This chapter traces the history of Chinese writing from its creation and early development through to the establishment of the standard traditional script, emphasizing the structural components of the Chinese characters as a reflection of its history. Traditional Chinese classifications of Chinese character structure are introduced through the framework of the Han dynasty dictionary Shuo wen jie zi.

This chapter discusses what it means for a word to have meaning. Starting with the classical traditions in the West and the East about the nature of meaning, the connections between the word and the object it refers to (reference), and a set of inherent and defining properties which determines the referent (sense). It then moves on to the modern analysis of types of meaning, and introduces the way linguists characterize word meanings through semantic analysis. Major lexical relations, including hyponymy/hypernymy, antonymy, synonymy, polysemy, homonymy and homophony, are discussed. This chapter also introduces the notion of collocation.

The first decades of the twenty-first century were very different from the manufacturing revolution of the twentieth, when whole new industries, such as making cars, televisions and a myriad of new household appliances, created huge numbers of new, well-paid, skilled jobs. Instead, recent times have been more like the early stages of the industrial revolution two centuries ago, when living standards and life expectancy both fell. Around twenty years ago we started sending emails instead of letters, following news online rather than buying newspapers, ordering goods online rather than going to high street shops. Following the hollowing out of the old industries from the 1980s onwards, well-paid careers in imposing factories, familiar shops, banks and traditional post offices ended up being replaced by low-paid jobs staffing anonymous call centres, packing online orders, delivering take-away meals and driving Amazon vans. Not quite the dark satanic mills of 200 years ago, but not glad confident morning either. Previous generations assumed that steady growth would ensure better lives for their children. That confidence has evaporated across Western Europe and North America.

I present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Spain, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, I reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

I offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

This chapter discusses the importance of beauty in our lives and how it has been under-valued until recently. Despite philosophers having written extensively on aesthetics, large scale quantitative evidence supporting the notion that beautiful places benefit humans has been limited to aspects of the environment that were traditionally measurable, such as the percentage of green land cover, tree density and different types of land cover via satellite imagery or population density via the census. However, behavioural data generated through our increasing interactions on the Internet has allowed us to quantify aspects of the visual environment that were previously difficult to measure. Using geotagged images uploaded to the Internet and advanced deep learning methods, we extract information about the aesthetic qualities of different locations. We use crowdsourced data from the online game Scenic-Or-Not, which rates geotagged photographs on the basis of how scenic they are, to investigate whether individuals achieve greater levels of happiness when encountering more scenic environments during their everyday life experience. We find that individuals are happier in more scenic locations, even in built-up areas, after taking other environmental measures such as green space into account. We show that inhabitants of more scenic environments report better health, even when taking core socioeconomic indicators of deprivation into account.