1. Familial clustering of learning disorders: Dyslexia and dyscalculia run in families – that is, in individuals who share both their genetic make-up and their surrounding environment. Children with at least one diagnosed first-degree relative are up to approximately four times more likely to develop learning difficulties themselves.

In the international school context, pupils with learning disabilities are educated differently. There are many countries in which the common practice is the combined teaching of children with and without disabilities, as is the case in the United Kingdom. There are also countries, however, that have just begun to adapt their separate school systems step by step to allow for combined teaching, as is the case in Germany. There are still other countries that keep to a dual system or offer both inclusive and separate teaching formats in parallel. School systems practicing inclusive education have already gathered many experiences and insights in dealing with the high degree of heterogeneity in terms of pupils’ learning performance at school. They have adapted their school systems to this heterogeneity, tested supportive measures, and trained or retrained their teaching staff.

The foundations of academic abilities in reading and mathematics are established early in life, long before formal schooling begins. One major source that impacts the outcome of academic abilities is the prenatal (or antenatal) and postnatal environment. Exposures during prenatal or postnatal development that cause permanent changes to the biology and outcome of an individual are known as ‘developmental programming’ (Sutton et al. 2016). These exposures include but are not limited to drugs, alcohol, maternal psychosocial stress, and teratogens such as pollutants. Earlier studies of pre- and postnatal environmental impact on the brain and behaviour have primarily focused on outcome measures such as mortality, physical growth, and internalizing and externalizing neurodevelopmental disorders. Later studies have, however, begun to focus on more fine-grained cognitive as well as academic outcomes, and their neural correlates, notably as cognitive and academic performance provide important measures of life outcome, including future well-being, health, and employment (OECD Education Working Papers). Thus far, links have been identified through animal models and epidemiological, prospective, and intervention studies in humans to identify the causal relationships and underlying mechanisms.

(1) Effect size of gender differences: Effect sizes of gender differences in reading and maths ability are small. A moderate effect size is currently only reported for a related domain ( male advantage in visuospatial mental modelling tasks).

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a learning disorder characterized by difficulties in reasoning about numbers and performing mathematical calculations (Butterworth et al. 2011; Kaufmann et al. 2013; Kucian et al. 2014). The term DD highlights the specificity of numerical deficits and its developmental origins and is often used synonymously with mathematical disabilities and mathematical learning disabilities (Szűcs and Goswami 2013).

Learning to read is a remarkable feat with extraordinary consequences for cognitive and personal development. This learning process involves substantial changes in the function and structure of underlying brain networks. In most western industrialized societies, these changes take place across several years in early and middle childhood, from the onset of formal schooling at around 5 to 7 years of age to 3rd grade of primary school at around 7 to 9 years. Over this period, brain maturation processes co-occur with cognitive development shaped by learning and literacy experience (Dehaene et al. 2015). Longitudinal designs are useful for disambiguating the contribution of maturational changes from those associated with cognitive development and the individual trajectories of reading skills. This knowledge is important for advancing our understanding of the specific neurodevelopmental basis of both typical reading and dyslexia.

The main purpose of this chapter is to review the recent literature on male sexual fantasies. Topics that are analysed include sexual fantasies’ definitions and functions; methodological issues related to the disparate measures used across studies; the distinction between fantasies, interests/desires, and experiences; how general and unusual fantasies are developed; prevalence rates and the multidimensional content of fantasies, with highlights on gender, sexual orientation, and personality differences; and, finally, fantasies’ role in sexual offending. Overall, sexual fantasies are pervasive across the general population and, for the most part, they reflect evolutionary perspectives on psychology. As sexual fantasies can be used to increase sexual arousal in people that suffer from dysfunctions and to foster more positive romantic feelings towards a partner, they are important in clinical treatment and marital therapy settings. Moreover, they constitute a central component in the treatment of people convicted of sexual offenses that are at a high risk of recidivism. Therefore, it is essential to understand fantasies’ role in human sexuality and behaviour.

In species with internal female fertilization, males face the problem of paternity uncertainty, which refers to the risk of investing in unrelated offspring. As such, a partner’s sexual infidelity may be particularly damaging for males given that it may result in allocating resources to genetically unrelated offspring, reducing a male’s inclusive fitness. As such, males invest considerable time and effort to retain their mates. Mate retention tactics involve cost-inflicting strategies that operate by reducing the partner’s self-perceived value to prevent the partner from leaving the partnership, and benefit-provisioning strategies that operate by boosting a partner’s self-esteem and improving relationship satisfaction. In this chapter, first, we discuss the benefits that men gain from long-term relationships, which include increased probability of paternity, prolonged proximity and sexual access to a partner, and increased probability of attracting a high-quality partner. Second, we discuss the main costs of infidelity for males, including the risk of investing in an unrelated child as well as costs to his reputation and future mating opportunities. Third, we define and discuss a taxonomy of mate retention tactics and explain that a male’s mate retention tactics are expected to respond to his female’s partner preferences, at least partly. Indeed, males have been found to engage in tactics such as resource display given that females value mates that are able and willing to provision them and their offspring with resources. Empirical evidence has also, surprisingly, found that men, more than women, engage in strategies such as submission and debasement. Empirical evidence also suggests that men also use threats and violence directed to rivals more than women do. Our review also demonstrates that males engage in both benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting mate-retention strategies, and that the type of strategy chosen as well as its intensity is partly dependent on a man’s mate value and his ability to acquire resources. Finally, we discuss some of the main environmental factors that may influence the mate retention tactics displayed by males, including partner mate value and perceived infidelity threat.

Working memory (WM) training explores whether and how repeated practice on working memory tasks might generalize to a variety of outcome measures. Although this field of research is part of the growing literature in cognitive sciences, it has spawned contentious debates. The controversies are largely driven by inconsistent findings and commercial interests, and as a result, numerous meta-analyses and systematic reviews have focused on the validity of WM training. Similarly, there is an inconsistency in the conclusions drawn by these meta-analyses; while there seems to be an agreement about the generalization to proximal cognitive measures; there is a discrepancy in the interpretation of any translational outcomes (e.g., behavioral, clinical, and academic). In this chapter, we review the collection of meta-analyses with a particular focus on children diagnosed with ADHD and other developmental disabilities, and recommend that the field should focus on improving our understanding of the mechanistic and effectiveness properties of WM training, which might result in the development of valuable alternative and/or supplemental approaches, when traditional interventions might fall short, especially for individuals typically underrepresented and underserved.

We start with a brief review of evidence that verbal working memory (WM) involves a limited capacity phonological loop capable of retaining verbal sequences for a few seconds in immediate serial recall, vocabulary acquisition, speech production, and language comprehension. The challenge of explaining how such a system handles information about serial order is discussed in the context of computational models of the immediate recall of unstructured sequences of words, letters, or digits, an extensively studied laboratory task for which there are many benchmark findings. Evaluating computational models against these benchmarks suggests a serial ordering mechanism in which items are simultaneously active before being selected for sequential output by a process of competitive queuing (CQ). Further evidence shows how this process may operate in the context of sequences that conform to various kinds of linguistic constraint. We conclude by suggesting that CQ is a promising theoretical mechanism for connecting and potentially unifying theories of WM and language processing more generally despite major differences in their scope and level of abstraction.

Working memory (WM) is our limited-capacity storage and processing (memory) system that permeates essential facets of our cognitive life such as arithmetic calculation, logical thinking, decision-making, prospective planning, language comprehension, and production. Since the very inception of WM in the early 1960s (Miller et al., 1960), its role in language acquisition and processing has been extensively investigated both empirically and theoretically by researchers from diverse fields of psychology and linguistics, accumulating an increasingly huge body of literature (e.g., see Baddeley, 2003; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993 for reviews of early studies). Notwithstanding, the field still lacks a comprehensive and updated profile of conceptualizing and implementing working memory in the broad domains of native and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. In this chapter, we introduce a comprehensive handbook in which key areas of inquiry and practice in working memory and language are at the forefront and theoretical ingenuity and empirical robustness are integrated throughout.

Many vertebrate animals engage in masturbation and it is also prevalent in primates. Given the gregarious nature of this order, this is perhaps surprising, since, by definition, it occurs to the exclusion of others. Our research maps the masturbatory landscape of the primate order, highlighting the distribution and diverse forms self-stimulation of the genitalia takes: from an infant vervet monkey grasping his own penis in his mouth, to female chimpanzees using water spigots to stimulate their clitorises. We also examine the causation of this behavior. While autosexual behavior can be a substitute for allosexual interactions, many acts of masturbation seem to serve functions, which fall broadly under two categories: avoidance of pathogen transmission and reduction of mate competition. In terms of implications for human public health, the finding that masturbation is ubiquitous throughout the primate order, practiced by wild-living members of both sexes and all age-groups is a strong counter-argument to voices who condemn human masturbation as "unnatural."

Gibbons are the small-bodied Asian apes that comprise the taxonomic family Hylobatidae. In addition to small body size, gibbons are distinct from the large-bodied apes (i.e., orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees) in a number of aspects of their behavior and biology. These traits include strict arboreality; sexual monomorphism for body and canine size; the production of loud complex calls, or songs; the joint defense of a fixed territory; and the tendency to live in small family groups with a single adult pair. While frequently described as monogamous, and even as “mating for life,” research over the last several decades has documented far greater diversity in gibbon social systems than was initially recognized, leading to a broad effort to reassess how best to characterize gibbon social systems and their origins. Nevertheless, as this review will demonstrate, much of what we know about gibbon sexual psychology and reproductive behavior is best understood in the context of small, one-male/one-female social groups.

Evolutionary sexual psychology posits that sexual preferences evolved in response to recurring adaptive problems faced by men and women in regard to reproduction and mating. Accordingly, asymmetries in the mating-related problems faced by the sexes should result in sex-differentiated preferences. Some asymmetries which could be expected to result in sex-differentiated preferences include: 1) the length of time during which one is able to produce offspring (much longer for men as compared to women, which is posited to result in men showing a preference for partners who display cues to fertility and reproductive viability); 2) minimum investment needed to produce offspring (much greater for women as compared to men, which is posited to result in men showing a greater preference for short-term mating relative to women); and 3) certainty of maternity/paternity of offspring (much greater for women as compared to men, which is posited to result in men showing preferences which mitigate partner infidelity and sperm competition). Consistent with the predictions of evolutionary sexual psychology, many of the physical characteristics which men find to be attractive in women are associated with fecundity (e.g., a low waist-to-hip ratio, youthfulness). Men do appear to display a greater interest in engaging in short-term mating relative to women. Men self-report more permissive attitudes toward casual sex, desire a greater number of sexual partners across various time periods, and report being more motivated by casual sex when dating or using dating apps. Large representative surveys frequently find a sizable sex difference in the number of sexual partners reported over the lifespan, although the degree to which this may reflect factors like differences in the way that men and women respond to such questions (e.g., estimating versus counting) is debated. Field experiments indicate that men are more inclined to accept offers of casual sex from opposite-sex strangers, and men appear to be more likely to pay for sex. The content of sexual fantasies and pornography also offer insights into the nature of men’s sexual preferences. Men’s sexual fantasies more frequently involve elements of sexual variety and nonmonogamy (e.g., casual sex with multiple partners). Men also appear to consume pornography more frequently than women, which may reflect pornography providing vicarious access to excellent short-term mating opportunities in the form of a myriad of virtual partners who are youthful, attractive, and display unusually high levels of sexual accessibility. The contents of pornography, and themes common to men’s sexual fantasies, also demonstrate a preoccupation with partner infidelity.

Understanding evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs) is important for social scientists seeking a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and cognition. In this chapter we discuss the origins of EPMs, describing their functioning and situational sensitivity. We also discuss how EPMs offer a valuable framework for integrating proximate and distal explanations of psychological phenomena. We then describe methodologies and evidence that can be used to identify EPMs, before concluding with a discussion of how certain EPMs are mismatched with conditions of modern living, potentially interfering with the goal of a happy and healthy life.