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Ethanol (or, as it is more popularly known, alcohol) use has a long and ubiquitous history. The prevailing tendency to view alcohol merely as a ‘social problem’ or the popular notion that alcohol only serves to provide us with a ‘hedonic’ high, masks its importance in the social fabric of many human societies both past and present. To understand alcohol use as a complex social practice that has been exploited by humans for thousands of years requires cross-disciplinary insight from social/cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, psychologists, primatologists, and biologists. This multidisciplinary volume examines the broad use of alcohol in the human lineage and its wider relationship to social contexts such as feasting, sacred rituals, and social bonding. Alcohol abuse is a small part of a much more complex and social pattern of widespread alcohol use by humans. This alone should prompt us to explore the evolutionary origins of this ancient practice and the socially functional reasons for its continued popularity. The objectives of this volume are: (1) to understand how and why non-human primates and other animals use alcohol in the wild, and its relevance to understanding the social consumption of alcohol in humans; (2) to understand the social function of alcohol in human prehistory; (3) to understand the sociocultural significance of alcohol across human societies; and (4) to explore the social functions of alcohol consumption in contemporary society.

We have assembled an interdisciplinary group of distinguished authors—all experts in the field—who have been testing the efficacy of cognitive and working-memory training using a combination of behavioral, neuroimaging, meta-analytic, and computational modelling methods. This edited volume is a defining resource on the practicality, utility, and validity of the field of cognitive training research in general, and working memory training in particular. Importantly, one focus of the book is on the notion of transfer-namely, the extent to which cognitive training generalizes to learning and performance measures that were decidedly not part of the training regimen.

Confronting Humanity at Its Worst: Social Psychological Perspectives on Genocide reviews research and scholarship by social psychologists that has the potential to deepen our understanding of genocide, mass killing, and atrocious behavior in general. Some contributors shed light on the cultural, ideological, and psychological preconditions of extreme intergroup violence and mass killing. Others delve more deeply into the motivations and phenomenology of genocide perpetrators and their victims and into the roles of prejudice, obedience, dehumanization, and moral justification. Contributors also present analyses of how perpetrator groups collectively construe and evaluate their behavior after the fact and of when and how denial is likely. The book also reviews the pitfalls involved in providing explanations for the behavior of genocide perpetrators.

This book is a nontechnical, accessible, scholarly volume about criminal trajectories within a developmental context. The book provides a comprehensive overview of criminal trajectories as a concept and methodology. It addresses the complexities, controversies, findings, and applications from the rich criminal trajectory literature. It synthesizes material from the current literature in a range of fields, including developmental psychology, developmental and life-course criminology, quantitative methods, and crime prevention, to illustrate the theoretical, empirical, and practical utility of considering the heterogeneity underlying offender populations (i.e., of criminal trajectories) in the conceptualization, response to, and prevention of crime. Each chapter ends with suggested supplemental readings.

From emails to social media, from instant messaging to political memes, the way we produce and transmit culture is radically changing. This book uses, for the first time, cultural evolution theory to analyze how information spreads, and how it affects our behavior in the digital age. Online connectedness and digital media allows access to networks where cultural transmission is possible, increasing both the availability of cultural models (from whom we can copy) and our reach (the number of individuals who can copy from us). This poses new problems, and new opportunities (Chapter 1). A cognitive and evolutionary approach suggests that we are wary learners, and the power of social influence, either online or offline, is often overestimated (Chapter 2). The background developed in the initial chapters into the details of different online phenomena is used: the tendency to copy popular individuals (Chapter 3), popular opinions (Chapter 4), or exchange information only with same-minded individuals (Chapter 5). The spread of online misinformation is then scrutinized at length (Chapter 6), proposing that to understand the phenomenon we need to understand why, generally, some information is more successful in spreading than other. The last two chapters examine how online, digital, transmission is different from other forms of cultural transmission, providing more “fidelity amplifiers” (Chapter 7), and how this could affect future cultural cumulation (Chapter 8). Overall, it is proposed that a “long view” to the current situation, based on a personal perspective of cognitive and evolutionary approaches to culture, suggests that some of the dangers of digital, online, interactions may have been overestimated, and the opportunities still ahead of us are discussed.

Much has been written about deaf identities; however, no single book has focused specifically on how different academic disciplines conceptualize deaf identities in one fell swoop. This book does exactly that. It is a unique compilation of multidisciplinary perspectives on the lens of deaf identities written by scholars representing a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, counseling, education, literary criticism, practical religion, philosophy, psychology, sociology, social work, and Deaf Studies. Nowhere else can one find careful scrutiny of the meaning of deaf identities within, for example, the disciplines of philosophy and religion. Where else can one find a sense of identity in “passing” as a deaf person instead of “almost passing” as a hearing person? Where else can one examine mutating identities in progressing from Spiderman to the Incredible Hulk? The book focuses on how the contributors perceive what deaf identities represent, how these identities develop, and the societal influences that shape these identities. Intersectionality; examination of medical, educational, and family systems; linguistic deprivation; the role of oppressive influences; what the “deaf body” is about; strategies to facilitate positive deaf identity development; and how ethical values are interpreted are among the multiple topics examined in the search to better understand how deaf identities come into being. In presenting their deaf identity paradigms, contributors have endeavored to intertwine both scholarly and personal perspectives in their efforts to personalize academic content. The result is a book that reinforces the multiple ways in which deaf identities are manifested.

Children take their first steps, produce their first words, and become able to solve many new problems seemingly overnight. Yet, each change reflects many other previous developments that occurred in the whole child across a range of domains, and each change, in turn, will provide opportunities for future development. This book proposes that all change can be explained in terms of developmental cascades such that events that occur at one point in development set the stage, or cause a ripple effect, for the emergence or development of different abilities, functions, or behaviors at another point in time. The authors argue that these developmental cascades are influenced by different kinds of constraints that do not have a single foundation: They may originate from the structure of the child’s nervous system and body, the physical or social environment, or knowledge and experience. These constraints occur at multiple levels of processing and change over time, and both contribute to developmental cascades and are the product of them. The book presents an overview of this developmental cascade perspective as a general framework for understanding change throughout the lifespan, although it is applied primarily to cognitive development in infancy. The book also addresses how a cascade approach obviates the dichotomy between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms. The framework is applied in detail to three domains within infant cognitive development—namely, looking behavior, object representations, and concepts for animacy—as well as two domains unrelated to infant cognition (gender and attachment).

Stigmatization is part of the everyday lives of children with disabilities, their families, and their friends. Negative social encounters, even with perfect strangers, can dampen joyful occasions, add stress to challenging situations, and lead to social isolation. This book describes a program of research spanning a decade that seeks to understand disabilities in their developmental and cultural contexts. The authors are especially interested in understanding adults’ socialization practices that promise to reduce stigmatization in the next generation. Guided by developmental cultural psychology, including the concept of “universalism without uniformity,” the authors focus on the understandings and responses to disability and associated stigmatization of elementary-school educators practicing in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. Educators from all four cultural groups expressed strikingly similar concerns about the impact of stigmatization on the emerging cultural self, both of children with disabilities and their typically developing peers. Educators also described culturally nuanced socialization goals and practices pertaining to inclusive education. In Japan, for instance, educators emphasized the importance of peer group belonging and strategies to support the participation of children with disabilities. In the U.S., educators placed relatively more emphasis on individual development and discussed strategies for the equitable treatment of children with disabilities. Educators in South Korea and Taiwan emphasized the cultivation of compassion in typically developing children. The understanding gained through examination of how diverse individuals address common challenges using cultural resources available in their everyday lives provides important lessons for strengthening theory, policy, and programs.

Don’t Use Your Words! argues that the discourse of “emotional management” across educational, therapeutic, and media sites aimed at young children valorizes the naming of certain (accepted) emotions in the interest of containing affective expressions that don’t conform to the normative notion of growing up. A therapeutic discourse has become prevalent in media produced for children in the U.S.—organizing storylines to help them name and manage their feelings, a process that weakens the intensity and range of those feelings, especially their expression through the body. Both through the appropriation of these media texts and the production of their own culture, kids resist these emotional categorizations, creating an “archive of feeling” that this book documents. Taking a cultural studies approach, the book analyzes a variety of cultural productions by kids between the ages of five and nine: drawings by Central American refugee children; letters and pictures by kids in response to the Trump victory; observations of a Montessori classroom; tweets from a Syrian child; Tumblr fanart; kids’ television reviews from Common Sense Media; dozens of YouTube videos; and observations of kids playing the popular games Minecraft and Roblox. I show how kids talk to each other across these media by referencing memes, songs, and movements, constructing a common vernacular that departs from normative conceptions of growing up. This book asks: what does it feel like to be a kid? And why do so many policy makers, parents, and pedagogues treat feelings as something to be managed and translated?

Why do people go to the movies? What does it mean to watch a movie? To what extent does our perception of the fictional nature of movies differ from our daily perception of the real world? The authors, a neuroscientist and a film theorist, propose a new multidisciplinary approach to images and film that can provide answers to these questions. According to the authors, film art, based on the interaction between spectators and the world on the screen, and often described in terms of immersion, impressions of reality, simulation, and involvement of the spectator’s body in the fictitious world he inhabits, can be reconsidered from a neuroscientific perspective, which examines the brain and its close relationship to the body. They propose a new model of perception—embodied simulation—elaborated on the basis of neuroscientific investigation, to demonstrate the role played by sensorimotor and affect-related brain circuits in cognition and film experience. Scenes from famous films, like Notorious, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Persona, The Silence of the Lambs, and Toy Story are described and analyzed according to this multidisciplinary approach, and used as case studies to discuss the embodied simulation model. The aim is to shed new light on the multiple resonance mechanisms that constitute one of the great secrets of cinematographic art, and to reflect on the power of moving images, which increasingly are part of our everyday life.

This book is designed to introduce the evolutionary origins of the human brain’s present structures and functions. Evolutionary neuropsychology is a new multidisciplinary science that embraces and uses empirical findings from the fields of evolution, neuroscience, cognitive sciences, psychology, anthropology, and archaeology. This book is designed for the intellectually curious, but styled especially for academics at any level and psychologists focusing on various aspects of human behavior. The bedrock foundation of evolutionary neuropsychology is the assumption that functionally specialized brain regions are adaptations naturally selected in response to various environmental challenges over the course of billions of years of evolution. These adaptations and their brain regions and circuitry may now serve new functions, which are called exaptations, and they are particularly involved in higher cognitive functions.

We tend to think about memory in terms of our own experience, but a series of our direct ancestors—from the earliest vertebrates to archaic humans—also had memories. The evolutionary history that we share with these ancestral species has left its mark on modern memory, complemented by other forms of memory that are uniquely human. This book traces the long evolutionary road to human memory by explaining how a series of now-extinct ancestral species adapted to life in their world, in their time and place. As they did, new brain areas appeared, each of which supported an innovative form of memory that helped them gain an advantage in life. Through inheritance and modification across millions of years, these evolutionary novelties created several kinds of memory that influence the human mind today. Then, during human evolution, yet another new kind of memory emerged: about ourselves and others. This evolutionary innovation ignited human imagination; empowered us to remember and talk about a personal past; and enabled the sharing of knowledge about our world, our cultures, and ourselves. Through these developments, evolution made it possible for every individual, day upon day, to add new pages to the story of a life: the remarkable, rich record of experiences and knowledge that make up a human mind.

Eyewitnesses are likely to have some degree of familiarity with a perpetrator when a crime is committed. Despite the fact that the majority of crimes are committed by someone with whom the victim/witness is familiar, the majority of eyewitness research has focused on the identification of stranger perpetrators. It is critical to examine how familiarity may influence eyewitness accuracy. Familiarity can vary from a complete stranger to a very familiar other. This book explores the “middle ground” as it relates to the criminal justice system, namely describing perpetrators, eyewitness identification, and jury decision-making. The purpose of this book is to consolidate the literature that exists regarding familiarity and to apply this research to an eyewitness context. This book attempts to better understand how familiarity may impact eyewitnesses and to highlight key considerations when an eyewitness is familiar with a perpetrator while collecting eyewitness evidence and using it in a courtroom. This is achieved through an in-depth discussion of the definition of familiarity, the examination of critical social psychological and cognitive theory in relation to familiarity, a description of the current literature examining eyewitness familiarity, a discussion of familiarity evidence in the courtroom, and a proposal for future directions and research.

Social media users fracture into tribes, but social media ecosystems are globally interconnected technically, socially, culturally, and economically. At the crossroads, Huatong Sun, author of Cross-Cultural Technology Design, presents theory, method, and case studies to uncover the global interconnectedness of social media design and reorient universal design standards. Centering on the dynamics between structure and agency, Sun draws on practices theories and transnational fieldwork and articulates a critical design approach. The culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUE², or CLUE-squared) framework extends from situated activity to social practice and connects macro institutions with micro interactions to redress asymmetrical relations in everyday life. Why were Japanese users not crazed about Facebook? Would Twitter have been more successful than its copycat Weibo in China if not banned? How did mobilities and value propositions play out in the competition of WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, and KakaoTalk for global growth? Illustrating the cultural entanglement with a relational view of design, Sun provides three provocative accounts of cross-cultural social media design and use. Concepts such as affordance, genre, and uptake are demonstrated as design tools to bind the material with the discursive and leap from the critical to the generative for culturally sustaining design. Sun calls to reshape the crossroads into a design square where differences are nourished as design resources, where diverse discourses interact for innovation, and where alternative design epistemes thrive from the local. This timely book will appeal to researchers, students, and practitioners who design across disciplines, paradigms, and boundaries to bridge differences in this increasingly globalized world.

The German American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg’s 1908 book, On the Witness Stand, is widely regarded as “founding” the modern field of psychology and law. The purpose of the present volume is twofold: first, to summarize the chapters and conclusions of On the Witness Stand, making Münsterberg’s insights available to a new generation of scholars and students; and second, to present the “state of the science” on the very issues that Münsterberg raises. These issues continue to be of great importance to the field and the contemporary criminal justice system: eyewitness memory, deception detection, false confessions, suggestibility, hypnotism, and the causes of criminal behavior. Thus, the book provides a historical perspective, as well as a contemporary, comprehensive review of topics that remain central to the discipline of psychology and law. In essence, each chapter asks, “What have we learned about this topic in the 110 years since Münsterberg first wrote about it? Has subsequent research shown him to be right or wrong?” Each chapter summarizes the content of Münsterberg’s corresponding chapter, interleaved with a contemporary assessment of the topic.

ISIS Propaganda offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda. Combining a range of different theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences and using rigorous methods, the authors pursue several interconnected tasks. They trace the origins of IS’s message, they lay bare the strategic logic guiding its evolution, they examine each of its many components (magazines, videos, music, social media, etc.) and show how they work together to radicalize audiences’ worldviews, and they highlight the challenges such a “full-spectrum propaganda” raises in terms of counterterrorism. The volume hence not only represents a one-stop point for any analyst of IS and Salafi-jihadism, but also a rich contribution to the study of text and visual propaganda, radicalization and political violence, and international security.

This book traces the experiences of diverse adoptive families—including lesbian, gay, and heterosexual parent families, and families who adopted through foster care and private adoption—as they manage birth family relationships across their children’s childhood. It explores the diversity among families in how open adoption is envisioned, enacted, and experienced over time. The author uses interview data from four time points spanning preadoption to 8 years postadoption to address a variety of questions, including: How do adoptive parents feel about openness when they first learn about it, and why do their feelings change over time? How do adoptive parents’ initial feelings about birth parents inform the types of relationships that they form with birth family? How do adoptive parents who strongly valued openness cope with and handle the disappointment of matching with birth parents who do not desire and/or are unable to enact a similar level of openness? What types of complex, unexpected, and nuanced trajectories of contact unfold over time between adoptive families and birth families? What types of boundary challenges occur between adoptive and birth family members, offline and online? How do adoptive parents talk about adoption with their children, and how does this vary depending on level and type of contact? How and to what extent do adoptive parents invoke environment versus genetics (i.e., birth family) in articulating children’s strengths, challenges, and physical features (e.g., height, skin color)? How do the experiences of adoptive parents differ by parent gender and sexual orientation?

The topic of autobiographical memory has held a prominent role in memory research for the past 30 years, as it has proven indispensable to the understanding of human memory and cognition. An important focus of autobiographical memory research is uncovering the basic structure, nature, and organization of the autobiographical memory system. This edited volume addresses the organization and structure of autobiographical memory. Based on over 30 years of research, and the latest empirical findings, this volume presents the major theories and problems in the science of autobiographical memory organization. At its core are two influential global views on the organization, structure, and function of autobiographical memory (chapters 2 and 3). In addition, the volume examines the organization of autobiographical memory from a developmental perspective (chapter 4), a chapter examining the neuroscience of autobiographical memory organization (chapter 7), and a chapter examining organization from a functional perspective (chapter 6). Also covered is the role of culture in forming autobiographical memory (chapter 5), the role of the self in organizing autobiographical memory (chapter 8), insights from the reminiscence bump on organization (chapter 9), and a chapter on the organization of episodic autobiographical memories (chapter 10).

This book addresses what parents believe about children—both children in general and their own children in particular. Its scope is broad, encompassing beliefs directed to numerous aspects of children’s development in both the cognitive and social realms, developments that span the age periods from birth through adolescence. Although the focus is on typical development, departures from the norm in both children’s functioning and parental practices are also discussed. Four questions are addressed for every topic considered: What is the nature of parents’ beliefs? What are the origins of parents’ beliefs? How do parents’ beliefs relate to parents’ behavior? And how do parents’ beliefs relate to children’s development? These questions tie in to long-standing theoretical issues in psychology, they are central to our understanding of both parenting practices and children’s development, and they speak to some of the most important pragmatic issues for which psychology can provide answers. The major goal of the book is to convey the main conclusions from the large body of work that has addressed these questions. Because much still remains to be learned, a second goal is to identify needed directions for further study.