The ability to express and perceive vocal emotions plays an important role in social interactions. Notably, the encoding and decoding of emotions often occur in social interactions of persons of different ages, where speaker and listener characteristics dynamically shape the perception of emotion expressed in the voice. However, existing models of (emotional) voice processing have primarily focused on stimulus quality while accounting sparsely for person characteristics, such as speaker and listener age. Consequently, systematic research on the expression and perception of emotion in the voice across the lifespan is needed. Here, we provide a synopsis of how the perception and specifically the recognition of vocal emotions is modulated by the age of both speakers and listeners. First, we summarize what we currently know about human vocal tract development and age-related variations in voice acoustics. We then synthesize evidence on age-related changes in the expression and perception of vocal emotions. We conclude that the perception of emotion expressed in the voice is not only a matter of how one speaks but also of who speaks and who listens. A broader perspective on how the voice communicates emotions should be reflected in existing models and guide future research.

This chapter offers an overview of the fascinating and complex world of Islamic Christology by using the Qur’an and Hadith, the primary sources of Islam, as a starting point. It condenses the wealth of literature that Muslim exegetes, philosophers, and mystics have produced on the Islamic representation of Jesus and Mary, examining what they consider to be authoritative Islamicized forms of Christian beliefs.

This chapter highlights the pivotal role of animal models in unraveling the intricate biological mechanisms and complex neural networks associated with emotional processing and psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, and addiction. These models contribute significantly to understanding distinct brain circuits governing specific emotional behaviors and uncovering potential alterations in pathological conditions. Exploring inter-individual variability and sex differences in emotional behaviors using these models is crucial for advancing our knowledge of emotional processing and dysregulation. This chapter emphasizes the importance of extending the time window analyzed, as well as the importance of using computational tools such as machine learning. Integrating cutting-edge computational tools will enable a finer understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, fostering improved interpretability of both preclinical and clinical results. Ultimately, preclinical models play a vital role in comprehending the neurobiology underlying emotional dysregulation, contributing essential insights for the development of effective treatment strategies for mental disorders.

Chapter 3 examines the programmatic consolidation, destruction, and removal of sensitive documents in Kenya and East Africa to London as constitutional negotiations were underway as a way to simultaneously curate, in ways favorable to British interests, materials for the writing of colonial history and for the making of a postcolonial political order. It presents recordkeeping as a political project through which the outgoing colonial government in Kenya attempted to strategically furnish the incoming independent government with documents that would facilitate structural continuity during the transition to political independence while at the same time removing those which might jeopardize British interests, at the personal and governmental levels, thereby creating the conditions for impunity.

By the late 1950s, the Colombo Plan had gathered steam and supporters. As this chapter shows, the small Bureau in Colombo attracted talented experts who worked as advocates as much as the administrators. Drawn on a rotating basis from donor nations, the directors of the Bureau could be counted to expand the realms of their work and reporting. For several of the newly joined, membership was a step towards higher diplomatic cachet, towards full sovereignty, membership of the UN, or simply higher standing among neighbours. Representatives enjoyed the indulgences granted by long meetings. In addition to lavish hospitality, the annual meetings provided ample space for reflections on the state of ‘East–West’ relations and on the best paths towards peace and prosperity. Still buoyed by the momentum from Bandung, leaders such as Sukarno relished the chance to again proclaim how the world had changed and how Indonesia would not be moulded into a Western approximation of how a state should appear. One grievance that Asian representatives found they had in common with colleagues from Australia and especially New Zealand, was the effects of price fluctuations on their main exports.

Pain is a complex experience that includes physical sensations and emotional responses. Research has shown that the central nervous system plays a significant role in how we experience pain. In this chapter, we review the current understanding of the neuroscience of pain, with a particular emphasis on pain processing in the brain. We cover early theories that emphasized the brain’s role in integrating and modulating pain, as well as modern approaches that view pain as distributed processing in the brain. We also introduce functional and computational frameworks for understanding the sensory and motivational aspects of pain and discuss various factors that contribute to the multidimensional nature of pain. The future direction of the study of pain neuroscience includes a deep sampling of subjective pain experience and the use of generative models.

This book has sought to explain the modern salafī doctrine of theonomy, according to which rule by Allāh’s law is a sine qua non of faith, and parliamentary democracy and other systems based on human legislation are deemed inherently polytheistic. The greater part of this study has been devoted to investigating this doctrine from the perspective of Islamic intellectual history: How it developed, based on what precedents, and under what circumstances. The details of this development have often been intricate but the underlying pattern is quite simple. This Conclusion will first summarize our principal findings regarding the Islamic intellectual history of the salafī doctrine of theonomy, and then will address the significance of modern salafī theonomy through the lens of political theology by revisiting the framework outlined in the Introduction so as to better situate salafī theonomy in a wider comparative context.

The final chapter brings the findings to the current context of Spanish American countries. Two centuries after independence, rural conflict is a rarer occurrence than in the 1800s; yet, the spatial segregation of indigenous minorities and the limits to political representation remain. Relying on contemporary data from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, the chapter shows that subnational territories with more intense office-selling in the past exhibit greater childhood malnutrition and stunting as well as low weight at birth. This is unlikely to be driven by alternative factors – such as the mere presence of indigenous populations or postcolonial developments – as the differences are visible with fine-level data only comparing localities straddling the borders of former colonial jurisdictions. Sides of the border with greater venality have today lower public good and economic well-being vis-a-vis neighboring ones, consistent with effects running through local governance. The chapter closes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the study of corruption; the Spanish Empire; as well as for understanding other contexts where office-selling also took place (China, France, and Iran).

At the end of the eleventh century, European knowledge of a wider world was emerging from a period of relative ignorance. Patterns of long-distance trade across the Mediterranean, an increased impetus in pilgrimage, and the settlement of previously little-known regions had, by the 1090s, all contributed to a growing awareness of distant lands and peoples. Italians were regularly trading in north Africa and the Levant; Normans had established themselves in southern Italy; French-speaking knights participated in campaigns of Christian conquest in the Iberian peninsula; Scandinavians were a familiar sight in Constantinople, and western knights had even fought with the Seljuqs in Asia Minor. The response to the papal preaching of the First Crusade in 1095, however, stimulated travel to the eastern Mediterranean and Near East on a much larger scale than previously. Most crusaders were experiencing topographies and landscapes that were unfamiliar, and encountering peoples whose appearance, customs, and values challenged their preconceptions about the world.

Travel manuscripts and printed books tell us how scribes and printers had to think carefully about representing foreign lands. Sometimes this meant turning the ordinary into the marvellous to capture the imagination of their readers; at other times this meant turning the strange into the recognisable. The manuscripts and printed books they produced translated tales of the unfamiliar into material palatable for domestic readers, which often required a careful balance of accuracy in relating travellers’ accounts and imagination to satisfy readers’ appetites for novelties. This essay looks at how travel literature circulated in manuscripts, how printers took advantage of the appetite for travel narratives, and what hybrid forms of manuscript and print tell us about who was reading them and the way travel literature was being read. As travel literature is a broad category that encompasses marvellous accounts, diaries, itineraries, letters, guidebooks, devotional aids, maps, and other narratives, my aim is not to offer a comprehensive overview but a few examples that demonstrate how the material context of travel literature can reveal much about their reception, use, and development.

Starting in 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Taking advantage of the routes opened up by the spread of Islam from one end to the other of the eastern hemisphere, he then travelled twenty-nine years, tracing the contours of Afro Eurasia, from North Africa to the China Sea and back. Ibn Battuta swears early in his journeys to travel the world without ever repeating a single route (2: 283; 191). and he undertook journeys three times the extent of Marco Polo’s, totalling around 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s adult years devoted to journeying also involved him learning many scholarly livelihoods, and taking many forms of training and service, of which the final one, travel writer, might be considered the consummation. I will argue that Ibn Battuta was able to perform himself as a professional traveller-author of such extensive outreach because he employs extraordinary tactics at particular thresholds, essentially becoming his own passport by cultivating, adopting, or pretending to a range of roles that will secure admission. This gave him unusual, but not complete access to many thresholds otherwise rarely crossed.

The aim of this chapter is to offer an approachable introduction to the questions, goals, and techniques of affective neuroscience research in nonhuman animals. Rather than providing a detailed literature review, we attempt to outline the overarching principles of the neuroscience of emotion and highlight some areas of special interest. We begin by describing a broad conceptual framework for understanding emotion states that is relied upon by many affective neuroscientists working with nonhuman animals today. We then explore representative examples of work from especially instructive domains of emotion research in other animals, focusing on mice. We discuss each example in detail, introducing the relevant methods and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, to convey the overall logic of affective neuroscience research in other animals and demonstrate its utility and potential for mechanistic insights into how emotions are manifested by the brain.

Here, the significance of mandates is shown for the initiation, pursuit, and outcome of mediation, as demonstrated by the Nordic cases of mediation from the past seventy-five years. Mandates influence the selection of mediator, but we argue that mediators can influence the mandate and develop it, within the confines set by the warring parties and the mandator. Some mandates are vague, which can allow space for the mediator, and mandates may change over time. Either way, they are important for the pursuit and outcome of the mediation. Five general conclusions are proposed for research and practice, including the mismatch between mandates and support for mediation efforts. In particular, the chapter emphasizes the utility of the mediation staircase for assessing outcomes. It also encourages the study of non-Nordic cases of mediation.