This chapter reviews research on social cognition and age. This covers self-focused processes, including self-referencing and memory as well as own-age bias and stereotype threat and stigma. Processes focused on other people are also reviewed, including moral judgment, empathy, theory of mind, social interactions and impression formation, memory for impressions, and trust.

Does the conception of worship – in expressing, as it does, a direct relationship with God – prevent an understanding of love for God as mediated by love for humans? Taking the latter to be an existential model of one’s relationship with God, in this chapter I answer in the negative to the above question by demonstrating the role that worship plays in such a model. To do so, I turn to Kierkegaard’s image of “resting transparently” in God. For Kierkegaard, this image represents what he perceives as the highest possible state of the believer’s relationship with God; a state that is achieved, according to Kierkegaard, when one becomes the self – the individual – that God intends one to be. And how does one become this self? By loving properly the neighbour (that is, another individual). The suggestion I develop in this chapter is that it is the worshipping of God – that is, by being in a state of respect and attendance to God’s will – that directs one in loving properly the neighbour. Hence, it is worship of God that paves the way to fully loving the neighbour and thus to fully loving God.

This chapter will show you how traversing the overlapping identities of self (micro), organisation (meso) and system (macro) is an essential skill for educators to be culturally responsive. This includes making decisions informed by broader contexts, organisation/learning environment interpretations of those cultures and, crucially for educators at all stages, what this then looks like in their own educational setting. For pre-service teachers, this calls for a consideration of multiple layers in the development of teacher identity. For all educators, it demands reflection and scrutiny throughout one’s career recognising that some aspects of identity may remain a continuity, while others may change. By examining practitioner examples, research literature, national and global contexts, this chapter will equip you with practical and theoretical examples. We hope this will help you identify and negotiate micro, meso and macro levels of teacher identity as a way to better identify, empathise and implement effective culturally responsive pedagogies for the contexts you work in.

This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.

White extremism has been a rising trend in North American and European countries over the past two decades. Despite the systemically engrained privileged status of people who identify as white in US society, one of the causes of white extremism is a perceived threat of being sidelined/disadvantaged by individuals with non-white identities. For example, the mainstreaming of the great replacement theory among right-wing media outlets and politicians demonstrates this perception. We examine this perception, and white extremism rhetoric and radicalization broadly, within the context of social exclusion at both the individual and systemic levels. We further embed this analysis within theories and research focused on concepts of “the self,” social identity, and related psychological needs usually impacted by social exclusion. We recommend researchers and practitioners interested in extremism and radicalization to intentionally consider self-related theories and constructs going forward.

Feeling marginalized, silenced and excluded, as an individual or as a (sub)group within a collective, can make one feel uncertain about one’s self and identity and about “fitting in.” This feeling of uncertainty can be reduced by group identification – especially with a distinctive group that has a clearly defined, unambiguous, and homogenous social identity. Such groups and identities can sometimes be characterized as extremist. Excluded individuals may exit the larger group to identify with a different and possibly more extreme group, and the larger group may thus become less diverse and more homogeneous and extreme itself. Members of excluded subgroups can bond tightly together as a highly distinctive entity and identify strongly with it, a process that can fragment and polarize the larger group into oppositional or combative factions. In this chapter we draw upon an uncertainty identity theory framework to describe how exclusion can generate self and identity uncertainty, which is resolved by a process of identification that fragments groups and can produce extremist groups and identities.

Chapter 4 considers the project of worldmaking and the concept of personality from the perspective of two prose genres that dominated Yeats’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s: autobiography and occult philosophy. My justification for bringing these genres together lies in an understanding of how they are used in his exploration of personality and aesthetic Bildung. The logic of misrecognition can be discerned not only in Yeats’s growing understanding of the self/anti-self dichotomy but also in the the process by which he learns, at the hands of sometimes deceptive instructors, the secrets of the spirit world. Yeats’s spiritual journey in A Vision frames a cosmic system in which personality, understood as a dialectics of self and anti-self, defines many of the historical figures who exemplify the phases of the moon. In Autobiographies, he becomes increasingly aware of the need to document his own personality with the rectifying aim of discovering the “age-long memoried self” that coexists with his ordinary “daily self” (Au 216). Each text creates in its own fashion the contours and atmosphere of a world in which the past – on the one hand, through recollection; on the other, through an understanding of the historical gyres – retains its vitality and presentness.

One of the earliest patents for an automaton in Victorian America was for a steam-powered android, drawn as a caricature of a Black man. Most histories of the so-called Steam Man tend to treat this automaton in one of two ways: Historians of science have addressed the machine indirectly, drawing general connections between Victorian Black androids, white femininity, and imputed inferiority; literary and cultural studies have addressed the Steam Man directly as a product of Reconstruction-era white anxiety over free Black labor. In this chapter, we argue for a different way of understanding the Steam Man and other Victorian Black automata, one that sees them as concealing historical truths about the Black technological self in nineteenth-century America. We follow a counterhistory of the mechanics that underpinned Black automata and show that, although androids like the Steam Man portrayed Black people in pastoral, leisurely, and nontechnological roles, their reliance on blackface minstrelsy ultimately concealed the intimate relationships between Black Victorian Americans, contemporary technologies, and the self

In its original version, before Wittgenstein decided to extend the book’s scope, the Tractatus advanced a solipsism of a decidedly etiolated sort – so etiolated, indeed, that the self which according to this solipsism claims ownership of the world ends up stripped of any substantial content. By the time it was published, however, the solipsism passage had been revised so as to gesture towards a puzzling ‘metaphysical’ subject, whose importance seems to be primarily (though no doubt not exclusively) ethical. By the time he wrote the Blue Book Wittgenstein no longer held the unitary conception of language on which his Tractarian conception of solipsism depended, but he continued to deny coherence of a substantial self.

Recent decades have seen a revival of interest in the study of the self, self-awareness and various changes in self-awareness, especially in the context of mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. This chapter outlines the psychopathology of various disturbances of awareness of self-activity, including depersonalisation, loss of emotional resonance, disturbances in the immediate awareness of self-unity, disturbances in the continuity of the self and disturbances of the boundaries of the self. It also explores theory of mind, consciousness and schizophrenia, which represent areas of growing research interest. The chapter concludes with suggested questions for eliciting specific symptoms in clinical practice, in addition to standard history-taking and mental state examination.

Kierkegaard’s thesis that lacking faith is necessarily a state of despair leads to the conclusion that Either/Or’s fictional character Judge William, who belongs to the “ethical” rather than the “religious” stage of life, is, despite the many virtues of his position, in a state of despair. What does his despair amount to, then? Relying on Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, I claim that the failure in the Judge’s view of life is rooted in his misguided understanding of what it is to be a “self.” By taking himself to have ultimate control over the way he is (in a manner akin to what Sartre’s means by “radical freedom”), the Judge fails to acknowledge that he possesses what I term an individual essence, bestowed upon him by God in a state of potential. This chapter explains the conception of individual essence and demonstrates how it applies to the Judge’s despair.

Gambling affected the mental apparatus that people employed to understand the world around them as well as their own desires and compulsions. Casino gambling established a psychological dynamic perfectly calibrated to drive people to the edge of madness. The “storm” of despair generated by a loss, never compensated by a corresponding elation coming with a win, can overwhelm the player and leave them incapable of self-direction. Descriptions of the psychological effects of addiction – not only how those behaviors were formed through repetition but also how they resulted in a person whose entire world had shrunk – indicate how the machinery of Blanc-style casino gambling affected people in new and profound ways.