Behaviour is the actions and reactions of an organism or group of organisms. Living organisms, robots and virtual agents all exhibit measurable forms of behaviour. Measuring behaviour involves assigning numbers to direct observations of behaviour using specified rules. Direct observation means collecting data that relates directly to the performance of the behaviour pattern in question. Measuring behaviour accurately and reliably is important because behaviour is central to answering many questions in the biological and social sciences. Measuring behaviour is challenging because behaviour has a temporal component, does not always occur in discrete bouts, is generally complicated, can be influenced by stimuli undetectable to humans and varies both within and between individuals. Studying behaviour can be broken down into a series of steps that starts with asking a question and ends with communicating findings.

The psychological principles impacting language learning can have a major impact on the success of the classroom, teachers/coaches, and learners. By successfully guiding and mentoring learners through their language and culture education journey, recognizing that cognition plays an important role in processing and retaining information will contribute to not only language knowledge, but also the development of biculturalism. Chapter 20 focuses on cognitive affect, and the impact of cognition when learning a language. This chapter identifies how to recognize distortions, affective dissonance, and negative classroom behaviors; it contains insights and suggestions on helping autonomous language learners reach their goals by effectively addressing disorienting dilemmas; and it offers teachers, mentors, and coaches concrete examples of how to help learners overcome self-sabotage.

This chapter argues that given the radical changes in the world's climate and biosphere, and their impact on language learners and on the changing nature of language, culture, literacies, and semiotics, the language field is well advised to look specifically to the transformative learning theories of Daisaku Ikeda and Edmund O'Sullivan. The chapter concludes that as the fields of bilingual, second, and world language education cohere into the multilingual turn, the existential crises of climate change demand that these fields enact an even greater paradigm shift by engaging climate as the integrating focus of language and culture learning and instruction. Ikeda and O'Sullivan's East–West perspective of selfhood provides a “deep cultural” foundation for such transformative language learning.

In his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, the fourth-century exegete Calcidius makes ample use of musical theory and its kinship with the related sciences arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Musical theory impacts upon the metaphysical, physical and ethical aspects in his account of the composition of the cosmic soul. Calcidius draws upon the soul’s musical make-up to show how it translates into the arrangement of the heavenly bodies, the relationships between the immortal and mortal creatures in the cosmos, and the tripartite human soul. Emphasizing the overall significance of harmonics for his exegesis, Calcidius, in fact, likens the creator god to a musician who composed the All as a well-tuned symphony. I shall discuss these aspects of his exegesis by placing them, initially, into the context of his sources, thereafter focusing on more idiosyncratic aspects: Calcidius’ referencing of musical composition for the question of the soul’s (un-)createdness, the relationship he establishes between harmonics and his demonology, and his view on human psychological conditions such as anger and passion. These conditions, according to Calcidius, are not merely a consequence of the human soul’s association with the body, but psychological manifestations of its natural make-up, which is determined by numeric-musical proportions.

This chapter considers the ways in which filmmakers have established the ‘tragic universe’ in screen adaptations of Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, through attention to the environment. Filmmakers repeatedly foreground the interplay between human body, physical surroundings and filmic space in ways that foreground the tragic environment as subjectively experienced and produced, and in turn see that environment producing and influencing its human subjects. The chapter moves between three kinds of tragic environment. The open spaces of films by Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Justin Kurzel, and Grigori Kozintsev frame human conflict within the natural world, a world that often suffers ecological catastrophe alongside its inhabitants, but which also endures. Another strand of films, including work by Michael Almereyda, Penny Woolcock, Don Boyd and Vishal Bhardwaj, establishes urban environments that privilege an interpretive focus on community, claustrophobia, consumption, and class. Finally, other filmmakers from Laurence Olivier to Kit Monkman, as well as directors of stage-to-screen adaptations, utilise cinematic technique to foreground inner psychological space, with environments constructed subjectively around their protagonists.

In twenty-first-century psychology and self-help literature, the “inner child” refers to an original or true self that serves as a repository of wisdom for its adult counterpart. This chapter traces the modern inner child back to Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her protégée Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 1890s. Hopkins described an idealized “Man Child” within each adult woman who could lead her to spiritual serenity and worldly success. Frances Hodgson Burnett fictionalized different versions of this figure in her short story Sara Crewe (1888) and her blockbuster novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), whose eponymous child hero helps his mother achieve undreamed-of wealth and status. Little Lord Fauntleroy also serves as his mother’s proxy outside of the domestic sphere, allowing her to reach personal goals without appearing inappropriately ambitious. The novel’s enormous popularity may have stemmed from this symbiotic relationship between mother and son. Then as now, the inner child helped women reconcile social pressures to be selfless and giving with career pursuits and self-indulgent behavior. The persistence of the inner child suggests that contemporary feminism still has work to do in enabling women to embrace opportunities without guilt.

This introduction provides an overview and brief history of New Thought and Christian Science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly not only in America but also in Britain and Canada. The introduction also describes how popular literature written for and about children circa 1900 helped spread New Thought ideas while simultaneously critiquing them. As I explain, New Thought proved especially popular with female novelists and readers seeking escape from domestic duties and greater opportunities outside of the domestic sphere. Finally, the introduction includes a chapter breakdown outlining which works and concepts will be discussed later in the book.

Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898), to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Lord Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought's relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).

In this introductory chapter we sketch the role that the notion of habit has played in the work of pragmatist authors such as James, Peirce and Dewey, and give an account of its ambivalent role in the development of psychology and cognitive sciences from James's introspectionism, through behaviorism and computationalism, up to 4E cognition and the rediscovery of a pragmatist action-oriented stance to cognition. We then investigate how the abandonment of the notion of habit in the second half of the twentieth century was paralleled by the adoption of a dualism between automatic routine and intelligent action and by an approach to cognition based on the notion of mental representation. We explore how habit formation has been investigated within contemporary neuroscience in a dynamic perspective based on the interplay between automatism and goal-oriented behavior. Subsequently we show that the adoption of the dualism between rational action and mechanical routines also influenced the development of twentieth-century sociological thought, and is nowadays being reconsidered by social theory. Finally, we provide an overview of the book and a chapter-by-chapter summary.

In this text, the role of emotions in education and society has been examined from various perspectives, particularly from psychological, philosophical, and other theoretical and political views. To develop more in-depth understanding about emotions in social life, a number of emotional virtues have also been explored at length. These include basic emotions, like happiness, sadness, and fear; emotional virtues often idealised, such as gratitude and compassion; and more complex emotional and cognitive-based dispositions prized in contemporary education and society, like resilience, grit, and mindfulness. A complicated account has been given, based on an interdisciplinary orientation toward emotional virtues and educating emotions in society. As seen here, the means and ends of educating emotional virtues are not simple and straightforward, given diversity in experiences, identities, and norms around emotional expectations in society. While educational implications have been discussed across chapters, thus far such considerations have been specific to particular emotional domains and contexts. This conclusion elaborates further on a more global perspective on educating emotional virtues in schools and society.