Decisions are doors that provide people of all ages with opportunities to express who they are and to learn about who they want to become. Sometimes the young people in your life may choose the wrong door and, while that can make for a good learning experience, you probably want to help them make good decisions and avoid the bad ones. You did, after all, decide to open up this book. While we cannot program kids with the answers they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives, we can support kids in learning and using a common-sense approach to understanding and organizing their feelings and thoughts as they make their own decisions.

Many people have had the experience of thinking with pleasure, or of the pleasure of thinking, but can we substantiate the idea that thinking can be pleasurable? This first chapter explores non-psychological productions to search for evidence of the pleasure of thinking in the visual arts, in philosophy – mainly in the writings of Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt - and in the self-writing of a few authors, among them Sigmund Freud and the novelist Chaim Potok. This enables to identify five modalities of the pleasure of thinking. The chapter then poses the theoretical frame for the book, a sociocultural and developmental psychology, and highlights its ontological and epistemological axioms. Two concepts are defined: on the one hand, the concepts of thinking, including reasoning, sense-making, and daydreaming; on the other hand, the concept of pleasure. The methodology used for the book is then exposed – an abductive integration of theoretical work with the secondary analysis of existing work and of data collected in our past work. The outline of the volume is finally presented.

This chapter offers a critique of the idea that writing has unique or inherent benefits. It argues that the promise or potential of writing lies in what we do with writing, rather than what writing does to us. The chapter focuses on the ways in which we think with writing as well as how we label and organize our environment, and navigate the world, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. It also shows how writing has evolved as a way of initiating and sustaining our social relationships. Writing can be used to mislead us, or to persuade us to do things we might later regret, and this is used to counter overenthusiastic claims about the promise of writing.

Comprehension can be the starting point for further cognitive activities such as thinking and problem-solving. Productive thinking requires a specific interaction between descriptive and depictive representations combining representational power and inferential power. The interaction takes place through processes of mental model construction and model inspection. Descriptive representations are combined and coordinated with the corresponding depictive representations, whereby each representation constrains the construction and usage of the other representation. Model inspection requires systematic and exhaustive interrogation of depictive representations in order to read off relevant information. Depictive representations have to grasp task-relevant structures and facilitate performance of the required procedures. Required operations should not be difficult to perform and the sequences of operations should be relatively short. Inappropriate perceptual structures of visualizations can obscure relevant structural attributes, preventing the application of correct procedures and stimulating the application of incorrect procedures.

Thinking as a way of coping with the situations in which we find ourselves. Internal dialogue and gestures. Situations calling for thought. Thinking and rational deliberation. Actions and plans for actions as having entirely different ontological status. In the seventeenth century the mechanical worldview separated bodies from minds, and thinking thereby became a disembodied process. The body was instead equated with “the passions.” As a result, movements such as the ballet came to be regarded only as aesthetic objects. Eighteenth-century theories of the origin of language buttressed this claim. The ridiculousness of ballets d’action. Ballet dancers now became sex workers, and the theater became a location where rational, disembodied, human beings keep their emotions.

This chapter deals with inquiry, a central tenet of geographical learning as set out in the Australian Curriculum. It examines the reasons for using inquiry in the classroom, in terms of both pedagogical theory and practical classroom teaching. It then suggests a number of ways in which inquiry can be put into practice.

The logic of the Concept has three parts. The first (“The subjective concept”) examines (apparently following the divisions of traditional logic) the concept as-it-is, the types of judgement and the reasoning (“syllogism”) constructed from judgements; but the notions of judgement and syllogistic reasoning are as deeply transformed as that of the concept itself. Far from any formal approach, how thought informs reality should be examined. The second part (“The object”) examines how this conceptual shaping of the real happens. It occurs at three levels, seemingly corresponding to the great divisions of classical science: mechanism, chemism, teleology. The third part concerns “the idea”, a notion that is completely transformed, being defined as “the absolute unity of the [subjective] concept and objectivity” (Encyclopedia §213). Hegel describes how subjectivity and objectivity, thought and reality, interfere, to the extent that it becomes impossible to separate them, except at the cost of a great abstraction, that of the “understanding”. Hegel calls this interpenetration of thought and being the “absolute idea”, thus redefining the terms in which philosophy had hitherto been thought.

The chapter considers Plato's claim, in Parmenides 135, that thinking about things requires Forms. It locates Plato's argument for this claim in 132 and, especially, in the second part of the dialogue (142ff.). It shows that the second part of the dialogue is just as much about thinking as it is about being.

Most empirical studies about chess have taken the happenstance of the cognitive or experimental paradigm within psychology. In this chapter, the past main research findings from this approach will be reviewed together with their contribution to psychological science. The chapter is structured into three main subsections, perception, memory, and thinking. Each of these sections describe more specific themes such as information processing models, eye movements, theories of memory in chess, and thinking methods such as pattern recognition and search. The main conclusions from this extensive body of research are summarized through the prism of the individual differences approach.

Chapter 1 introduced the basic ‘tools’ of performance and reward management, including key aspects of purpose and practice. In this chapter we introduce two overarching concepts of alignment that recur throughout this book: ‘strategic alignment’ and ‘psychological engagement’. The design, implementation and maintenance of effective performance and reward management systems requires simultaneous, systematic and constant attention to both of these dimensions of alignment.

‘Strategic alignment’ refers to the plans, processes and actions involved in establishing and maintaining an alignment between an organisation’s overarching purpose or intent and how it manages employee performance and reward, as well as all other aspects of people management.