bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Temporal Dynamics of Emotional Responding: Implications for Well-Being and Health From the MIDUS Neuroscience Project
Authors: Schaefer Stacey M. , van Reekum Carien M. , Lapate Regina C. , Heller Aaron S. , Grupe Daniel W. , Davidson Richard J.
Published: October 2018

Findings are reviewed from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Neuroscience Project demonstrating the value in examining the temporal dynamics of responses to brief emotional provocation for understanding linkages among emotional response styles and factors contributing to health and well-being. Findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as well as electromyographic recordings (EMG) of the facial muscles to objectively measure emotional responses demonstrate that the temporal dynamics of emotional responses to affective stimuli are associated with aging, personality, psychopathology, stress exposure, biomarkers, and well-being. These findings suggest that variation in health and well-being are differentially predicted by specific temporal parameters of the emotional response. By examining temporal dynamics in response to affective stimuli, a better understanding is gained of the brain–behavior associations underlying emotion and how emotions “get under the skin” to impact well-being and health across the life span.
The Roles of Twin Studies and Modern Genomic Technologies in Integrative Health Science
Authors: Krueger Robert F. , South Susan C.
Published: October 2018

This chapter focuses on genetically informative research design and strategy in integrative health science (IHS). A feature of IHS is studying individual differences in health outcomes together and in a multidisciplinary manner. The chapter focuses on the advantages of using genetically informative research strategies for IHS. Genetically informative strategies are tools to enrich inferences within the IHS paradigm. They help parse the meaning of observed associations between exposures and outcomes. Two strategies are considered for the Midlife in the United States study : (1) Gene × Environment interactions and (2) correlations between education and allostatic load. A strategy likely to be employed in IHS research involves using segments of RNA to understand mechanisms underlying health and illness, focusing on the conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA). The conclusion is that IHS and genetically informative research strategies are natural allies in understanding origins of health and illness in the population at large.
Personality and Socioeconomic Status Over the Adult Working Years
Authors: Chapman Benjamin P. , Elliott Ari
Published: October 2018

Measuring the interrelationship of personality and socioeconomic status (SES) over the adult life span is crucial in assessing how—or if—personality traits are involved in SES health differentials. Using data from Midlife in the United States cohort members of working age throughout a 16- to 17-year period, we studied the reciprocal relationship between personality traits and SES. Results indicated that standing on socioeconomic indicators was heavily shaped by both family of origin SES and education, with small positive associations of Openness and Conscientiousness and negative associations of Neuroticism and Agreeableness with SES indicators at subsequent waves. Results revealed small associations between socioeconomic factors and future Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, and Openness. Continuity in SES and personality dwarfed reciprocal influences. Findings suggest that any major selection effects of personality on SES occur prior to midlife, and that family of origin SES and education are common links to both adult SES and personality.
Socioeconomic Status and Health-Related Biology: Links Between Socioeconomic Disadvantage, Psychological Factors, and HPA Activity in MIDUS
Authors: Zilioli Samuele , Imami Ledina , Slatcher Richard B.
Published: October 2018

Understanding causal pathways that explain socioeconomic-related health disparities is a long-standing challenge in health research. This chapter reviews research on links between socioeconomic status, ecology, and health, focusing on psychosocial factors that may influence these associations. The Socioeconomic Gradient Bow-Tie Model is introduced to connect socioeconomic status (SES) and SES-related physical and social environments to health. The activity of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis is highlighted as a key biological pathway through which psychosocial factors may influence the links between SES and health; these ideas are illustrated with findings from the Midlife in the United States study. Attention is given to those findings that showcase psychosocial factors that may help low-SES individuals “escape” the biological risks associated with socioeconomic disadvantage. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions on the link between SES and health-related biology beyond the activity of the HPA axis.
Social Capital, Altruistic Behavior, and Mental Health
Authors: Fujiwara Takeo , Ryff Carol D.
Published: October 2018

Social capital matters for health, but issues of causal directionality and underlying mechanisms are not well understood. It is widely known that receiving social support is good for health, although few studies have investigated the impact of showing caring, altruistic behaviors on health of the provider. Further, as the family is a core component of society, altruistic behaviors toward children may be a unique context for evaluating the impact of such caring on the mental health of parents. This chapter provides a brief overview of prior research on social capital, altruism, and health. It then describes a series of studies conducted with the Midlife in the United States data set, including longitudinal and twin analyses, to examine the impact of altruistic behaviors on various mental health outcomes. The impact of altruistic behaviors toward children on the mental health of parents and grandparents is also considered. The chapter concludes with suggested directions for future research.
The Spanish Baroque Novel
Authors: García Santo-Tomás Enrique
Published: October 2018

Don Quixote’s immediate success in Spain and abroad provides us with many tools to analyze the development of the novel in early modern culture not only from aesthetic and political perspectives, but from social and financial ones as well. This novel is also a pioneer for other reasons: the publication of its first part in 1605 coincides with what traditional historiography has considered the “Spanish Baroque,” a period covering a century of unparalleled artistic achievements but also of relentless historical decay. In masterpiece after masterpiece, through genres like the picaresque and the novela cortesana and formats like the short story and the comedia novelada, authors from Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) to Francisco Santos (1623–1698) elevate the novel where their Renaissance fathers had taken poetry a century earlier, to a veritable “Golden Age.” Framing the analysis in the wider European tradition, this chapter examines some of the greatest achievements of this era in Spain, taking into account those same parameters cited above that made Cervantes’s creation such a successful one.
Court Spectacle and Entertainment
Authors: Spielmann Guy
Published: October 2018

In the global history of spectacles, the baroque era constitutes an acme not only because it encompasses the most influential corpus of Western drama but also because of the unprecedented use of stagecraft in the pursuit of political goals. At a time when the world-as-theater metaphor reached the apex of its relevance, nowhere was it more aptly enacted than in the royal, imperial, ducal, and princely courts of Europe. Spectacle events were an integral part of life at court; although on the surface their purpose was providing entertainment, in the modern sense of gratuitous distraction, their function was almost always more complex as it pertained to diplomacy, propaganda, or governance. Moreover, the unfettered pursuit of distinction and the need for the extraordinary in all of its forms made the baroque court a creative laboratory in which all disciplines (drama, ballet, music, gardening, cuisine) could be practiced at the highest possible levels of excellence, and in which myriad influential artistic forms were first developed.
Stress and Comorbidity of Physical and Mental Health
Authors: Vig Kelsey D. , El-Gabalawy Renée , Asmundson Gordon J. G.
Published: October 2018

This chapter discusses the complex relationship between stress and physical health, with a focus on comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and physical health conditions. There is a great deal of evidence that stress and mental health conditions, such as PTSD, often co-occur with physical health conditions. This chapter reviews this evidence, describes potential mechanisms underlying the comorbidity, and outlines theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between stress and physical health. It considers the ways in which stress leads to poor physical health, how physical health conditions can lead to stress, and how other factors may both increase stress and worsen physical health. Clinical implications of comorbid mental and physical health conditions and suggestions for future research in the area are also discussed.
Barrio Music, Spirituality, and Social Justice in Latino Hip-Hop
Authors: Nava Alejandro
Published: October 2018

This essay explores the spiritual and social concerns of US Latino and Latin American hip-hop. Beginning with a description of hip-hop’s influence on the author’s educational journey, the essay considers some of the key influences of Latino music on US rap music, as well as the growing dominance of hip-hop among Latino youth throughout the Americas. Besides documenting the influences of US rap on Latino music, it charts the distinct idioms, styles, and philosophies of Latino hip-hop, emphasizing the unique contributions of this subgenre to the broader culture of hip-hop.
Television and its Impact on Latinx Communities
Authors: Castañeda Mari
Published: October 2018

The chapter investigates the intersections of television with Latinx communities, and the ways in which the evolving televisual context is mediating diasporic translatinidades. It focuses on five areas: (1) the role of Latinas in television set manufacturing, (2) the representation of Latinos in mainstream television, (3) the rise of Spanish-language television, (4) the importance of telenovelas in global television, and (5) the emergence of TV streaming as new venues for translatinidades. Taken together, these five topics construct an ample canvas in which we can investigate television and how it reflects social, political, economic, and cultural lived experiences. Ultimately, the goal of this chapter is to investigate how television and its relationship with Latinx communities cannot be uniformly characterized as one static practice but must in fact be recognized as a multilayered and evolving formation that is culturally embedded as well as closely interconnected to market power.
Forces of Production and Relations of Production
Authors: Laibman David
Published: October 2018

Marx and Engels based the movement for socialism and communism on a scientific analysis of social evolution rather than on ahistorical moral longings. This, however, requires replacement of vague evocative formulations by rigorous theoretical foundations. Two recent proposals for grounding the theory of the forces and relations of production—“intentional primacy” and “competitive primacy”—provide elements for this project but fail to drive it home. A proposed third approach, “social‒functional primacy,” focuses on the correspondence between advancing human power over nature, on the one hand, and the changing requirements for reproducible systems of exploitation—incentive, coercion, and control—on the other. A core evolutionary ladder of modes of production is identified as the basis for reconstructing the immense complexity of actual history, thus overcoming the dichotomy between “hard” and “soft” approaches to historical materialist theory.
Meaningful Objects and Consumption
Authors: Woodward Sophie
Published: October 2018

This chapter explores the ways in which practices of consumption are processes of making social and personal meanings. Building on theories of material culture, it highlights that these meanings arise from the co-agency of people and things. Rather than dismissing semiotic accounts as failing to attend to the materiality of goods, it draws from semiotic approaches (Keane 2005) that center the material possibilities of objects and the interrelationships and connections between different objects. The relationality of objects is developed through assemblage theories (Bennett 2009) to widen out the study of consumption beyond meaningful goods to see these in dynamic relation to objects that have implicit meanings and “meaningless” items such as everyday clutter.
Age-Related and Noise-Induced Hearing Loss
Authors: Xie Ruili , Ropp Tessa-Jonne F. , Kasten Michael R. , Manis Paul B.
Published: October 2018

Hearing loss generally occurs in the auditory periphery but leads to changes in the central auditory system. Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) and age-related hearing loss (ARHL) affect neurons in the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN) at both the cellular and systems levels. In response to a decrease in auditory nerve activity associated with hearing loss, the large synaptic endings of the auditory nerve, the endbulbs of Held, undergo simplification of their structure and the volume of the postsynaptic bushy neurons decreases. A major functional change shared by NIHL and ARHL is the development of asynchronous transmitter release at endbulb synapses during periods of high afferent firing. Compensatory adjustements in transmitter release, including changes in release probability and quantal content, have also been reported. The excitability of the bushy cells undergoes subtle changes in the long-term, although short-term, reversible changes in excitability may also occur. These changes are not consistently observed across all models of hearing loss, suggesting that the time course of hearing loss, and potential developmental effects, may influence endbulb transmission in multiple ways. NIHL can alter the representation of the loudness of tonal stimuli by VCN neurons and is accompanied by changes in spontaneous activity in VCN neurons. However, little is known about the representation of more complex stimuli. The relationship between mechanistic changes in VCN neurons with noise-induced or age-related hearing loss, the accompanying change in sensory coding, and the reversibility of changes with the reintroduction of auditory nerve activity are areas that deserve further thoughtful exploration.
Migration and Integration in China
Authors: Fong Eric , Lai Yingtong , Li Aijia
Published: October 2018

This chapter addresses three major trends of migration in China. The first part of the chapter explores the causes, characteristics, and consequences of migration from rural areas to the city. Our discussion focuses on earning differentials, workplace experiences, intergenerational occupational mobility, housing, residential segregation, health care and social services. The second part discusses the characteristics and issues related to migration from one city to another. Finally, the chapter investigates international migration to China. The discussion highlights the extent of rural-to-urban migration in China, which has often been described as a crisis, and explores why and how the trend in migration has reached a crisis level.
Migration Crisis and Social Trauma
Authors: Baligand Pascale
Published: October 2018

In this chapter, the author examines the emergence of the expression “migrant crisis” in the French public debate in 2015. This “migrant crisis” can be considered as the product of a crisis in migration and asylum policies that led to an externalition of the treatment of asylum-seekers and that resulted in their being forced into a migrant condition. Using a field survey carried out in 2007, in which she interviewed asylum-seekers living in Ile-de-France, and drawing on work in the fields of social science and psychoanalysis, the author develops several aspects of this migration policy crisis and investigates their impacts in terms of individual and social trauma.
Migration Crises in Turkey
Authors: Kivilcim Zeynep
Published: October 2018

Turkey is the country that hosts highest number of refugees in the world. The paradigm of crisis nurtures and sustains legislation and policies in the field of migration and asylum in the country. Migration legislation of the Turkish state consists mainly of the subsequent codifications of its practice relating to different crises constructed around the mass influxes of migrants into its territory. This context of crisis determines not only the scope and content of the legislative and political measures but also shapes the structures of the institutions in the field of immigration. The second paradigm governing Turkish migration policies is ‘Europeanization.’ This paradigm materializes in the effort of the subsequent governments of Turkey to align national legislation with the two contradicting legal regimes governing migrants in Europe: the European Union’s migration regulations and the Council of Europe’s regime framed by the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. This chapter aims to study the dynamics of migration policies in Turkey and the self-interest of Turkish state as a motivating factor to its legal responses to refugee ‘crises.’
Sanctuary and Unsettling “the” Refugee Crisis
Authors: Bagelman Jen
Published: October 2018

This chapter examines how discursive framings of ‘the refugee crisis’ problematically reduce the intractable politics of displacement to a singular and sudden event. This chapter also argues that sanctuary—as a lexicon and practice—potentially disrupts this problematic lens in two important ways. First, sanctuary unsettles a crisis lens that depicts displacement and persecution in ahistorical terms; instead, this rich tradition of sanctuary situates contemporary politics within more complex genealogies. Second, sanctuary challenges a crisis lens that frames displacement as an isolated problem, exclusively impacting refugees. The chapter concludes that these sanctuary expressions cannot be confined to traditional scalar logics of the city, the state, or even the planet. Instead, sanctuary is better understood as a movement, enacted through the register of the global-intimate.
East Asian Exceptionalism to Western Populism and Migration Crisis
Authors: Lie John
Published: October 2018

In the 2010s, the world is seemingly awash with waves of populism and anti-immigration movements. Yet virtually all discussions, owing to the prevailing Eurocentric perspective, bypass East Asia (more accurately, Northeast Asia) and the absence of strong populist or anti-immigration discourses or politics. This chapter presents a comparative and historical account of East Asian exceptionalism in the matter of migration crisis, especially given the West’s embrace of an insider-outsider dichotomy superseding the class- and nation-based divisions of the post–World War II era. The chapter also discusses some nascent articulations of Western-style populist discourses in Northeast Asia, and concludes with the potential for migration crisis in the region.
Afghan Experiences of Displacement
Authors: Ganguly-Scrase Ruchira
Published: October 2018

This chapter focuses on research among internally displaced Afghan communities who had fled to Pakistan over the protracted periods of conflict and were then unable to return to their homes and are currently living in temporary accommodation. Drawing on interviews with forced migrants this chapter aims to explore their lived experiences. In doing so, it highlights the complexities of the decision-making processes that involuntary migrants undertake. Negative public discourses of Afghan refugees notwithstanding, they are the quintessential exemplars of a global migration crisis, given that the geopolitical situation in the region over the last three decades have compelled millions to flee their homes. In order to dispel the fears and distrust toward asylum-seekers this chapter shows the importance of producing accurate data based on the worldviews of the displaced as they are formulating their decisions to flee. This in turn enables us to challenge both the artificially constructed demonizing discourses centered on asylum-seekers as well as the refugees’ own retrospective accounts, which are sometimes at odds with their actual experiences.
The Politics of the Refugee Crisis in Hungary
Authors: Cantat Céline , Rajaram Prem Kumar
Published: October 2018

This chapter describes the production of a migration crisis in Hungary and examines the politics it authorizes. After providing context into the emergence of the discourse of crisis in Hungary, the chapter examines the mechanisms used by the Hungarian authorities to keep the crisis alive in spite of the limited number of people receiving asylum in the country. Finally, the chapter studies the connections between the “migration crisis” and the marginalization of other social groups, particularly Roma. It argues that both are connected to the adoption of capitalist modes of development underpinned by moral economies that rely on the production of various “others.”
Place and Being in Shakespearean Comedy
Authors: Cartwright Kent
Published: October 2018

In Shakespeare’s comedies, place is related to identity, so that a shift in location can alter a character’s sense of self. Renaissance English culture had two different notions of space and place, a proto-scientific sense of uniformly measurable space and qualitatively undifferentiated locales in tension with an opposite sense that places could have affective or magical powers. Related to that second sense, place in Shakespeare’s comedies functions more figuratively and poetically than realistically. The metaphoric home of Shakespearean comedy is Italy, because of its reputation not only for humanist culture and cosmopolitanism but also for moral complexity and openness; imaginatively, it constitutes a place where change is possible. In that spirit, Shakespeare’s comedies often involve movement from a constricting ‘regulative’ locale to one more protean, more open to self-discovery and transformation. Those protean places may even exert a certain power, as if in another place one could become another self.
The Architecture of Shakespearean Comedy
Authors: Myers Anne M.
Published: October 2018

This essay argues that Shakespearean comedies evoke and confound associations between female interiority and domestic space. Drawing on The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, The Comedy of Errors, and The Taming of the Shrew, I show how characters expect access to domestic space to reveal incontrovertible truths about female bodies and minds. These assumptions, however, are foiled, as architecture is more often associated with confusion and obfuscation than with the acquisition of knowledge. Moreover, Shakespeare presents the domestic scene as a scene, a site for the mastery and performance of roles, rather than the expression of genuine human desires. In this way, the presentation of domestic architecture undercuts the conventions of the comic marriage plot. At the same time, though, these plays reveal that within the strictures of a particular social world, the successful domestic performance is a matter of life and death.
Holy Adultery
Authors: Parker John
Published: October 2018

This essay tries to explain the curiously positive role played by adultery in Shakespearean comedy as an echo of, and a commentary on, its role in Christianity. Medieval dramatists had found in scripture everything necessary for a sacred comedy whose ‘matter and ground’ (to borrow the formulation of an early modern antitheatricalist) was ‘Love, Bawdrie, Cosonage, Flatterie, Whoredome, Adulterie’ and which, partly for that reason, came to be suppressed. In its place, Shakespearean comedy repeatedly shows marital vows forging precisely the sort of commitment on which Christians are most likely to default; and this default, rather than simply betraying their love, functions as its premise—an opportunity, if nothing else, for one believer to exercise over another the highest Christian ideal: that of forgiveness. As a consequence married love is not so much threatened as sustained by the fantasy of adultery and the subsequent mercy that this fantasy demands.
Comedies of Tough Love
Authors: Diaz Joanne
Published: October 2018

Shakespeare’s comedies feature characters who are always open to the possibilities of Ovidian transformation, and in four comedies in particular—Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Much Ado about Nothing—the transformation can be a painful one. This chapter surveys these four comedies in order to understand the relationship between teaching and taming. I engage with recent Shakespeare criticism that foregrounds the importance of Ovid’s work to the rhetorical practices of Tudor-era grammar schools. I also draw upon readings of Ovid’s Heroides, Ars Amatoria, and Metamorphoses in order to articulate a vision of a pedagogical enterprise that on the one hand privileged translation and transformation and on the other hand attempted to regulate the bodies of Tudor schoolboys. In doing so, I explore the complex Ovidian engagements that produced knowledge of the body and of relationships in Shakespeare’s culture and on his stage.
Comedies of the Green World
Authors: Hopkins Lisa
Published: October 2018

The green world is the space where different peoples meet each other: Illyrians and Messenians in Twelfth Night, humans and fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, courtiers and country-dwellers in As You Like It. In essence these plays are all first contact narratives in which each group sheds light on the other. As You Like It offers echoes of the English colonial enterprise and the push to conquer Guiana. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the wood outside Athens proves to be the repository of England’s hidden self, containing its past, both classical and Celtic. Above all Twelfth Night offers images of both a new world and of a new. This essay traces the dynamics of the encounters in each of these three plays, but focusing on Twelfth Night, the comedy in which comedy itself is interrogated as it is forced to confront its own limits and functions.
Shakespearean Comedy and the Question of Race
Authors: de Sousa Geraldo U.
Published: October 2018

In the comedies Shakespeare offers glimpses of the world’s ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity, and raises the question of whether a culturally and racially diverse world can transcend the tragic forces inherent in racial, ethnic, and religious strife and therefore imagine a progressive, forward-looking social paradigm. This chapter thoroughly examines the question of race in Shakespeare’s comedies, offering a comprehensive discussion of race and racism, caricature and humour, the aggression of language, the centrality and prominence of images of whiteness, and a sense of global interconnectedness intertwined with fear of foreign influence. Therefore, the comedies raise the potential for inclusion in exclusion and the potential for exclusion in inclusion. Shakespeare approaches racial issues and ethnic contrasts to reveal subtle connections in contrasts, and the cultural forces of exclusion that inclusion of difference entails.
Introduction
Authors: Hirschfeld Heather
Published: October 2018

In addition to providing an overview of the volume’s thirty-three chapters and a summary of key works of criticism on the comedies since the mid-twentieth century, the Introduction explains the Handbook’s conceptual frame of the ‘encounter’. Relying on recent work in critical semantics, the chapter explains the usefulness and relevance of the idea of the ‘encounter’—as a meeting that can be either aggressive or amatory—for investigating Shakespeare’s comedies in their time and our own. It suggests that Shakespeare’s comedies are best viewed from perspectives that consider the ways in which they offer occasions for various kinds of unexpected interactions, whether between character and character, performer and audience, or performance tradition and innovation.
Encountering the Present I
Authors: Melnikoff Kirk
Published: October 2018

Throughout his life, Shakespeare was undoubtedly a voracious reader, and in his early London days, he must have spent a good deal of his time in the city’s many bookshops. There, short of either coin or credit, he would have been able to browse the latest publications and keep abreast of the hottest sellers. Taking the early 1590s book market as its point of origin, this chapter tracks the impact of new and popular fiction like Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, Greene’s coney-catching pamphlets, and Greene’s runaway bestseller A Quip for an Upstart Courtier on The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew. Concerned with substantive allusions along with shared themes, language, and characterization, it pays particular attention to moments of ‘encounter’ when these comedies engage deliberately with these ubiquitous titles.
Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Religious Culture
Authors: Graham Kenneth
Published: October 2018

The religious turmoil of the English Reformation left behind a rich mixture of beliefs and practices, ranging from traditional Roman Catholic to radical Protestant. A defining feature of early modern life, this vibrant and conflicted religious culture was on full display in Shakespeare’s London and bears a close relationship to many aspects of his comedies. This chapter explores the significance for Shakespeare’s comedies of five key aspects of early modern religion: doctrine, festivity, social reformation, the treatment of outsiders, and conversion. It argues that the plays sometimes reflect, sometimes question, and sometimes participate in the religious ferment of their time, and it illustrates the developments in literary-critical method that have increasingly thrown light upon Shakespeare’s engagement with contemporary religious conversations and controversies, including those surrounding the powers and purposes of mirth.
Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Marketplace
Authors: Bailey Amanda
Published: October 2018

Far from being a well-regulated, predictable totality, the early modern English economy defied reliable oversight. Measure for Measure charts the unpredictable flow of goods, services, bodies, and information. This essay considers how our understanding of early modern comic form as driven by the compensatory logic of payment in kind is connected to perceptions of the early modern economy as itself limited to a series of exchanges that establishes the equivalence of two values. While comic closure ensures restitution, the genre simultaneously refuses to adhere to its own reparative logic. Measure for Measure elaborates an alternative means of achieving satisfaction via participation in a sympathetic system. In the place of economic rationality, we are confronted with the unknowability of diffuse and productive forces that prime, incite, and orient (and disorient) people.
Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Domestic Sphere
Authors: Richardson Catherine
Published: October 2018

This essay is about the relationship between comic form and domestic politics—about how Shakespeare makes comedy out of household encounters, and how his plays might have intervened in current political thinking about family life and gender relations. Bringing the plays into dialogue with a range of contemporary prescriptive literature about household practice, it argues that the relationship between comedy as a genre and the patriarchal ideals of domestic organization which structured early modern society was a turbulent one, and that this adds to the plays’ political purchase and their theatrical power. The essay looks in detail at relationships between household heads, children and parents, and servants and their masters, focusing on the qualities of submission and authority which Shakespeare develops in his verse and staging—it aims to answer the question, just how does he put domestic encounters on the early modern stage?
Joint Action and 4E Cognition
Authors: Tollefsen Torstein T. , Dale Rick
Published: October 2018

Over past thirty years there has been an increased interest in studying joint action across a number of different disciplines including psychology, sociology, cognitive anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy. In this chapter we canvas recent philosophical and empirical research on joint action. Along the way we highlight embedded, embodied, extended, and enactive approaches and the challenges they pose for more orthodox approaches to joint action. We propose an ecumenical approach to the study of joint action. The cognitive science of joint action will have to integrate both high-level and low-level approaches across a variety of disciplines, including experimental psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. A single unitary account is unlikely to capture the nuanced and complex nature of joint action. Instead, we argue that we should seek a better understanding of how various accounts coalesce into a tapestry of explanatory tools.
Direct Social Perception
Authors: Krueger Joel
Published: October 2018

Defenders of a view called “direct social perception” (DSP) argue that our social-cognitive capacities rest on our ability to directly perceive others’ mental states—their emotions, desires, intentions, etc.—embodied in their expressive, goal-directed behavior. DSP thus challenges the widespread assumption that mental states are intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible to everyone but their owner. In this chapter, I consider a version of DSP that draws upon phenomenology, 4E cognition, and empirical work in cognitive science. I first examine DSP in its historical context, focusing on its development in the hands of phenomenologists like Husserl, Scheler, and Merleau-Ponty. I then consider some supporting arguments and empirical evidence—particularly work suggesting that embodied expressions of emotions (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, etc.) may constitute part of the emotion itself. I conclude by defending DSP against several objections.
Embodied Resonance
Authors: Gallese Vittorio , Sinigaglia Corrado
Published: October 2018

Mental simulation was claimed to provide a distinctive way of gaining knowledge about others’ actions and thoughts since the late 1980s. A decade later, the discovery of mirror neurons in macaque monkeys and the evidence of mirror brain areas in humans presented a new angle on this claim, suggesting also an embodied approach to simulation. The aim of the present chapter is to introduce and discuss this embodied approach and its role in basic social cognition. In doing this, we shall start by characterizing the distinctive features of embodied simulation (ES), especially in relation to its its motor aspects. Then, we shall provide evidence for the claim that ES may be critically involved in understanding others’ actions. Finally, we shall explore the conjecture that ES might involve a common ground for action execution and observation not only at the functional but also at the phenomenological level.
The Evolution of Cognition
Authors: Barrett Louise
Published: October 2018

4E cognition offers a viable alternative to the viewpoint of classic cognitivism, providing a coherent, biologically grounded theory of cognitive evolution, which recognizes that bodies evolved before brains, and argues that whatever cognition might be, it must be grounded in the ability of organisms to coordinate and control action in a dynamic environment. In this chapter, I first consider some ideas relating to the minimal criteria for cognition as a means to introduce this more “biogenic” approach. This notion of minimal cognition is then linked to a discussion of the origins of cognition in sensorimotor coordination, as articulated in the “skin-brain thesis,” which argues that early nervous systems enabled coordinated contractions across myoepithelia. Finally, I consider how one particular school of 4E thought, radical enactivism, offers a view of evolutionary continuity that seems well equipped to resist the anthropocentric impulses of traditional cognitivist views.
Critical Note
Authors: Roepstorff Andreas , Starzak Tobias
Published: October 2018

How can approaching the topic of 4E cognition from an evolutionary perspective shed light on aspects of cultural and biological evolution, the nature of cognition in general, and of human nature in particular? The four papers in this section offer a temporal analysis that puts cognition into a context of larger processes that span historical and indeed evolutionary time, and they embed the dynamics of cognition beyond brains and individuals, into groups and even species. This analysis does not deny the importance of abstract representations for human cognition. However, all four contributions suggest that in focusing too narrowly on representational cognition we lose sight of the basic mechanisms supporting and driving cognition. Furthermore, to understand these, we need to understand not only how these processes are embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended, but also how they are shaped, transmitted, and diversified in processes of group formation.
4E Cognition and the Humanities
Authors: Cook Amy
Published: October 2018

The arts and humanities move us and change our minds—not just metaphorically but literally. This chapter provides a snapshot of some of the work that has occurred at the intersection of cognitive science and theater and literature. I provide a description and analysis of a theatrical experience that staged a challenge to traditional theories of cognition, demonstrating how artists are responding to and prodding work being done across the disciplines. If thinking is “world-making,” rather than processing stimuli into meaning, then the hermeneutic tradition of literary and art scholarship must adapt. If thinking means using objects in our environment in order to make changes to our own extended ecosystem, then an interaction with a work of art can be aesthetic, poetic, and autopoetic. Contemporary art, literature, and performance may suggest a new language—and a richer perspective on old language—for 4E cognition.
Critical Note
Authors: Aizawa Ken
Published: October 2018

This chapter provides a brief review and commentary on the account of cognition offered in Di Paolo and Kiverstein. It notes that Rietveld, Denys, and van Westen do not say much about cognition per se. Instead, they are concerned with skilled action. Finally, it notes how Hutto and Myin apparently pursue the view that cognition is behavior, though decline to provide reasons for the view.
The Predictive Processing Hypothesis
Authors: Hohwy Jakob
Published: October 2018

Prediction may be a central concept for understanding perceptual and cognitive processing. Contemporary theoretical neuroscience formalizes the role of prediction in terms of probabilistic inference. Perception, action, attention, and learning may then be unified as aspects of predictive processing in the brain. This chapter first explains the sense in which predictive processing is inferential and representational. Then follows an exploration of how the predictive processing framework relates to a series of considerations in favor of enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended cognition (4E cognition). The initial impression may be that predictive processing is too representational and inferential to fit well to 4E cognition. But, in fact, predictive processing encompasses many phenomena prevalent in 4E approaches, while remaining both inferential and representational.
Martin Chuzzlewit
Authors: Browning Logan Delano
Published: October 2018

Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4) has struggled against negative reactions from general readers and critics from its beginnings as a serial, but numerous advocates for the novel’s value have shown that these negative responses often provide clues to more fruitful and positive approaches. These include especially the scrutiny of the characters and their afterlives, both creative and critical, and the re-evaluation of features thought problematic from a narratological perspective, such as coincidence and an abundance of characters too old or infirm to have a role in the plot. More careful attention to the chronological overlap of Chuzzlewit’s and A Christmas Carol’s composition and publication is another promising avenue for future scholarship.
David Copperfield
Authors: Davis Philip
Published: October 2018

This chapter on a novel concerning both a younger and an older view of the same life story is about the equivocal intelligence of second thought, its place and its pain in relation to both emotional primacies and adult requirements. The emotional intelligence and imaginative memory work involved in the writing of David Copperfield—including the secret work of Dickens in his manuscript revisions—seeks adulthood without disillusionment, and continuity across rather than despite experiential breaches. Instead of a model of mental synthesis as offered by a contemporary thinker such as J. C. Hare—of first and second thoughts reconciled dialectically in a unifying third—it achieves a complex blending of first and second thoughts, of past and present, consciousness and unconsciousness, to precipitate a third understanding of reality through art: an inextricable amalgam of experience revealed as the novel’s own ‘mind of the heart’ and registered most particularly in the dense maturity of syntax. It is argued, against the hermeneutics of suspicion, that Dickens’s thinking, in its relation to perceived and recalled reality, is not merely sentimental but of a finally metaphysical force.
Bleak House
Authors: Flint Kate
Published: October 2018

This chapter recognizes the challenge of Bleak House’s complexity—a complexity that in many ways replicates its contemporary social world. It considers how it is internally concerned with problems of interpretation, obscurity, and illegibility. It looks at the novel’s doubleness: two narrators, and a continual sliding between descriptive and metaphoric language. Analysing Bleak House’s engagement with such issues as pollution, disease, the law, philanthropy, and slavery brings out questions of where responsibility rests—with legislation, or with individual action? Bleak House demonstrates how we may apprehend our material environment, but making political and ethical sense of it is a far more difficult task. The chapter proposes that the principle of the network suggests profitable strategies for approaching the novel and the tightly interconnected world that it represents.
Our Mutual Friend
Authors: Duncan Ian
Published: October 2018

This chapter situates Our Mutual Friend at the intersection of nineteenth-century projects of culture: the antiquarian, pedagogical, and anthropological. Silas Wegg and the doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren, represent competing versions of the novel’s imaginative sources in popular culture, attached to successive historical stages. Wegg is a corrupt avatar of the Romantic ballad revival, with its commitments to antiquarian nationalism and a degenerationist cultural history. Jenny personifies a communal heritage of folktales, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, absorbed organically in childhood, anticipating the anthropological claim on these materials, in the decades after Dickens’s death, as relics of a universal ‘savage mind’. Our Mutual Friend resists both programmes, the anthropological as well as the antiquarian, in counterpoint to its well-studied critique of the acquisition of culture through formal schooling.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Authors: Orford Peter
Published: October 2018

Dickens’s last and incomplete novel has generated a remarkable number of theories regarding the missing end. This chapter explores the ways in which responses to the novel have evolved, dividing them broadly into four groups: the opportunists, the detectives, the academics, and the irreverent. It explores the solutions for their implicit criticism regarding how The Mystery of Edwin Drood should be interpreted, examining the conflicting ideas which have arisen about what genre the book falls into, or what other works it most closely resembles. It closes with a call to recognize and celebrate the comedy in Edwin Drood as a necessary balance to the prolonged morbid fascination with the final book of Dickens.
Journalism and Correspondence
Authors: Mackenzie Hazel
Published: October 2018

This chapter discusses recent developments in digital technologies and their application to Dickens’s overlapping roles as correspondent, reporter, journalist, and editor. It argues that open-access digitization, digital cataloguing, and computational stylistics open up new possibilities for our understanding of Dickens and his mediation of these roles, revealing new information as to subject matter, style, trends in editorial policy, and patterns of contribution. This information challenges previous author-centred narratives regarding Dickens’s progression from reporter and sketch artist to journalist and editor as well as long-held assumptions regarding his journals Household Words and All the Year Round. In this, digitization follows the current trend in scholarship towards the destabilization of the traditional ideas of Dickens as journalist and editor and acknowledges the changeable and sometimes contradictory nature of his fulfilment of these roles and points to new areas of interest.
The Trouble with Angels
Authors: Adams James Eli
Published: October 2018

Dickens’s celebration of other-worldly or childlike femininity, with its corollary anathema of ‘fallen’ women, has often seemed the quintessence of a fabled Victorian repression, which obscures or radically simplifies the unsettling energies of erotic life. Yet Dickens’s fiction acknowledges the power of those energies in its incessant preoccupation with the management of sexual desire. Gender norms in Dickens’s world are largely articulated through the management of desire, which also underwrites moral hierarchies that are frequently aligned with hierarchies of social class. But there is a powerful, gendered asymmetry in Dickens’s representation of sexual discipline. Inverting long-standing gender norms, the idealized woman of Victorian domestic ideology is a figure of selfless, nurturing sympathy, whose instinctive modesty and restraint are a foil to more aggressive, self-interested masculine desire, which must be controlled by strength of will. Thus while representations of femininity in Dickens tend to be shaped by stark sexual dichotomies—the virtuous and the ‘fallen’—masculinity depends on self-discipline that is articulated through a variety of psychic regimens, which are inflected by, and in turn articulate, more intricate social hierarchies. This chapter focuses on three novels from different stages of Dickens’s career—The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend—to bring home something of the range in his characterization of sexuality and sexual discipline, but also the consistency with which masculine self-discipline serves as a marker of class standing. That standing is ratified in the relative assurance with which a character masters his unruly desires—desires thrown into relief by contrasting models of femininity.