Chapter 7 concentrates on abstract words like democracy, luxury, and chance. These words are harder to characterize and investigate than concrete ones like bird, mug, and banana, but the pace of progress in understanding their cognitive and neural bases has dramatically increased in recent years. For instance, it’s now clear that compared to concrete words, abstract ones rely more on verbal associations, occur in a broader range of contexts, and are rated higher for certain types of semantic features (e.g., time, social interaction, emotion, and drive). Consistent with these differences, it’s well-established that abstract words rely more than concrete ones on a few very high-level cortical areas that play vital roles in language processing while also contributing to the GSN/DMN. And yet there’s also mounting evidence that, like concrete words, many abstract ones are anchored to some extent in systems for perception and action. In addition, an increasing amount of research has been exploring how different categories of abstract words (e.g., those for numbers, emotions, mental states, and moral judgments) are associated with different sets of partly shared and partly segregated brain regions.

This chapter explores the friendship practices of midlife men and women in long-term couple relationships in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eighteen adults aged forty to fifty-nine, it examines how friendship is shaped by, and often subordinated to, the couple norm, an ideal that centers monogamous, cohabiting relationships. Although friendship is increasingly celebrated in cultural discourse, it remains routinely deprioritized in midlife. Friends offer emotional support, companionship, and moral guidance, yet their contributions are often undervalued or constrained by normative expectations. At times, emotionally significant friendships were perceived as disruptive to the primacy of the couple bond. The contemporary ideal of friendship as autonomous, equal, and elective, sits uneasily alongside the institutional authority of coupledom. This chapter argues that friendship and couple relationships are not discrete domains but are relationally entangled. By tracing how intimacy is organized through these entanglements, it calls for a critical rethinking of friendship’s role in contemporary personal life.

Chapter 3 begins to elaborate a central theme of the book, which is that word meanings are not localized in just one part of the brain; instead, they have a widely distributed web-like layout that includes many different cortical areas and corresponding types of representation. This particular chapter focuses on the experiential (e.g., visual, auditory, and motor) features of word meanings. The key idea is that, in keeping with theories of grounded/embodied cognition, these concrete features are identical to some of the modality-specific representations that allow us to make sense of our nonlinguistic experiences involving the pertinent types of entities and events. For example, the word “scissors” denotes a kind of household tool with specifications for shape, motion, sound, and manipulation, and considerable research suggests that we store these features directly within some of the same cortical areas that are engaged when we see, hear, and use scissors. Such findings are exciting because they support the intuitive view that words are like instructions for neurally simulating experiences, albeit usually in an automatic, implicit manner. There’s still a great deal of debate, however, about the precise ways in which word meanings relate to perception and action.

Chapter 6 tackles the environment in which the social life of the image takes place. The image interpretation is situated within the immediate material environment where the image appears, which includes the medium, genre, and placement of the image. Then the interpretation takes into account the broader time and space surrounding the image, which includes the extended historical, social, cultural, and political context that the image exists within. The method of photo documentation is presented and applied on the case example of graffiti images.

The final chapter ends the book with a discussion about when do images still matter despite their abundance and why images have an ambivalent relationship with reality. Can we distinguish between images that reflect reality, manipulate reality, or help us imagine an alternative reality? Can we talk of a ‘good’ image, a powerful one that lives on, and invites dialogue? Can we talk of a ‘just’ image? We want images that do us justice, whether it is for our personal memories or grieving, or for our collective identity and society.

Chapter 2 explores the rise of the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. This flagship initiative aimed at doing exactly what its titles suggests, and has drawn international acclaim – alongside critique and concern. In attending to its underpinnings, I highlight the managerial and clinical trends IAPT drew from and extended to proliferate therapy at scale. I examine how features of IAPT understood to be novel came to be regarded as vital forms of infrastructure around which other psychological services should be built. I also illustrate how the economic logics that underpinned IAPT initially resulted in particular kinds of therapy being rolled out for certain types of conditions experienced by specific groups; most notably, CBT for anxiety and depression diagnosed in adults of working age. The chapter reflects on the ramifications of IAPT, including in relation to the understandings of the nature of ill-health that result from it.

In Chapter 1, I demonstrate how professional claims-making operates as a form of boundary work that both configures and is configured by the evolving identity of clinical psychology. The keenness of many in the field to position it as different from psychiatry is illuminated, with the ‘diagnostic’ approach deemed particularly problematic by many leading clinical psychologists. Likewise, I spotlight how some in clinical psychology also labour to differentiate it from other psychological traditions (like counselling psychology and health psychology). This includes through the development of a professional body solely for clinical psychologists: the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP-UK). Ultimately, these forms of boundary-work help to configure the nature and practices of clinical psychology. Accordingly, they also have implications for the values and perspectives of individual therapists, and the kinds of care that patients are (not) able to access.

Chapter 1 establishes the foundational concepts of neuroimaging by exploring the complex relationship between brain structure and mental function. It traces the historical progression from ancient surgical approaches to modern noninvasive techniques, contextualizing how technological innovations have transformed our understanding of neural processes. The chapter examines the multiscale nature of brain investigation, from single-neuron recordings to population-level measurements, and evaluates the critical tradeoffs between spatial and temporal resolution across imaging modalities. Key neurophysiological principles underlying these technologies are introduced, including neuronal action potentials, hemodynamic responses, and the chemical processes that support neural activity. The text challenges common neuromyths while addressing fundamental questions about functional organization, from modular specialization to distributed network processing. By comparing the relative strengths and limitations of major neuroimaging tools (fMRI, EEG, MEG, PET, and TMS), the chapter provides an analytical framework for understanding how these methodologies collectively advance our ability to correlate brain activity with cognitive and behavioral processes, setting the stage for more detailed exploration in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4 analyses how clinical psychologists preface (potential) care through negotiations of referrals and acts of assessment prior to any kind of therapy. I regard these as key ‘uncertainty moments’ in which practitioners must decide whether to see a patient for therapy. This decision-making process depends on far more than an ‘objective’ evaluation of the patient in front of them. Resolution of uncertainty entails the reciprocal configuration of at least three kinds of ontologies: the ontology of a potential patient, the ontology of the service in which they work, and the ontology of their profession. These are not necessarily stable; rather, they can be remade over time and in relation to particular service users (demonstrating how visions and adjudications of therapeutic need are highly contextualised). Such ‘prefacing practices’ contribute to the denial of access for some patients, although even exclusions might themselves sometimes be accounted for by professionals as forms of care.