hands express. Organized around key topics in this emerging area, including the role of the will in manual control, illusions concerning hand position sense, and the coordination of manual actions with others, Knowing Hands explains the planning and control of manual actions in everyday life.

In How to Explain Behavior: A Critical Review and New Approach, Sam S. Rakover proposes a critical review of explanation models (procedures); presents explanation as an essential part of research methodology; depicts understanding as based on explanation models and other procedures; provides a list of basic ideas common to most explanation models; supplies an approach that unifies mechanistic explanations as used by the sciences with mentalistic explanations that are based on one's inner world; and provides a general procedure for explaining individual behavior.

Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson are considered the founders of the field of the cognitive science of religion. Since its inception over twenty years ago, the cognitive science of religion has raised questions about the philosophical foundations and implications of such a scientific approach. This volume from McCauley, including chapters co-authored by Lawson, is the first book-length project to focus on such questions, resulting in a compelling volume that addresses fundamental questions that any scholar of religion should ask. The essays collected in this volume are those that initially defined this scientific field for the study of religion. These essays deal with issues of methodology, reductionism, resistance to the scientific study of religion, and other criticisms that have been lodged against the cognitive science of religion. The new final chapter sees McCauley reflect on developments in this field since its founding. Tackling these debates head on and in one place for the first time, this volume belongs on the shelf of every researcher interested in this now established approach to the study of religion within a range of disciplines, including religious studies, philosophy, anthropology and the psychology of religion.

With contributions from founders of the field, including Justin Barrett, E. Thomas Lawson, Robert N. McCauley, Paschal Boyer, Armin Geertz and Harvey Whitehouse, as well as from younger scholars from successive stages in the field's development, this is an important survey of the first twenty-five years of the cognitive science of religion. Each chapter provides the author's views on the contributions the cognitive science of religion has made to the academic study of religion, as well as any shortcomings in the field and challenges for the future. Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-five Years calls attention to the field whilst providing an accessible and diverse survey of approaches from key voices, as well as offering suggestions for further research within the field. This book is essential reading for anyone in religious studies, anthropology, and the scientific study of religion.

Researchers from different disciplines (e.g., physiological, psychological, philosophical) have investigated motivation using multiple approaches. For example, in physiology (the scientific study of the normal function in living systems such as biology), researchers may use "electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain, the recording of electrical brain-wave activity with the electroencephalograph, and lesion techniques, where a portion of the brain (usually of a laboratory animal) is destroyed and subsequent changes in motivation are noted" (Petri & Cofer, 2017). Physiological studies mainly conducted with animals, other than humans, have revealed the significance of particular brain structures in the control of fundamental motives such as hunger, thirst, sex, aggression, and fear. In psychology, researchers may study the individuals' behaviors to understand their actions. In sociology, researchers may examine how individuals' interactions influence their behavior. For instance, in the classroom students and teachers behave in expected ways, which may differ when they are outside the classroom. Saracho (2003) examined the students' academic achievement when they matched or mismatched their teachers' way of thinking. She identified both the teachers and students individual differences and defined consistencies in their cognitive processes. In philosophy, researchers can study the individuals' theoretical position such as supporting Maslow's (1943) concept that motivation can create behaviors that augments motivation in the future. Abraham H. Maslow's theory of self-actualization supports this theoretical position (Petri & Cofer, 2017). These areas and others are represented in this volume. This volume is devoted to understanding mutual and contemporary themes in the individuals' motivation and its relationship to cognition. The current literature covers several methods to the multifaceted relationships between motivational and cognitive processes. Comprehensive reviews of the literature focus on prominent cognitive perspectives on motivation with young children, which includes ages from birth to eight years of age. The chapters in this special volume review and critically analyze the literature on several aspects of the relationships between motivational and cognitive processes and demonstrates the breadth and theoretical effectiveness of this domain. This brief introduction acknowledges the valuable contributions of these chapters to the study of human motivation. This volume can be a valuable tool to researchers who are conducting studies in the motivation field. It focuses on important contemporary issues on motivation in early childhood education (ages 0 to 8) to provide the information necessary to make judgments about these issues. It also motivates and guides researchers to explore gaps in the motivation literature.

The Roman cult of Mithras was the most widely-dispersed and densely-distributed cult throughout the expanse of the Roman Empire from the end of the first until the fourth century AD, rivaling the early growth and development of Christianity during the same period. As its membership was largely drawn from the ranks of the military, its spread, but not its popularity is attributable largely to military deployments and re-deployments. Although mithraists left behind no written archival evidence, there is an abundance of iconographic finds. The only characteristic common to all Mithraic temples were the fundamental architecture of their design, and the cult image of Mithras slaying a bull. How were these two features so faithfully transmitted through the Empire by a non-centralized, non-hierarchical religious movement? The Minds of Mithraists: Historical and Cognitive Studies in the Roman Cult of Mithras addresses these questions as well as the relationship of Mithraism to Christianity, explanations of the significance of the tauroctony and of the rituals enacted in the mithraea, and explanations for the spread of Mithraism (and for its resistance in a few places). The unifying theme throughout is an investigation of the 'mind' of those engaged in the cult practices of this widespread ancient religion. These investigations represent traditional historical methods as well as more recent studies employing the insights of the cognitive sciences, demonstrating that cognitive historiography is a valuable methodological tool.

Integrating common factors research and practice, Person-Centered Approaches for Counselors highlights the deep social justice roots of the approaches and shows counselors in training and experienced therapists how to integrate person-centered process and outcome measures to improve therapy outcomes. For each of the person-centered approaches covered (including classical, focusing, emotion-focused, intersubjective, and interdisciplinary orientations) this accessible book covers historical development, theory, process, evaluation, and application. Person-Centered Approaches for Counselors is part of the SAGE Theories for Counselors Series that includes Psychoanalytic Approaches for Counselors by Frederick Redekop and Cognitive Behavioral Approaches for Counselors by Diane Shea.

Cognitive function is crucial to human beings right across the life course. Developed in an early age, cognitive function is influenced by environmental factors, changing over time. This book has reviewed and updated some areas on cognitive development, processes and challenges. Across 11 chapters, the book covers topics ranging from theory explorations to original studies in the real world. This book offers important insight into a theoretical understanding of the basic cognitive processes involved in the generation of new knowledge and ways in which to promote the development of learning and semantic memory. Cognitive development and its relation to emotional development is examined, and how traditional and current theories of cognitive development provide a framework for understanding the development of emotional processing in children. Children's conceptual development and cross-classification theories have been reviewed, particularly examining how children use classification, the ability to group items into categories, to structure the world into meaningful units. The effects of different parent-child activities on early literacy have been examined with a discussion on the contribution of different parent-child dyadic activities at home in promoting skills that pave the way to reading and spelling acquisition. On determining the relations among parenting, socio-emotional engagement, shared practices, language and perspective taking skills, new data shows that constructivist approaches provide a powerful way to investigate the development of children's social cognition. They also indicate that maternal factors and mother-child shared practices facilitate a child's mastery of sentential complements, conversation skill, and explicit perspective taking skills. In particular, this book has explored the face-inversion effect in children, with new perspectives indicating that expert face processing mechanisms are only employed for the recognition of faces from the age of 10, but inexpert mechanisms were employed prior to this age.

This book explores new developments in the dialogues between science and theatre and offers an introduction to a fast-expanding area of research and practice.The cognitive revolution in the humanities is creating new insights into the audience experience, performance processes and training. Scientists are collaborating with artists to investigate how our brains and bodies engage with performance to create new understanding of perception, emotion, imagination and empathy. Divided into four parts, each introduced by an expert editorial from leading researchers in the field, this edited volume offers readers an understanding of some of the main areas of collaboration and research: 1. Dances with Science 2. Touching Texts and Embodied Performance 3. The Multimodal Actor 4. Affecting Audiences Throughout its history theatre has provided exciting and accessible stagings of science, while contemporary practitioners are increasingly working with scientific and medical material. As Honour Bayes reported in the Guardian in 2011, the relationships between theatre, science and performance are 'exciting, explosive and unexpected'. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science charts new directions in the relations between disciplines, exploring how science and theatre can impact upon each other with reference to training, drama texts, performance and spectatorship. The book assesses the current state of play in this interdisciplinary field, facilitating cross disciplinary exchange and preparing the way for future studies.

The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, i.e. the problem of explaining how and why we have conscious experiences, has received different formulations across time. Back in 1868, Thomas Henry Huxley suggested that the mystery of consciousness resides somewhere -- or somehow -- in the activity of the brain. Since then, both clinical and basic neurosciences have taken the problem of consciousness seriously, joining the allied disciplines of philosophy and psychology in the seemingly insurmountable quest for consciousness. This book presents some of the latest research in the multidisciplinary field of consciousness studies, dealing with both theoretical and experimental aspects encompassing a wide range of normal and pathological states of consciousness.

The books in this bite-sized new series contain no complicated techniques or tricky materials, making them ideal for the busy, the time-pressured or the merely curious. CBT Tips for a Happier Life is a short, simple and to-the-point guide to learning some basic Cognitive Behavioural Therapy skills that will help to boost your self-esteem, prevent negative thinking, and overcome self-defeating behaviour that might stop you reaching your goals. In just 128 pages you will discover a complete toolkit for making positive and lasting changes to your way of thinking and acting.

This book studies how poetic structure transforms verbal imitations of religious experience into concepts. The book investigates how such a conceptual language can convey such non-conceptual experiences as meditation, ecstasy or mystic insights. Briefly, it explores how the poet, by using words, can express the 'ineffable'. It submits to close reading English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Armenian and Hebrew texts, from the Bible, through medieval, renaissance, metaphysical, and baroque poetry, to romantic and symbolistic poetry.

The book focuses specifically on aggressive offenders and is divided into two parts. Part I deals with sexual abusers whilst Part II is concerned with violent offenders. Each part discusses theory, latest research and treatment related information. Emphasis is placed on discussing cognition in context i.e. identifying the factors impacting upon and related to offenders' cognition.