Representing Development presents the different social representations that have formed the idea of development in Western thinking over the past three centuries. Offering an acute perspective on the current state of developmental science and providing constructive insights into future pathways, the bookdraws together twelve contributors with a variety of multidisciplinary and international perspectives to focus upon development in fields including biology, psychology and sociolog...

Whether we grow up with one, two, or several languages during our early years of life, many of us will learn a second, foreign, or heritage language in later years. The field of Second language acquisition (SLA, for short) investigates the human capacity to learn additional languages in late childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, after the first language --in the case of monolinguals-- or languages --in the case of bilinguals-- have already been acquired. Understanding Second Language A...

From yoga to neuroscience, a tour of major ideas about the body and mind.Body psychotherapy, which examines the relationship of bodily and physical experiences to emotional and psychological experiences, seems at first glance to be a relatively new area and on the cutting edge of psychotherapeutic theory and practice. It is, but the major concepts of body/mind treatment are actually drawn from a wide range of historical material, material that spans centuries and continents.

Converging evidence from disciplines including sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and human biology forces us to adopt a new idea of what it means to be a human. As cherished concepts such as free will, naïve realism, humans as creation's crowning glory fall and our moral roots in ape group dynamics become clearer, we have to take leave of many concepts that have been central to defining our humanness. What emerges is a new human, the homo novus, a human being without illusions. Leading...

This volume addresses the question of what it is like to be depressed. Despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted into the causes and treatment of depression, the experience of depression remains poorly understood. Indeed, many depression memoirs state that the experience is impossible for others to understand. However, it is at least clear that changes in emotion, mood, and bodily feeling are central to all forms of depression, and these are the book’s principal focus. In...

An original interdisciplinary study positioned at the intersection of literary theory and neuroscience."Literature matters," says Paul B. Armstrong, "for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story." In How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the parallels between certain features of literary experience and functions of the brain. His central argumen...

L. S. Vygotsky was an early-twentieth-century Russian social theorist whose writing exerts a significant influence on the development of social theory in the early-twenty-first century. His non-deterministic, non-reductionist account of the formation of mind provides current theoretical developments with a broadly drawn yet very powerful sketch of the ways in which humans shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and historical conditions. This dialectical conception of development insists...

Philosophy has much to offer psychiatry, not least regarding ethical issues, but also issues regarding the mind, identity, values, and volition. This has become only more important as we have witnessed the growth and power of the pharmaceutical industry, accompanied by developments in the neurosciences. However, too few practising psychiatrists are familiar with the literature in this area. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry offers the most comprehensive reference r...

All psychological processes—like biological and social ones—are dynamic. Phenomena of nature, society, and the human psyche are context bound, constantly changing, and variable. This feature of reality is often not recognized in the social sciences where we operate with averaged data and with homogeneous stereotypes, and consider our consistency to be the cornerstone of rational being. Yet we are all inconsistent in our actions within a day, or from, one day to the next, and much of such i...

2013 sees the centenary of Jaspers' foundation of psychopathology as a science in its own right. In 1913 Karl Jaspers published his psychiatric opus magnum - the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology). Jaspers was working at a time much like our own - with rapid expansion in the neurosciences, and responding to the philosophical challenges that this raised. The idea inspiring his book was very simple: to bring order into the chaos of abnormal psychic phenom...

Vygotsky is widely considered one of the most significant and influential psychologists of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, true appreciation of his theories has been hindered by a lack of understanding of the background to his thought. Vygotsky's Developmental and Educational Psychology aims to demonstrate how we can come to a new and original understanding of Vygotsky's theories through knowledge of their cultural, philosophical and historical context. Beginning with the mai...

In this unique exploration of the mysteries of the human brain, Roger Bartra shows that consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the mind but also in an external network, a symbolic system. He argues that the symbolic systems created by humans in art, language, in cooking or in dress, are the key to understanding human consciousness. Placing culture at the centre of his analysis, Bartra brings together findings from anthropology and cognitive science and offers an original vis...