Friendship in the workplace is alternately approached as a resource to be leveraged or a liability to be managed. In leadership development, where practitioners carefully cultivate their subjectivities, appearing adequately self-aware and open-minded is valued highly. How do leadership development practitioners’ use of complaints in their workplace, in ways both formal and informal, serve as an affordance for friendship? Considering this example raises questions about what it means to make friendship useful at work and in other contexts, and it suggests that separating the “goods” of friendship from the “bads” is a misleading and problematic endeavor.

Finally, Chapter 8 rounds off the book by summarizing the main conclusions, highlighting several directions for future research, and considering the broader implications of the neuroscience of word meaning.

Chronological age is a common feature in the organization of North American society. From institutional to everyday spaces and our cultural practices of association within these spaces, age segregation is the norm. Yet, intergenerationality persists in its various forms. One such space in which intergenerationality occurs is the skatepark, and one such form is that of organic intergenerational friendships forged between youth and adults. In this study, the phenomenon is explored through data gathered from eighteen semi-structured, on-site interviews with twenty participants at a skatepark in a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through these interviews, three main themes are identified: (1) making intergenerational friends at the skatepark, (2) practices of youth-adult intergenerational friendship, and (3) perceptions of youth-adult intergenerational friendship. These three themes contribute to the overall argument of the chapter that youth-adult intergenerational friendships simultaneously disrupt boundaries and patterns of age/generational differences in friendship while also reinforcing such differences in both subtle and explicit ways.

This chapter begins with the perspective that subject matter experts have failed to be public with their definitions of psychopathy, and as a consequence, the general public has a limited understanding of psychopathy as a clinical construct. This chapter describes the origins of the term psychopathy and the nonlinear path that has been taken to establish contemporary definitions of this construct. The chapter outlines four key perspectives of psychopathy: Cleckley’s perspective, the triarchic model of psychopathy, the comprehensive assessment of psychopathy personality, and the view of psychopathy traits as extreme manifestations of general personality traits. The goal is not to convince readers which perspective they should adopt, but rather to help clarify similarities and differences so that the meaning of psychopathy can be more readily understood depending on the context in which it is being used. Indeed, different contemporary perspectives on psychopathy tend to share in common the view that core psychopathy traits emerge from interpersonal, affective, and behavioural domains of functioning.

Even as friendship carries overwhelmingly positive connotations, the categories of “fair-weather friend” or “frenemy” indicate that less-than-ideal friendship is commonplace. What remains poorly understood is how people make sense of the persistence of their imperfect friendships. Drawing on studies of difficult friendships and friends who cohabitate, this chapter offers an interpretive perspective on how and why friendships that people characterize as difficult persist. Using the concept of the “good enough friend,” we unsettle ubiquitous yet simplistic directives of modern therapeutic culture to “cut off” difficult relationships. We argue that the potential for ease and difficulty are equally inherent to what friendship is, and that by attending to “difficult” ones and how people evaluate their worth, we can better understand how people navigate concord and conflict in personal life. We advance the intervention that a critical friendship must resist hierarchies of intimacy inherited from Western philosophical traditions that rank easy, pleasurable friendships as inherently “better” than ambivalent ones, which may also have core places in people’s lives.

This chapter outlines the fundamental importance of metaphor in understanding the functions of basic body parts and various simple bodily actions.

The afterword synthesizes the chapters in this volume to draw out themes, lessons, and future directions and acknowledges the importance of the ethnographic approach of this work. We expand on the three themes of ideals in tension with practices, the shifting nature of acquaintanceship to friendship, and the enactment of public and private across space and place. We argue for three valuable insights gained from reading these chapters together. First, they point towards the importance of how people read our intentions, friendship performances, and relationships. Second, friendships impinge on our ontological security. Third, there are rhythms to connections across space. Interactions are temporally bound and accounting for the temporal is helpful in completing analyses of friendships. Ultimately, we show how these chapters sit at the intersection of critical theory and symbolic interaction. We also underscore that this volume marks not the end, but a beginning of a renewed research agenda on critical friendship, one that began with contributors who were mostly strangers but who are now mostly friends.

Alien abduction reports often follow a strikingly familiar pattern: lost time, immobilization, floating, bright lights, and invasive procedures. These memories are emotionally intense and vividly detailed—even when the events themselves can’t be verified. This chapter explores how neuroscience might explain why such experiences feel real, even when they may not reflect objective reality. Topics include memory formation and reconsolidation, the vulnerability of memory to suggestion, and the ways cultural narratives can shape the content of extraordinary experiences. It also touches on hypnosis, dissociation, and why some individuals may be more prone to magical thinking or altered states of consciousness. Through this lens, alien encounters are reframed as meaningful phenomena rooted in the brain’s powerful (and sometimes flawed) storytelling machinery—offering insight into how belief systems form around experiences that defy conventional explanation.

Chapter 2 introduces the “nuts and bolts” of the brain. It describes how neurons represent and transmit information, and how the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain most relevant to word meaning. Special emphasis is placed on the following large-scale cortical systems: modal networks of sensory and motor areas; transmodal networks of association areas; and the core language network. This chapter also briefly outlines the brain mapping methods that are used in the various experiments discussed in Chapters 3–7.

Quality data are necessary to test research questions about psychopathy. This chapter describes the research design of the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study (ISVYOS). The ISVYOS was initiated in 1998 and has been ongoing ever since. In this chapter I describe the ISVYOS that was used in the book, procedures for interviewing youth and collecting data in adulthood, control variables that were accounted for in the different analyses in this book, and the different measures of psychopathy that were available. This book focuses on 535 incarcerated youth who received an interview and rating on the PCL:YV. Many of these youth received psychopathy assessments using additional measures. To give readers a better sense of how psychopathy manifests in youth, I describe procedures for rating the PCL:YV and discuss and interpret different responses that youth provided that were used as indications of the presence of specific psychopathy traits. This includes describing manifestations of each item from the Interpersonal, Affective, and Lifestyle factors from the PCL:YV.

Chapter 9 is on the different motives and ways through which social actors destroy images, and the consequences of these actions on different forms of image ‘death’. Analysing image destruction could show the different dynamics of what is tolerated in the public space, what is deemed appropriate, representable, and visible, and what is deemed offensive and needs to be made invisible. Methods for researching absences will be presented and applied on the case example of digital memes.