The aim of this chapter is to discuss the communication and media effects theories that may serve as the foundations for research into the effects of social media use on adolescents. The first section of this chapter focuses on three important paradigms of general media effects theories that may help us understand the effects of social media, namely the selectivity, transactionality, and conditionality paradigms. The second section reviews computer-mediation theories, which originated in the 1970s, and are still important to understand the cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects of social media. The third section introduces a transactional affordance theory of social media uses, which is inspired by transactional theories of development (Bronfenbrenner, 2005; Sameroff, 2009), self-effects theory (Valkenburg, 2017), and affordance theories of social media use (e.g., McFarland & Ployhart, 2015). The chapter ends with some avenues for future research into the effects of social media on adolescents.

This chapter examines some conceptual problems that arise when we apply new embodied theories of mind in literary analysis. Critics have used affordance theory and models of predictive processing to reflect on narrative and genre, the literary devices and codes that shape our expectations about how a text will unfold. Instead of reinforcing the functionalist assumptions that guide cognitive scientists, including the effort to treat reading literature as just another cognitive task that is directed toward problem solving, this chapter proposes to view it instead as an emotionally engaging or ethically challenging way of reconstructing the ecology in which we think. This approach helps theorists honor the conceptual resources that the 4Es offer by giving more heed to individualized and culturally specific encounters with literary texts. I end by examining a poem that demands that we alter prevailing interpretive practices, thus exposing the way literature reorganizes emotional responses and value schemes.