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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to be as comprehensive as possible about what is known about mirror neurons at this time.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter offers a comprehensive critique including Churchland's hesitations about findings on mirror neurons (2011) which are balanced by Ramachandran's conviction that much of the research on mirror neurons is valid (2011). Following this is a summary of the results of the Mirror Neuron Forum (2011) wherein leading mirror neuron researchers exchange their views and conclusions about this subject.

Findings – The few single cells measures that we have show that they are much wider distributed throughout the brain than we have previously imagined. It should be stressed that single measures of mirror neurons have occurred albeit in limited situations. This establishes once and for all their relevance to humans.

Originality/value – The work on mirror neurons is a critical contribution from neuroscience to bringing the social brain into sociology and refining our understandings of intersubjectivity and of our biologically driven connections with others.

Purpose: This chapter describes the design and implementation, at the computer hardware and software level, of the Greggg robot. Greggg is a scalable high performance, low cost hospitality robot constructed from off-the-shelf parts. Greggg has a robust architecture and acts as a tour guide on-campus, both indoors or outdoors. This research allows one to build a customized robot at a low cost, under U.S. $2,000, for accomplishing the desired hospitality tasks, and scale, and expand the capability of the robot as required.

Practical Implications: The practical implication of the research is the capability to build and program a robot for hospitality tasks. Greggg is a customizable robot capable of giving on-campus tours both indoors and outdoors. In its current architecture, Greggg can be trained to be a museum docent and give directions to visitors on-campus or at an airport and scaled up for other hospitality tasks using off-the-shelf components. Enhancing the robot by scaling it up and expanding it, in addition to testing it with a range of increasingly more difficult tasks using machine learning algorithms, is highly beneficial to advancing research on the use of robots in the hospitality sector. Greggg can also be used for Robot-as-a-service (Rass) applications.

Societal Implications: The economic implication of Greggg is the ease and low cost with which one, with minimal technology know-how, can construct an autonomous hospitality industry robot. This chapter details the hardware and software needed to build a low cost scalable and customizable autonomous robot for the hospitality industry without having to pay an exorbitant price.

Research/Limitations/Implications: This research allows one to build their own customized hospitality robot under U.S. $2,000. Given the cost of building the robot, it has limitations on the hospitality tasks it can perform. It can navigate on flat surfaces, has limited vision and speech processing capabilities and has a battery life not exceeding an hour. Furthermore, it does not have any robotic manipulators or tactile processing capabilities.

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

Purpose – We summarize three previous neuroeconomic studies with two features that distinguish them from most others in experimental economics: (1) the use of physical pain to induce incentives and (2) acquisition of data on brain activation levels. By correlating behavior when payoffs are painful with brain activation, we are able to test for the neurobiological relevance of important phenomena previously observed in experimental studies that are at odds with classical economic theories of decision-making. These specific phenomena are (a) negative discounting of future payoffs; (b) nonlinear probability weighting; (c) the experience of regret and rejoice when making a decision under risk.

Methodology/approach – The expectation of pain is created through the use of mild electric shocks to the top of the foot. Pain confers disutility, so decisions are made in the domain of losses relative to the status quo. Simultaneous with these decisions, brain activation data is acquired through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Findings – We find evidence for negative time discounting of electric shocks. Participants who exhibited the most extreme forms of this discounting were distinguished by early and robust activation of a subset of the cortical pain matrix. We also find evidence for probability weighting in the domain of electric shocks, which is manifest at the neural level. We find evidence both behaviorally and neurally for regret and rejoice functions for painful outcomes.

Originality/value of chapter – Previous experimental economic studies in the domain of losses have typically used monetary rewards. Here, we report behavioral effects and neural correlates using pain.

To identify features of teacher support associated with children who made accelerated progress in writing in an early literacy intervention.

Mixed methods were used to describe the paths, rates, variability, and potential sources of change in the writing development of 24 first grade students who participated in an early literacy intervention for 20 weeks. To describe the breadth and variability of change in children’s writing within a co-constructed setting, two groups who made high and low progress were identified.

We focus on one child, Paul, who made high progress (became more independent in the writing of linguistically complex messages) and the features of teacher support that this child received compared to those who made lower progress. We compare him to another child, Emma, who made low progress. Teacher support associated with high progress included a conversational style and flexibility to adapt to the child’s message intent as the student composed, supporting students to write linguistically more complex and legible messages, and supporting students to orchestrate a broad range of problem-solving behaviors while writing.

We describe how teachers can support children to gradually take control of the composition process, how they can recognize complexity in early written messages and we provide suggestions as to how teachers can systematically assess, observe, and support children’s self-regulation of the writing process.

In this chapter, the authors present a conceptual perspective on resilience that is grounded in self-regulation theory, to help address theoretical, empirical, and practical concerns in this domain. Despite the growing popularity of resilience research (see Linnenluecke, 2017), scholars have noted ongoing concerns about conceptual confusion and resulting, paradoxical, stigmatization associated with the label “resilience” (e.g., Adler, 2013; Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). The authors seek to advance this domain via presenting a clarified, theoretically grounded conceptualization that can facilitate unified theoretical advancements, aligned operationalization, research model development, and intervention improvements. Resilience is defined here as continued, self-regulated goal striving (e.g., behavioral and/or psychological) despite adversity (i.e., after goal frustration). This self-regulatory conceptualization of resilience offers theoretically based definitions for the necessary conditions (i.e., adversity and overcoming) and outlines specific characteristics (i.e., unit-centered and dynamic) of resilience, distinguishes resilience from other persistence-related concepts (e.g., grit and hardiness), and provides a framework for understanding the connections (and distinctions) between resilience, performance, and well-being. After presenting this self-regulatory resilience perspective, the authors outline additional paths forward for the domain.

One of the causes of the Iranian revolution of 1978–1979 was that the Iranian government had serious administrative deficiencies. Amir Taheri, a well-known Iranian journalist, wrote in the mid-1978 that public disturbances were “due to an accumulation of discontent with tight control, over-centralization, lack of sufficient open debate and a general feeling that corruption and inefficiency together with arrogance have struck the bureaucracy.”¹ These administrative problems were not new. An important scholarly examination of the Iranian political system in the early1970s concluded that the “problems of governance in Iran are profound. Inefficiency is their hallmark….”²