This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

The Index Buddhicus is the first classified comprehensive bibliography of Buddhist Studies. It describes secondary material ranging from articles, papers and chapters appearing in journals, proceedings and collections, through reference works, monographs, editions and theses, to digital resources. All entries are linked to an elaborate index of both proper names and thematic, and cross referenced to related material. The Index is available as an online resource.

It's time to rethink the Christian life in light of current research on the human mind, particularly with a deeper understanding of "extended cognition." Using insights from neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Brad Strawn and Warren Brown argue for a vision of the Christian life as extended into interactions with a local network of believers.

Widely regarded as the standard reference in the field, this handbook comprehensively examines all aspects of emotion and its role in human behavior. The editors and contributors are foremost authorities who describe major theories, findings, methods, and applications. The volume addresses the interface of emotional processes with biology, child development, social behavior, personality, cognition, and physical and mental health. Also presented are state-of-the-science perspectives on fear, anger, shame, disgust, positive emotions, sadness, and other distinct emotions. Illustrations include seven color plates.

Widely regarded as the standard reference in the field, this handbook comprehensively examines all aspects of emotion and its role in human behavior. The editors and contributors are foremost authorities who describe major theories, findings, methods, and applications. The volume addresses the interface of emotional processes with biology, child development, social behavior, personality, cognition, and physical and mental health. Also presented are state-of-the-science perspectives on fear, anger, shame, disgust, positive emotions, sadness, and other distinct emotions. Illustrations include seven color plates.

This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. This volume is divided into several sections first guiding the reader through important theoretical topics within affective neuroscience, social neuroscience and moral emotions, and clinical neuroscience. Each chapter addresses everyday social interactions and various aspects of social interactions from a different angle taking the reader on a diverse journey. The last section of the book is of methodological nature. Basic information is presented for the reader to learn about common methodologies used in neuroscience alongside advanced input to deepen the understanding and usability of these methods in social and affective neuroscience for more experienced readers.

Digital Storytelling and Ethics: Collaborative Creation and Facilitation provides a method for analyzing digital storytelling practices that focuses on the rhetorical, dialogic, co-productive, creative storymaking space rather than the finished stories or the technologies. Looking through a new media lens, Amanda Hill situates the digital storytelling genre and writing practice as a co-creative media process created between writers, storytellers, educators/facilitators, institutions, and the audience, and discusses the inter-relationships within the collaborative writing workshop as well as in those found in the dissemination of the final digital stories. Digital Storytelling and Ethics provides a reflexive look at the responsibility of the facilitator in co-creative digital storytelling writing spaces and makes use of diverse international case studies as examples. Hill shows that writing educators/facilitators should interpret their roles within the collaborative creation process. This will ensure that responsible facilitation practices based in witnessing guide the storytelling process and create an environment that treats participants as subjects with the ability to respond to the world. This innovative book is an essential read for collaborative digital writers and facilitators.

The authors are proud sponsors of the SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. Modern Sociological Theory gives readers a comprehensive overview of the major theorists and schools of sociological thought, from sociology′s 19th century origins through the mid-20th century. Written by an author team that includes one of the leading contemporary thinkers, the text integrates key theories with with biographical sketches of theorists, placing them in historical and intellectual context.

This advanced text for psychology, human development, and education provides students with state-of-the-art overviews of the discipline in an accessible, affordable format. Unique both in the depth of its coverage and in the timeliness of the research that it presents, this comprehensive text conveys the field of child and adolescent development through the voices of scientists who themselves are now shaping the field.

Advances in modern sciences occur thanks to within-fields discoveries as well as confrontation of concepts and methods from separated, sometimes distant, domains of knowledge. For instance, the fields of psychology and psychopathology benefited from accumulated contributions from cognitive neurosciences, which, in turn, received insights from molecular chemistry, cellular biology, physics (neuroimaging), statistics and computer sciences (data processing), etc. From the results of these researches, one can argue that among the numerous cognitive phenomena supposedly involved in the emergence the human intelligence and organized behavior, some of them are specific to the social nature of our phylogenetic order. Scientific reductionism allowed to divide the social cognitive system into several components, i.e. emotion processing and regulation, mental state inference (theory of mind), agency, etc. New paradigms were progressively designed to investigate these processes within highly-controlled laboratory settings. Moreover, the related constructs were successful at better understanding psychopathological conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, with partial relationships with illness outcomes. Here, we would like to outline the parallel development of concepts in social neurosciences and in other domains such as computer science, affective computing, virtual reality development, and even hardware technologies. While several researchers in neurosciences pointed out the necessity to consider naturalistic social cognition (Zaki and Ochsner, Ann N Y Acad Sci 1167, 16-30, 2009), the second person perspective (Schilbach et al., Behav Brain Sci 36(4), 393-414, 2013) and reciprocity (de Bruin et al., Front Hum Neurosci 6, 151, 2012), both computer and software developments allowed more and more realistic real-time models of our environment and of virtual humans capable of some interaction with users. As noted at the very beginning of this editorial, a new convergence between scientific disciplines might occur from which it is tricky to predict the outcomes in terms of new concepts, methods and uses. Although this convergence is motivated by the intuition that it fits well ongoing societal changes (increasing social demands on computer technologies, augmenting funding), it comes with several difficulties for which the current Frontiers in’ topic strives to bring some positive answers, and to provide both theoretical arguments and experimental examples. The first issue is about concepts and vocabulary as the contributions described in the following are authored by neuroscientists, computer scientists, psychopathologists, etc. A special attention was given during the reviewing process to stay as close as possible to the publication standards in psychological and health sciences, and to avoid purely technical descriptions. The second problem concerns methods: more complex computerized interaction models results in unpredictable and poorly controlled experiments. In other words, the assets of naturalistic paradigms may be alleviated by the difficulty to match results between subjects, populations, conditions. Of course, this practical question is extremely important for investigating pathologies that are associated with profoundly divergent behavioral patterns. Some of the contributions of this topic provide description of strategies that allowed to solve these difficulties, at least partially. The last issue is about heterogeneity of the objectives of the researches presented here. While selection criteria focused on the use of innovative technologies to assess or improve social cognition, the fields of application of this approach were quite unexpected. In an attempt to organize the contributions, three directions of research can be identified: 1) how innovation in methods might improve understanding and assessment of social cognition disorders or pathology? 2) within the framework of cognitive behavioral psychotherapies (CBT), how should we consider the use of virtual reality or augmented reality? 3) which are the benefits of these techniques for investigating severe mental disorders (schizophrenia or autism) and performing cognitive training? The first challenging question is insightfully raised in the contribution of Timmermans and Schilbach (2014) giving orientations for investigating alterations of social interaction in psychiatric disorders by the use of dual interactive eye tracking with virtual anthropomorphic avatars. Joyal, Jacob and collaborators (2014) bring concurrent and construct validities of a newly developed set of virtual faces expressing six fundamental emotions. The relevance of virtual reality was exemplified with two contributions focusing on anxiety related phenomena. Jackson et al. (2015) describe a new environment allowing to investigate empathy for dynamic FACS-coded facial expressions including pain. Based on a systematic investigation of the impact of social stimuli modalities (visual, auditory), Ruch and collaborators are able to characterize the specificity of the interpretation of laughter in people with gelotophobia (2014). On the issue of social anxiety, Aymerich-Franch et al. (2014) presented two studies in which public speaking anxiety has been correlated with avatars’ similarity of participants’ self-representations. The second issue focuses on how advances in virtual reality may benefit to cognitive and behavioral therapies in psychiatry. These interventions share a common framework that articulates thoughts, feelings or emotions and behaviors and proposes gradual modification of each of these levels thanks to thought and schema analysis, stress reduction procedures, etc. They were observed to be somehow useful for the treatment of depression, stress disorders, phobias, and are gaining some authority in personality disorders and addictions. The main asset of new technologies is the possibility to control the characteristics of symptom-eliciting stimuli/situations, and more precisely the degree to which immersion is enforced. For example, Baus and Bouchard (2014) provide a review on the extension of virtual reality exposure-based therapy toward recently described augmented reality exposure-based therapy in individuals with phobias. Concerning substance dependence disorders, Hone-Blanchet et collaborators (2014) present another review on how virtual reality can be an asset for both therapy and craving assessment stressing out the possibilities to simulate social interactions associated with drug seeking behaviors and even peers’ pressure to consume. The last issue this Frontiers’ topic deals with encompasses the questions raised by social cognitive training or remediation in severe and chronic mental disorders (autistic disorders, schizophrenia). Here, therapies are based on drill and practice or strategy shaping procedures, and, most of the time, share an errorless learning of repeated cognitive challenges. Computerized methods were early proposed for that they do, effortlessly and with limited costs, repetitive stimulations. While, repetition was incompatible with realism in the social cognitive domain, recent advances provide both immersion and full control over stimuli. Georgescu and al. (2014) exhaustively reviews the use of virtual characters to assess and train non-verbal communication in high-functioning autism (HFA). Grynszpan and Nadel (2015) present an original eye-tracking method to reveal the link between gaze patterns and pragmatic abilities again in HFA. About schizophrenia, Oker and collaborators (2015) discuss and report some insights on how an affective and reactive virtual agents might be useful to assess and remediate several defects of social cognitive disorders. About assessment within virtual avatars on schizophrenia, Park et al., (2014) focused on effect of perceived intimacy on social decision making with schizophrenia patients. Regarding schizophrenia remediation, Peyroux and Franck (2014) presented a new method named RC2S which is a cognitive remediation program to improve social cognition in schizophrenia and related disorders. To conclude briefly, while it is largely acknowledged that social interaction can be studied as a topic of its own, all the contributions demonstrate the added value of expressive virtual agents and affective computing techniques for the experimentation. It also appears that the use of virtual reality is at the very beginning of a new scientific endeavor in cognitive sciences and medicine.