Social problems in many domains, including health, education, social relationships, and the workplace, have their origins in human behavior. The documented links between behavior and social problems have compelled governments and organizations to prioritize and mobilize efforts to develop effective, evidence-based means to promote adaptive behavior change. In recognition of this impetus, The Handbook of Behavior Change provides comprehensive coverage of contemporary theory, research, and practice on behavior change. It summarizes current evidence-based approaches to behavior change in chapters authored by leading theorists, researchers, and practitioners from multiple disciplines, including psychology, sociology, behavioral science, economics, philosophy, and implementation science. It is the go-to resource for researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers looking for current knowledge on behavior change and guidance on how to develop effective interventions to change behavior.

A successor to the acclaimed 'Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex', 'Understanding the Prefrontal Cortex' presents a careful study of the anatomical connections in this brain region, showing how each area and subarea of the brain has a unique pattern of connections, and exploring the transformation that this area performs - from its inputs to it outputs. The book starts with two chapters of foundational material, before considering five subdivisions of the prefrontal cortex, and looking at the transformation that each one performs. Next it considers how the prefrontal cortex interacts with the rest of the brain, including not only cortical areas but also subcortical areas such as the basal ganglia and cerebellum. The book ends with a final section in which these principles are applied to the human brain. It starts by discussing the expansion of the prefrontal cortex during human evolution. It then considers how the human brain has co-opted mechanisms that existed in our primate ancestors, and by providing new inputs had extended them so as to support reasoning, remembering events from the distant past and imagining events in the distant future, the sense of self, language, the ability to understand the mental states of others, and the ability to cooperate and learn social and moral rules. Written by a leading brain scientist, the book will be an important and influential contribution to the neuroscience literature.

The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes is a primer to the basic and most important concepts, theories, methods, empirical findings, and applications of personality dynamics and processes. This book details how personality psychology has evolved from descriptive research to a more explanatory and dynamic science of personality, thus bridging structure- and process-based approaches, and it also reflects personality psychology's interest in the dynamic organization and interplay of thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions within persons who are always embedded into social, cultural and historic contexts. The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes tackles each topic with a range of methods geared towards assessing and analyzing their dynamic nature, such as ecological momentary sampling of personality manifestations in real-life; dynamic modeling of time-series or longitudinal personality data; network modeling and simulation; and systems-theoretical models of dynamic processes.

""The best general introduction to positive psychology available."
Dr Alex Linley, University of Leicester, UK

"Dr Ilona Boniwell is recognized as Europe's leading researcher, innovator and thinker in the expanding world of positive psychology. "Positive Psychology in a Nutshell" offers something for everyone with an interest in discovering how to live optimally. This brilliant little book is packed with scientific evidence identifying the key ingredients that help to create a happy life. Read it and learn how to change yours for the better."
Dr Cecilia d'Felice, Consultant Psychologist, Author and Columnist for "The Times "and" The Metro

" ""Positive Psychology in a Nutshell "is a little gem of a book, beautifully and engagingly written, and having the marks of a cogent teacher who has mastered the contemporary structure, bounds and outreach of her field. This is a 'must read', and a welcome antidote for all those engaged in the caring professions."
Richard Whitfield, Human Development Specialist, Educator, Poet and Chairman of Trustees of the Face-to-Face Trust

"As good an introduction to positive psychology as you can read. A must-read book for all those involved in the education and health industries."
Dr Anthony Seldon, Master, Wellington College, Berkshire, UK

""Positive Psychology in a Nutshell" is a comprehensive, user friendly, thoughtful introduction and critique of the field. Simply put, it is the best overview out there that can be read in a couple of sittings. Those with no psychology background find it fascinating and informative; those with serious credentials find it to be a credible overview and critique of the field."
Dr Carol Kauffman, Co-founder and Director of the Coaching and Positive Psychology Initiative, Harvard Medical School, USA

"In a nutshell, I could scarcely put down this intelligent, balanced and irresistible introduction to positive psychology "
Dr Sean Cameron, Co-Director, Practitioner Doctorate in Educational Psychology, University College London, UK"

""It is very readable, seductively so, and is no doubt as good an introduction to the subject as you can get ... Emotional wellbeing is complex and there are useful insights here to shore up the flabby phrases tossed around by politicians ... There are some parts of this book I will use and anyone who wants to find out about positive psychology should start here."
Mike Shooter is a child psychiatrist and President of BACP, UK "

When you hear the words 'positive psychology' or 'the science of well-being', do you wonder what it's all about?

'What makes us fulfilled?' and 'Is happiness necessary for a good life?' Discover the latest thinking on the topics of happiness, flow, optimism, motivation, character strengths and love, and learn how to apply it to your life. Ilona Boniwell presents an engaging overview of the science of optimal functioning and well-being, which combines real readability with a broad academic base applied to day-to-day life.

Now fully updated and enhanced with new material on how to: Change your mindset Practice mindfulness Develop better resilience Enhance your well-being at work Adopt positive leadership Introducing positive psychology in a friendly, straightforward way, this international bestseller is peppered with many simple tools and tips for daily living that will help you love your life.

Social problems in many domains, including health, education, social relationships, and the workplace, have their origins in human behavior. The documented links between behavior and social problems have compelled governments and organizations to prioritize and mobilize efforts to develop effective, evidence-based means to promote adaptive behavior change. In recognition of this impetus, The Handbook of Behavior Change provides comprehensive coverage of contemporary theory, research, and practice on behavior change. It summarizes current evidence-based approaches to behavior change in chapters authored by leading theorists, researchers, and practitioners from multiple disciplines, including psychology, sociology, behavioral science, economics, philosophy, and implementation science. It is the go-to resource for researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers looking for current knowledge on behavior change and guidance on how to develop effective interventions to change behavior.

There are myriad questions that emerge when one considers emotions and decision-making: What produces emotions? Why do we have emotions? How do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel like something? What is the relationship between emotion, reward value, and subjective feelings of pleasure? How is the value of 'good' represented in the brain? Will neuroeconomics replace classical microeconomics? How does the brain implement decision-making? Are gene-defined rewards and emotions in the interests of the genes? Does rational multistep planning enable us to go beyond selfish genes to plans in the interests of the individual? The Brain, Emotion, and Depression addresses these issues, providing a unified approach to emotion, reward value, economic value, decision-making, and their brain mechanisms. The evolutionary, adaptive value of the processes involved in emotion, the neural networks involved in emotion and decision making, and the issue of conscious emotional feelings are all considered. The book will be valuable for those in the fields of neuroscience, neurology, psychology, psychiatry, biology, animal behaviour, economics, and philosophy from the advanced undergraduate level upwards, and for all interested in emotion and decision-making.

In the 1960s, Americans combined psychedelics with Buddhist meditation to achieve direct experience through altered states of consciousness. As some practitioners became more committed to Buddhism, they abandoned the use of psychedelics in favor of stricter mental discipline, but others carried on with the experiment, advancing a fascinating alchemy called psychedelic Buddhism. Many think exploration with psychedelics in Buddhism faded with the revolutionary spirit of the sixties, but the underground practice has evolved into a brand of religiosity as eclectic and challenging as the era that created it. Altered States combines interviews with well-known figures in American Buddhism and psychedelic spirituality-including Lama Surya Das, Erik Davis, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei, Rick Strassman, and Charles Tart-and personal stories of everyday practitioners to define a distinctly American religious phenomenon. The nuanced perspective that emerges, grounded in a detailed history of psychedelic religious experience, adds critical depth to debates over the controlled use of psychedelics and drug-induced mysticism. The book also opens new paths of inquiry into such issues as re-enchantment, the limits of rationality, the biochemical and psychosocial basis of altered states of consciousness, and the nature of subjectivity.

Confabulations are recitations of events and experiences that never happened, ranging from incorrect responses to questions to a blatant confusion of reality. The Confabulating Mind provides the most up-to-date account of the causes, anatomical basis, and mechanisms of the phenomenon of false memories. In this significant update on the first edition, the author analyses new and diverse examples of striking clinical cases, discusses children's sense of reality, and incorporates his research on a distinct form of confabulation that is characterized by a confusion of reality. The book also examines other forms such as deja-vu, paramnesic misidentification, and anosognosia; looks at false memories as they occur in healthy people; and considers how the brain uses orbitofrontal reality filtering to create reality. By re-tracing the history of confabulations and integrating the latest insights into the mechanisms of confabulations, it summarises current interpretations of confabulations before making recommendations for future study. This book is important reading for neurologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and other scientists and clinicians interested in the organization of memory and thought.

The aim of this book is to provide insight into the principles of operation of the cerebral cortex. These principles are key to understanding how we, as humans, function. There have been few previous attempts to set out some of the important principles of operation of the cortex, and this book is pioneering. The book goes beyond separate connectional neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, neuroimaging, neuropsychiatric, and computational neuroscience approaches, by combining evidence from all these areas to formulate hypotheses about how and what the cerebral cortex computes. As clear hypotheses are needed in this most important area of 21st century science, how our brains work, I have formulated a set of hypotheses about the principles of cortical operation to guide thinking and future research. The book focusses on the principles of operation of the cerebral cortex, because at this time it is possible to propose and describe many principles, and many are likely to stand the test of time, and provide a foundation for further developments, even if some need to be changed. In this context, I have not attempted to produce an overall theory of operation of the cerebral cortex, because at this stage of our understanding, such a theory would be incorrect or incomplete. However, many of the principles described will provide the foundations for more complete theories of the operation of the cerebral cortex. This book is intended to provide a foundation for future understanding, and it is hoped that future work will develop and add to these principles of operation of the cerebral cortex. The book includes Appendices on the operation of many of the neuronal networks described in the book, together with simulation software written in Matlab.

This book presents a lively and accessible way to use the ancient figure of Socrates to teach modern psychology that avoids the didactic lecture and sterile textbook. In the online age, is a living teacher even needed? What can college students learn face-to-face from a teacher they cannot learn anywhere else? The answer is what most teachers already seek to do: help students think critically, clearly define concepts, logically reason from premises to conclusions, engage in thoughtful and persuasive communication, and actively engage the franchise of democratic citizenship. But achieving these outcomes requires an intimate, interpersonal learning community. This book presents a plan for using the ancient figure of Socrates and his Method to realize humane learning outcomes in the context of psychology.

Starting Out in Methods and Statistics for Psychology: a Hands-on Guide to Doing Research takes first year psychology students through the entire process of doing research in psychology, from exploring designs and methods, to conducting step-by-step, by-hand data analysis, and writing up their findings, all in a friendly and accessible way. The text begins by presenting a thorough overview of research, explaining its central role in psychology as a science and exploring how to read and present research findings before introducing students to both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. The author then explores experimental and correlational designs in detail, introducing the general principles before addressing the logic of the specific data analyses used in these forms of design. Dedicated chapters show students how to calculate independent and repeated t tests, and independent measures ANOVA in the experimental design section, and correlation and regression analyses in the correlation section. After guiding students through these essentials, the author moves on to a detailed explanation of when to use non-parametric tests, and again takes students through these data analyses in a carefully-paced series of hand calculations. The text concludes with a clear guide to when to use which test, and takes a look forward to the sorts of statistical analyses students will encounter in both published research and the next phase of their studies. Online Resource Centre For students: - A diagnostic maths test to help students identify their - strengths and weaknesses - Example lab reports (good and bad) - Example ethics applications forms - Full answers to the in-text study questions - SPSS screencasts - Links to papers and websites For lecturers: - Worksheets with additional datasets - Fully worked answers to worksheets - Testbank - Figures and tables from the book, ready to download - Animated solutions to the hand calculations

In the first half of the twentieth century, psychology was a discipline in search of scientific legitimacy. Debates raged over how much of human and animal behavior is instinctive and how much is learned, and how behavior could be quantified accurately. At the Johns Hopkins University's new Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, Curt P. Richter stood aside from these heated theoretical arguments, choosing instead to apply his data-collection methods, innovative measurement techniques, playful sense of exploration, and consummate surgical skill to laboratory examinations of the biological basis of behavior. From identifying the biological clocks that govern behavior and physiology to observing the self-regulation of nutrient levels by the body, the cyclical nature of some mental illnesses, and the causes of hopelessness, Richter's wide-ranging discoveries not only influenced the burgeoning field of psychobiology and paved the way for later researchers but also often had implications for the treatment of patients in the clinic. At the time of his death in 1988, Richter left behind a massive collection of laboratory data. For this book, Jay Schulkin mined six decades of Richter's archived research data, personal documents, and interviews to flesh out an engaging portrait of a "laboratory artisan" in the context of his work.

'Gaining control' tells the story of how human behavioral capacities evolved from those of other animal species. Exploring what is known about the psychological capacities of other groups of animals, the authors reconstruct a fascinating history of our own mental evolution. In the book, the authors see mental evolution as a series of steps in which new mechanisms for controlling behavior develop in different species - starting with early representatives of this kingdom, and leading to a species - us - that can engage in a large number of different types of behavioral control. Key to their argument is the idea that each of these steps - from reflexes to instincts, drives, emotions, and cognitive planning - can be seen as a novel type of psychological adaptation in which information is 'inherited' by an animal from its own behavior through new forms of learning - a form of major evolutionary transition. Thus the mechanisms that result from these steps in increasingly complex behavioral control can also be seen as the fundamental building blocks of psychology. Such a perspective on behaviour has a number of implications for practitioners in fields ranging from experimental psychology to public health. Short, provocative, and insightful, this book will be of great interest and use to evolutionary psychologists and biologists, anthropologists and the scientific community as a whole.

Visual control of our actions can be unconscious as well as conscious. For example, when a pedestrian steps onto a street and then suddenly steps back, to avoid being hit by an oncoming car, the pedestrian's visual system has been able to detect the car very rapidly. Since the registration of the approaching car in conscious vision could take a few hundreds of milliseconds - possibly too long to avoid being struck by it, the rapid injury-avoiding action has relied on the oncoming car being detected at unconscious levels in the visual system. So how, and at what level in the visual system is a stimulus processed unconsciously? This book explores unconscious and conscious vision, investigated using psychophysical and brain-recording methods. These methods allow microtemporal analyses of visual processing during the interval, ranging from a few 10s to a few 100s of milliseconds, between a stimulus's impinging on the retinae and its eliciting a behavioral response or a conscious percept. By tying these findings to well-known neuroanatomical and physiological substrates of vision, the book presents and discusses theoretical and empirical approaches to, and findings on, conscious and unconscious vision. In addition to presenting an in-depth, integrative review of recent and ongoing scientific and scholarly research, the book proposes several avenues for directing future research in these areas. It also provides a well articulated theoretical and a detailed empirical base that points to the special importance of the processing of surface properties of visual objects to their conscious vision. Aimed at scientists and scholars in visual cognition, visual neuroscience and, more broadly, cognitive science - including that part of the philosophical community that is currently occupied with the mind-brain problem, the book sheds new light on and advances experimental, philosophical, and scholarly research on visual consciousness.

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them?These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan "cognitive revolution" of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the 18th century. This is the first book to comprehensively treat this "pre-Chomskyan" history. It tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. The book is both a history of ideas as well of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created this discipline. Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the 19th century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks. The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Emile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the 20th century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus. A tour de force from one of the seminal figures in the field, this book will be essential reading for all linguists, psycholinguists, and psychologists with an interest in language.

The Second Edition of Introduction to Research Methods: A Hands-On Approach by Bora Pajo continues to make research easy to understand and easy to construct. Covering both quantitative and qualitative methods, this new edition lays out the differences between research approaches so readers can better understand when and how to use each research design. Through clear, simple, and even humorous prose, this text offers students a straightforward introduction to a new world of social science research. Rather than making research seem intimidating, Introduction to Research Methods shows students that research is an ongoing conversation concerning topics that matter in their lives, a conversation that's easy to understand and easy to join. The new edition features updated chapters on qualitative designs and qualitative data analysis, a new chapter on big data and digital methods, and updated citation and report styles for APA Style 7th Edition. This title is accompanied by a complete teaching and learning package in SAGE Vantage, an intuitive learning platform that integrates quality SAGE textbook content with assignable multimedia activities and auto-graded assessments to drive student engagement and ensure accountability. Unparalleled in its ease of use and built for dynamic teaching and learning, Vantage offers customizable LMS integration and best-in-class support.

What is modern psychology and how did it get here? How and why did psychology come to be the world's most popular science? A Conceptual History of Psychology charts the development of psychology from its foundations in ancient philosophy to the dynamic scientific field it is today. Emphasizing psychology's diverse global heritage, the book explains how, across centuries, human beings came to use reason, empiricism, and science to explore each other's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The book skilfully interweaves conceptual and historical issues to illustrate the contemporary relevance of history to the discipline. It shows how changing historical and cultural contexts have shaped the way in which modern psychology conceptualizes individuals, brains, personality, gender, cognition, consciousness, health, childhood, and relationships. This comprehensive textbook: - Helps students understand psychology through its origins, evolution and cultural contexts - Moves beyond a 'great persons and events' narrative to emphasize the development of the theoretical and practical concepts that comprise psychology - Highlights the work of minority and non-Western figures whose influential work is often overlooked in traditional accounts, providing a fuller picture of the field's development - Includes a range of engaging and innovative learning features to help students build and deepen a critical understanding of the subject - Draws on examples from contemporary politics, society and culture that bring key debates and historical milestones to life - Meets the requirements for the Conceptual and Historical Issues component of BPS-accredited Psychology degrees. This textbook will provide students with invaluable insight into the past, present and future of this exciting and vitally important field. Read more from Brian Hughes on his blog at thesciencebit.net

"The question for me is how can the human mind occur in the physical universe. We now know that the world is governed by physics. We now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how will the mind do that as well."--Allen Newell, December 4, 1991, Carnegie Mellon University
The argument John Anderson gives in this book was inspired by the passage above, from the last lecture by one of the pioneers of cognitive science. Newell describes what, for him, is the pivotal question of scientific inquiry, and Anderson gives an answer that is emerging from the study of brain and behavior.
Humans share the same basic cognitive architecture with all primates, but they have evolved abilities to exercise abstract control over cognition and process more complex relational patterns. The human cognitive architecture consists of a set of largely independent modules associated with different brain regions. In this book, Anderson discusses in detail how these various modules can combine to produce behaviors as varied as driving a car and solving an algebraic equation, but focuses principally on two of the modules: the declarative and procedural. The declarative module involves a memory system that, moment by moment, attempts to give each person the most appropriate possible window into his or her past. The procedural module involves a central system that strives to develop a set of productions that will enable the most adaptive response from any state of the modules. Newell argued that the answer to his question must take the form of a cognitive architecture, and Anderson organizes his answer around the ACT-R architecture, but broadens it by bringing in research fromall areas of cognitive science, including how recent work in brain imaging maps onto the cognitive architecture.

What produces emotions? Why do we have emotions? How do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel like something? What is the relation between emotion, and reward value, and subjective feelings of pleasure? How is the value of a good represented in the brain? Will neuroeconomics replace classical microeconomics? How does the brain implement decision-making? Are gene-defined rewards and emotions in the interests of the genes, and does rational multistep planning enable us to go beyond selfish genes to long-term plans and social contracts in the interests of the individual? This book seeks explanations of emotion and decision-making by considering these questions. The topics covered include: The nature of emotion, and a theory of emotion The functions of emotion, including a Darwinian theory of the adaptive value of emotion, which helps to illuminate many aspects of brain design and behaviour The brain mechanisms of emotion Affective states and motivated behaviour: hunger and sexual behaviour The pharmacology of emotion, and brain mechanisms for action Neuroeconomics, and the foundation of economic value Decision-making Emotional feelings, and consciousness Neural networks involved in emotion The book will be valuable for those in the fields of neuroscience and neurology, psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy

Metacognition refers to the awareness an individual has of their own mental processes (also referred to as ' thinking about thinking'). In the past thirty years metacognition research has become a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary research within the cognitive sciences. Just recently, there have been major changes in this field, stimulated by the controversial issues of metacognition in nonhuman animals and in early infancy. Consequently the question what defines a metacognitive process has become a matter of debate: how should one distinguish between simple minds that are not yet capable of any metacognitive processing, and minds with a more advanced architecture that exhibit such a capacity? Do nonhuman animals process the ability to monitor their own mental actions? If metacognition is unique to humans, then at what stage in development does it occur, and how can we distinguish between cognitive and metacognitive processes?
The Foundations of Metacognition brings together leading cognitive scientists to consider these questions. It explores them from three different perspectives: from an evolutionary point of view the authors ask whether there is sufficient evidence that some non-human primates or other animals monitor their mental states and thereby exhibit a form of metacognition. From a developmental perspective the authors ask when children start to monitor, evaluate und control their own minds. And from a philosophical point of view the main issue is how to draw the line between cognitive and metacognitive processes, and how to integrate the different functions in which metacognition is involved into a single coherent picture of the mind. The foundations of metacognition - whatever they will turn out to be - have to be as complex as this pattern of connections we discover in its effects.
Bringing together researchers from across the cognitive sciences, the book is valuable for philosophers of mind, developmental and comparative psychologists, and neuroscientists.

Maladapting Minds discusses a number of reasons why philosophers of psychiatry should take an interest in evolutionary explanations of mental disorders and, more generally, in evolutionary thinking. First of all, there is the nascent field of evolutionary psychiatry. Unlike other psychiatrists, evolutionary psychiatrists engage with ultimate, rather than proximate, questions about mental illnesses. Being a young and youthful new discipline, evolutionary psychiatry allows for a nice case study in the philosophy of science. Secondly, philosophers of psychiatry have engaged with evolutionary theory because evolutionary considerations are often said to play a role in defining the concept of mental disorder. The basic question here is: Can the concept of mental disorder be given an objective definition, or is it rather a normative concept? Thirdly and finally, evolutionary thinking in psychiatry has often been a source of inspiration for a philosophical view on human nature. Thus evolutionary psychiatrists have suggested, for example, that man's vulnerability to mental disorders may well be one of the defining features of our species.
Written by leading authors in philosophy, psychiatry, biology and psychology, this volume illustrates that many debates in contemporary philosophy of psychiatry are profoundly influenced by evolutionary approaches to mental disorders. Conversely, it also reveals how philosophers can help contribute to the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychiatry. It is important reading for a wide range of readers interested in mental health care and philosophy.

To understand the mind and its place in Nature is one of the great intellectual challenges of our time, a challenge that is both scientific and philosophical. How does cognition influence an animal's behaviour? What are its neural underpinnings? How is the inner life of a human being constituted? What are the neural underpinnings of the conscious condition?
Embodiment and the Inner Life approaches each of these questions from a scientific standpoint. But it contends that, before we can make progress on them, we have to give up the habit of thinking metaphysically, a habit that creates a fog of philosophical confusion. From this post-reflective point of view, the book argues for an intimate relationship between cognition, sensorimotor embodiment, and the integrative character of the conscious condition.
Drawing on insights from psychology, neuroscience, and dynamical systems, it proposes an empirical theory of this three-way relationship whose principles, not being tied to the contingencies of biology or physics, are applicable to the whole space of possible minds in which humans and other animals are included. Embodiment and the Inner Life is one of very few books that provides a properly joined-up theory of consciousness, and will be essential reading for all psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists with an interest in the enduring puzzle of consciousness.

Common sense would suggest that we are in complete control of the actions we perform - that all our actions are the result of considered and conscious preparation. Yet, there are countless examples of this control breaking down, for example, in the case of phobias and compulsive actions. We can all recall those times when, in the 'heat of the moment', our actions have been very different to those that would have resulted from calm and considered reflection. In extreme moments of 'absent-mindedness' our actions can even have castastrophic consequences, resulting in harm to ourselves or others. So why does this happen - why do apparently rational and intelligent beings make, what appear to be, such fundamental errors in their thinking. This book explores the idea that humans have two distinct minds within their brains: one intuitive and the other reflective. The intuitive mind is old, evolved early, and shares many of its features with animal cognition. It is the source of emotion and intuitions, and reflects both the habits acquired in our lifetime and the adaptive behaviours evolved by ancient ancestors. The reflective mind, by contrast, is recently evolved and distinctively human: it enables us to think in abstract and hypothetical ways about the world around us and to calculate the future consequences of our actions. The evolution of the new, reflective mind is linked with the development of language and the very large forebrains that distinguish humans from other species; it has also given us our unique human form of intelligence. On occasions though, our two minds can come into in conflict, and when this happens, the old mind often wins. These conflicts are often rationalised so that we, conscious persons, are unaware that the intuitive mind is in control. Written by a leading cognitive scientist, this book demonstrates how much of our behaviour is controlled by automatic and intuitive mental processes, which shape, as well as compete, with our conscious thinking and decision making. Accessibly written, and assuming no prior knowledge of the field, the book will be fascinating reading for all those interested in human behaviour, including students and researchers in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

Although much of the hubris and hyperbole surrounding the 1990's Internet has softened to a reasonable level, the inexorable momentum of information growth continues unabated. This wealth of information provides resources for adapting to the problems posed by our increasingly complex world, but the simple availability of more information does not guarantee its successful transformation into valuable knowledge that shapes, guides, and improves our activity. When faced with something like the analysis of sense-making behavior on the web, traditional research models tell us a lot about learning and performance with browser operations, but very little about how people will actively navigate and search through information structures, what information they will choose to consume, and what conceptual models they will induce about the landscape of cyberspace.
Thus, it is fortunate that a new field of research, Adaptive Information Interaction (AII), is becoming possible. AII centers on the problems of understanding and improving human-information interaction. It is about how people will best shape themselves to their information environments, and how information environments can best be shaped to people. Its roots lie in human-computer interaction (HCI), information retrieval, and the behavioral and social sciences.
This book is about Information Foraging Theory (IFT), a new theory in Adaptive Information Interaction that is one example of a recent flourish of theories in adaptationist psychology that draw upon evolutionary-ecological theory in biology. IFT assumes that people (indeed, all organisms) are ecologically rational, and that human information-seeking mechanisms and strategies adapt the structure of the information environments in which they operate. Its main aim is to create technology that is better shaped to users. Information Foraging Theory will be of interest to student and professional researchers in HCI and cognitive psychology.