In Her Down-To-Earth, Humourous Style, Swamini Krishnamrita Prana Shares A Wealth Of Wisdom In Her Fifth Book Highlighting The Spiritual Teachings Of The Holy Mother, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi. She Reveals A Unique Perspective, Gained Through Living So Closely With Amma For Over Thirty Years. Swamini Krishnamrita Makes Amma’s Teachings Easily Accessible And Shows Us Through Practical Examples, How To Incorporate Them Into Our Daily Lives. Amma Constantly Inspires And Amazes Us With The Positive Energy She Continuously Offers The World. Her Smile Radiates The Bliss She Has Found Within. Amma Teaches Us Through Her Shining Example That, Happiness Is A Decision Just Like Any Other Decision. She Reminds Us That There Is No Path To Happiness, But Rather Happiness Is The Path. If We Simply Change Our Attitude And Decide To Be Happy, We Can. Discover Ultimate Joy And Freedom, Learn To Look Within Your Self And Smile. Published By The Disciples Of Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, Affectionately Known As Mother, Or Amma The Hugging Saint.
Many people of Portuguese descent take pride in claiming that the word saudade is untranslatable. In reality, we come close with a melding of bittersweet nostalgia, bone--deep longing, and an endless yearning for what one can never have again--or indeed may never have had. Adelaide Freitas dipped her pen in saudade to tell of family separation and bonds that never loosen. In her authentic Azorean voice, she recounts the immigrant experience and centrifugal impulses that force people apart in spite of their desperation to cling to one another. In their sensitive rendering, the translators have captured the nuances of Freitas's novel Smiling in the Darkness, with special care for those who have her native language in their heritage and heartfelt saudade for its loss.
This volume is the first monograph exploring the functions of visual cues in humor, advocating for the development of a non-linguocentric theory of humor performance. It analyzes a corpus of dyadic, face-to-face interactions in Spanish and English to study the relationship between humor, smiling, and gaze, and shows how, by focusing on these elements, it is possible to shed light on the “unsaid” of conversations. In the book, the humorous framing of an utterance is shown to be negotiated and co-constructed dialogically and multimodally, through changes and patterns of smiling synchronicity, smiling intensity, and eye movements. The study also analyzes the multimodal features of failed humor and proposes a new categorization from a dialogic perspective. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, which includes facial expression analysis and eye tracking, this book is relevant to humor researchers as well as scholars in social and behavioral sciences interested in multimodality and embodied cognition.
An important amount of research effort in psychology and neuroscience over the past decades has focused on the problem of social cognition. This problem is understood as how we figure out other minds, relying only on indirect manifestations of other people's intentional states, which are assumed to be hidden, private and internal. Research on this question has mostly investigated how individual cognitive mechanisms achieve this task. A shift in the internalist assumptions regarding intentional states has expanded the research focus with hypotheses that explore the role of interactive phenomena and interpersonal histories and their implications for understanding individual cognitive processes. This interactive expansion of the conceptual and methodological toolkit for investigating social cognition, we now propose, can be followed by an expansion into wider and deeply-related research questions, beyond (but including) that of social cognition narrowly construed. Our social lives are populated by different kinds of cognitive and affective phenomena that are related to but not exhausted by the question of how we figure out other minds. These phenomena include acting and perceiving together, verbal and non-verbal engagement, experiences of (dis-)connection, management of relations in a group, joint meaning-making, intimacy, trust, conflict, negotiation, asymmetric relations, material mediation of social interaction, collective action, contextual engagement with socio-cultural norms, structures and roles, etc. These phenomena are often characterized by a strong participation by the cognitive agent in contrast with the spectatorial stance typical of social cognition research. We use the broader notion of embodied intersubjectivity to refer to this wider set of phenomena. This Research Topic aims to investigate relations between these different issues, to help lay strong foundations for a science of intersubjectivity – the social mind writ large. To contribute to this goal, we encouraged contributions in psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, philosophy, and cognitive science that address this wider scope of intersubjectivity by extending the range of explanatory factors from purely individual to interactive, from observational to participatory.
Annotation A zookeeper's extraordinary relationship with the bears she has rehabilitated and her insights into their behavior and emotional lives. Few people know bears as intimately as Else Poulsen. She has raised bears, comforted bears, taught bears, learned from bears, had bears communicate their needs to her, and nursed bears back to health. This remarkable book reveals the many insights about bears and their lives that she has gained through her work with them. In the eighties, Poulsen became a zookeeper in Calgary, where she rehabilitated bears in crisis. She has shared in the joy of a polar bear discovering soil under her paws for the first time in twenty years, felt the pride of a cub learning to crack nuts with her molars, and grieved at the horror of captivity for Asian black bears in China. Smiling Bearsprovides an enlightening and moving portrait of bears in all their richness and complexity and of Poulsen's exhilarating work with them.
Derek Jarman's "Smiling in slow motion" concludes the journey started in "Modern nature", these previously unpublished journals stretch from May 1991 until a fortnight before his death in February 1994. Part diary, part observation, part memoir, Jarman writes with his familiar honesty, wry humour and acuity. Friends, collaborators and enemies are catalogued as he races through his last year painting, film-making, gardening, and annoying his targets through his involvement in radical politics. Writing from his Charing Cross Road flat, on his visits to international film festivales, his world famous garden at Dungeness in Kent, and finally from hios bed in St Bartholomew's Hospital, Jarman illuminates an era which seems more ephemeral and out-of-grasp with each passing day. "Smiling in slow motion" is not a document of illness, regret and resignation, but one of endeavour, remembrance and love.
Smiling in the Dark By: Jason Wonio One of the biggest challenges one faces in life is the internal conflict within themselves. Seattle-based firefighter, Hank, in the wake of losing his love to crippling alcoholism, decides to face his internal struggles and gets sober. Every day brings a new set of challenges as he navigates life without alcohol. Along the way, he finds his roots in his grandma’s farm and meets the eccentric and vivacious nurse, Julie, who stirs up feelings he has not felt in a long time. Smiling in the Dark tells the story of a man who tries to move on from his troubled past and seeks redemption and growth in the pursuit of self-improvement.
Smiling in the Darkness is the story of the persevering spirit of a woman in her courageous struggle against cancer. Isobel Bradley's journey is one that will inspire us all to appreciate and embrace the greatest gift of all, the gift of life.
Peter H. Wolff, a world-renowned authority on infant behavior, helped lay the foundation for the field in the 1960s with his innovative studies of behavioral studies, motor coordination, smiling, and crying in infancy. Some twenty years later, as infancy studies have become increasingly specialized and fragmented, he calls for new theoretical perspectives and methods of investigation. Applying ethological methods used in field studies of animal behavior, Wolff first observes how babies behave in the "natural" ecology of their homes to catalog their species-typical behavioral repertory and then manipulates their behavior through informal experiments designed to examine functional significance. Wolff argues that a coherent psychobiological theory of early human development must begin with knowledge about the infant's behavioral repertory under free field conditions. Many current theories of human development begin instead with assumptions about the organization of behavior derived from studies of psychological function in the adult; moreover, they appeal to instincts, maturational programs, or genomes to explain the apparent lawfulness in the development of these behavioral categories. Such a priori explanations, Wolff contends, beg the whole question of development. As an alternative to theoretical metaphors that portray the infant as a closed system and suggests that development is controlled by prescient programs that anticipate the mature steady state, Wolff proposes a metaphor of the infant as an open, self-organizing system with partial, mutative mechanisms of development. Applying this metaphor, he addresses the essentially unsolved problem of how novel behavioral forms are induced during ontogenesis. Wolff presents a study of twenty-two infants who were observed for thirty hours each week in their homes during the first months after birth. He builds a week-by-week description of changes in behavioral states of wakefulness and examines how reversible state changes influence developmental transformations in social-affective behavior and sensori-motor intelligence. The observations and informal experiments emphasize expressions of emotion and the infant's changing relations to persons and things. Pointing out that movements are our only clue to what infants "feel" or "think," Wolff gives special emphasis to the systematic variations in spontaneous and environmentally evoked patterns of motor coordination as a function of behavioral state transitions. Of great importance to psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and students of development in general, The Development of Behavioral States and the Expression of Emotions in Early Infancy offers a major empirical, methodological, and theoretical rethinking of the subject to which Wolff has made outstanding contributions.
