In Chapter 1, I explain how the book can be read and used in a nonlinear fashion, providing affordances for further exploration, comparable to the way the book approaches the creation and experience of works of art. The chapter proceeds to present a detailed advance organizer in the form of a point-by-point overview of the main messages and ideas of this book, providing a framework for the way the book can be read and used.

This chapter introduces action science as a novel approach to reconciling the knowing–doing gap presented in the Introduction. It reviews primary goals of this discipline as established in its seminal literature, as well as central tenets and terms in this discipline that are foundational to the analyses featured throughout the book. It also presents evidence that action science is a suitable approach to reconciling this knowing–doing gap, because its central tenets and terms speak to consistent and recurring themes in the extant educational literature. I explain how the ladder-of-inference framework from this literature is used to investigate K-12 urban teachers’ inferential thinking about cultural differences in the literature review featured across the next six chapters.

Doppelgänger is a term drawn from the writing of Jean Paul Richter in his novel Siebenkäs. This term is examined and discussed in this chapter. It stands for the possibility of the existence of a double of a living person and therefore raises questions about the nature of the self and of mind too. The concepts of self and mind are explored and the implications for philosophy of mind are examined. The importance of attending to the empirical literature rather than using thought experiments is emphasized.

In the middle of the last century, Archie Cochrane, one of the founding fathers of evidence-based medicine, argued that understanding healthcare treatments required the consideration of three questions: “Can it work?”, “Does it work?” and “Is it worth it?” Each of these questions addresses a different aspect of the problem and requires different assumptions and different research methodologies. Understanding if a treatment can work establishes proof of principle derived from efficacy studies that control who takes the treatment, how it is administered, and how outcomes are measured. The question “Does it work?” is about effectiveness that is evaluated under conditions of the usual care. Randomized controlled trials, which form the core of efficacy research, are difficult to employ in the evaluation of effectiveness. Even if interventions are shown to be efficacious and effective, people need to decide if accepting the treatment is worth it. Healthcare can be expensive, inconvenient, painful, and sometimes of little value. This introductory chapter reviews the three questions and prepares the reader for the in-depth discussion of these issues in the following 16 chapters.

This chapter provides a brief review of basic neuroanatomy, followed by a more detailed description of structures and pathways important for neuropsychiatric practice. The focus will be on the limbic brain and the functional anatomy of emotion, memory, cognition and behaviour. A more comprehensive review of general neuroanatomy can be found in standard textbooks such as Johns, Clinical Neuroscience.

This chapter presents considerations when conducting multi-nation research, with a particular focus on research conducted with sexual minority and gender diverse (SMGD) communities. Specifically, this chapter provide a nonexhaustive list of best practices from idea development, including forming multi-nation research teams, to practical challenges of the research process, such as questions of cross-cultural reliability and validity of chosen methods, and challenges of recruitment and data collection. Additionally, reference is made to specific methodological aspects, including missing data analysis and common analytical procedures, such as multilevel modeling. Examples and aspects of reflective practices, such as reflections on positionality, the impact of cultural and ethical aspects on the research process, and sources of bias and how research teams may make efforts to overcome them, are also presented.

• Drug use is common. It is estimated that one in ten people in the UK have tried an illegal psychoactive drug in the last year.

• Young people use more drugs than any other age group, many by their mid-teens.

• Cannabis is the most commonly used illegal psychoactive drug.

• People use psychoactive drugs to change the way they feel.

• Psychoactive drug use can result in new feelings that would otherwise be hard to experience, or take away unwanted feelings. To feel good, or stop feeling bad.

• Sometimes psychoactive drugs are used for social gain, bringing a sense of belonging and identity.

• As we will see in Chapter 11, some people experience mental health problems which increase their risk of using drugs

• The UK has two drug laws, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016. These laws place all psychoactive drugs under control and rank some drugs according to their potential to cause harm.

• The UK drug laws make it an offence to produce, supply, import or export and, in some cases, possess a psychoactive drug.

The beginning of the third millennium, starting in the early noughties and increasing in strength throughout the 2010s, has seen a large shift in theoretical focus in the mind sciences. In what might be called the predictive revolution or the predictive turn, many researchers in the psychological and brain sciences have come to consider the human mind a ‘predictive engine’ or ‘prediction machine.’ Like its predecessor, the cognitive revolution, more than half a century before, the predictive revolution is grand in ambition. It tries to explain all mental processes within one common framework. In this unified theory, the functioning of the mind is no longer best explained as an information processor: Minds have become prediction systems. The predictive revolution promises to reconcile cognition and behavior as the intrinsically connected two sides of the same coin serving human interactions with the environment.

Module 1 lays the foundation for understanding culture and cultural differences to be discussed later in the text by examining basic elements of the psychology of culture. Anthropological evidence suggests humans evolved cognitive enhanced capacities to facilitate social interaction, but which also made us unavoidably aware of our mortality. Cultures have increased in complexity and diversified, developing unique systems of values and ethics.

This chapter of the handbook introduces readers to the field of moral psychology as a whole and provides them with a guide to the volume. The authors delineate the landscape of morality in terms of five phenomena extensively studied by moral psychologists: moral behavior, moral judgments, moral sanctions, moral emotions, and moral communication, all against a background of moral standards. They then provide brief overviews of research on a few topics not assigned a dedicated chapter in the book (e.g., the moral psychology of artificial intelligence, free will, and moral responsibility), noting several other topics not treated in depth (e.g., the neuroscience of morality, links between moral and economic behavior, moral learning). In the last section of the chapter, the authors summarize each of the contributed chapters in the book.

Chapter 1 explores the complexity of defining adolescence. It then emphasises the need to include adolescents in health research and service development, although there are still significant barriers to their meaningful participation. The complexity of participation is also introduced as well as participatory methodology and methods being described.

My understanding of children’s cognitive development involved a series of progressive shifts in my understanding of what is involved in learning a language. Rather than language serving as a means of expressing and sharing existing thoughts, I came to see language as the exclusive means of creating thought itself. To my surprise I have become a sort of “Nominalist”; the view that language is the vehicle of thought itself.

This chapter describes challenges of proposing a different understanding of a well-known phenomenon, imitation (and its development in young children). The first challenge was to study imitation as a shared motor activity in a two-person perspective, instead of as a solitary tool for learning or forming mental images. A related challenge was to analyse imitation as a multifaceted phenomenon involving a hierarchy of mechanisms according to what, when, and how you imitate. This led to challenging the assumption that people with autism spectrum disorder cannot imitate and claiming, “Yes, they can!” Finally, hyperscanning two brains during synchronic imitation allows assessment of interbrain synchronization. From this an ultimate challenge emerges: to see imitation in its substitutive role as a multiplier of symbolic creations in a two-person generative mind. More generally, I explain how such a perspective builds on the philosophical framework of Henri Wallon that I encountered early in my career and that stood in opposition to the then-prevailing Piagetian paradigm.

This chapter explains what this book is about. Becoming an adult is different for everybody. Young people with cognitive disability can find it hard to get the right supports to become an adult. Many young people can experience violence and abuse. This book tells the stories of young people with cognitive disability from different backgrounds. Family members and practitioners also talk about stories of young people with cognitive disability.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the psychosocial literature on personal narratives, in general, and in connection to genocide and war, in particular. We begin with the concept of societies’ master narratives, emphasizing their long-term impacts on people’s personal narratives of genocide and war. We then look at the main characteristics and uses of personal narratives in psychosocial research. From there, we briefly present and discuss archives of personal narratives of survivors of gross human rights’ violations and their use in different truth commissions, followed by usages of personal narratives in research of genocide and war in different places in the world. Our focus in this chapter is mainly (though not exclusively) on the contexts of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian/Arab–Jewish conflicts.

This book aims at providing the reader with an introduction to psychiatry and to the study of mental disorders. While still addressing basic theoretical concepts of importance for the understanding of psychiatry as a specific field of knowledge, its main focus is not an extensive discussion or a comprehensive review of research findings. Instead, whenever possible, the different topics are addressed from a practical point of view, allowing the reader not only to expand their base knowledge but, most importantly, to obtain a good picture of how patients experiencing these conditions usually present themselves in clinical contexts. Moreover, the treatment of mental disorders is addressed in an objective, straightforward way, based on the respective authors’ own clinical experience in the management of a high number of patients, in different settings.

This opening chapter defines the concept of science-based therapy. The original framework for characterizing an approach as an empirically supported treatment is presented, for both well-established treatments and probably efficacious treatments. Also presented, a newer framework – sometimes called “the Tolin criteria” – provides greater emphasis to meaningful functional outcome improvement, meaningful effects in nonresearch settings, and lasting improvements. Other concepts in this chapter include evidence-based practice and pseudoscience in therapy.

People may believe sleep to be simply a static state that is the direct opposite of wakefulness; however, this is not the case. Rather, it is a complex and dynamic process, and throughout sleep we progress through multiple stages that can be measured discretely across behavioural, physiological, and cognitive domains. This chapter describes the differences and features of these different stages and how they can be measured. Also described is the fact that sleep and wakefulness are not mutually exclusive, and that there are times when the lines between sleep and wake can be blurred, and this is notably true in insomnia. Finally, the chapter explains how sleep is regulated through interacting homeostatic and circadian processes, and the neuroscientific underpinnings of the sleep and circadian system.

Over the last several years, the study of implicit bias has taken the world by storm. Implicit bias was even mentioned by the then candidate, Hillary Clinton, in a presidential debate in 2016. She went on to claim that implicit bias can have deadly consequences when Black men encounter law enforcement (for example, see Correll et al., 2002; Correll et al., 2007; Eberhardt et al., 2004). The controversy over police shootings of Black men and women has only intensified as evidenced by public outcry over the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 and increasing public support for the “Black Lives Matter” movement and its calls for liberty, justice, and freedom (Cohn & Quealy, 2020). These current events are but one reason why the study of implicit bias has so captivated the attention of the larger public: reducing it seems to have the potential to solve real-world problems. One idea is that if police officers were made aware of their implicit bias or participated in training workshops to reduce implicit bias, then perhaps fewer Black people would end up dead, arrested, or disproportionately sentenced to receive the death penalty (Baumgartner et al., 2014; Eberhardt, 2020).

This introductory chapter was invited to serve the role of inspiring young people in social and personality psychology about research methods. I wrote it in a personal voice, telling stories and offering opinions about (a) the joy of doing research, (b) the challenges of doing research on “concepts” rather than visible things like cells and atoms, and (c) the importance of methods alongside theory – specifically an argument against the “theory-first” and “theory-as-all-important” view.