Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

The goal of this chapter is to call into question the ways we inherently define success and force us to consider and subsequently be explicit about the criteria we use to evaluate our goals. Importantly, this chapter is not intended to devalue the importance of evaluating success by the outcomes, but rather to acknowledge that the outcome is not the only measure of success. Indeed, though individuals seem by default to define success as a function of the desired outcome, the process by which that outcome is attained as well as the effort invested in the process to attain the desired outcome offer alternative criteria that may best fit depending on the goal.

This study was designed to investigate the contribution of non-native (L2) patterns of pausing to the perceived effort of listening to speech. English-language speech samples from ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese (five of each) previously assessed as having intermediate proficiency in English were manipulated by removing all non-juncture silent pauses as well as all filled pauses. The original and manipulated speech samples, as well as samples of comparable but un-manipulated English speech produced by ten native speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese with higher English proficiency were evaluated in a between-groups design by 60 native speakers of American English. Although the removal of non-juncture pauses did not significantly alter listeners’ ratings of the intermediate speech, results did suggest a subtle interaction between ratings of effort and measures of listeners’ working memory capacity, suggesting that the detrimental effects of pausing in non-native accented speech may be related to increased demand on limited-capacity cognitive processing resources such as working memory.

To enhance math achievement, numerous instructional strategies have been and will continue to be developed. Neither typical instructional procedures nor new methods for teaching math will be successful unless students choose to engage in assigned math activities. Two factors that can influence choice are response effort and reinforcement strength. Enhancing students’ basic math fact fluency can reduce the effort required to complete simple and more complex math tasks, making it more likely that students will choose to engage in math activities. Four evidence-based procedures designed to enhance basic math fact fluency are described (i.e., Cover, Copy, and Compare; Taped Problems; Explicit Timing; and Detect, Practice, and Repair). Also, procedures designed to enhance reinforcement for choosing to engage in math tasks are reviewed. These procedures include the Additive Interspersal Procedure, altering longer assignments into multiple briefer assignments, and applying interdependent group-oriented bonus rewards.

This chapter describes the behavior change technique of goal setting. Goal setting is an established and ubiquitous technique that has been used successfully in varied and diverse contexts, for multiple behaviors, and in numerous populations. Goal setting encompasses many different perspectives from individual-level goal setting (e.g., making a new year’s resolution or reading one book a week) to goal setting by global organizations (e.g., the United Nations’ sustainable development goals). This chapter considers many different kinds of goal setting interventions, including those that have emerged in popular culture and those derived from specific theories. Given that goal setting is ubiquitous, numerous theories have emerged to explain how and why goals operate, with Locke and Latham’s (1990) goal setting theory, the focus of the current chapter, as the only theory that deals with goal setting as a behavior change technique in its own right. Goal setting theory is described in detail and used to illustrate how different types of goal setting interventions might operate. The final section includes a step-by-step guide of what to do, what not to do, and what can be left to personal preference when setting goals.

Some things are more difficult to know than others. For example, proving the Poincaré conjecture is certainly more difficult than coming to know what does 2 + 2 equal. However, as obvious as it seems, explaining that knowledge can be difficult in familiar epistemological terms (e.g., in evidentialist or simple reliabilist terms) is less straightforward than one could initially think. The aim of the chapter is to show that virtue reliabilism (unlike virtue responsibilism) provides a promising framework for accounting for the relationship between difficulty and knowledge. However, it argues that virtue reliabilism first needs to get rid of the problematic assumption that cognitive abilities are reliable dispositions to form true beliefs in appropriate conditions. The reason is that this idea not only prevents the theory from explaining how knowledge relates to difficulty, but also renders its main tenet – the thesis that knowledge requires the manifestation of cognitive ability in appropriate conditions – false. To amend this problem, the chapter connects the virtue reliabilist framework with recent work on the notions of achievement and difficulty. It then advances a positive proposal: the view that knowledge is a special kind of challenge with varying degrees of difficulty.

Traditional perspectives on the study of aging and cognition have focused on what has been characterized as “cold cognition.” However, recent theoretical and empirical advances have emphasized the need to examine age differences in the factors that energize and direct cognitive activity (i.e., “hot cognition”). In the present chapter, the roles of goals and motivation are considered in terms of both explaining age differences in performance and characterizing adaptive functioning in later life. As an illustration of goal influences, three different perspectives associated with normative changes in goals across adulthood – social cognitive goals, socioemotional goals, and goal priorities – are discussed, along with their impact on cognition. The impact of aging on motivational processes associated with energizing, directing, and sustaining actions directed toward achieving goals is then considered, using selective engagement as an organizational framework.

Chapter 3 focuses on discussions of simile (tashbīh) in the nonphilosophical critical tradition, namely, in al-Jurjānī’s Asrār al-balāgha (The Secrets of Eloquence), which forms the site of the most elaborate articulation of an aesthetic theory of wonder. The chapter argues that the pleasure that arises from simile is attributed to its ability to elucidate (bayān), which in turn allows the listener to go through an experience of discovery and wonder. The more effort is required to grasp a simile and the stranger it is, the more beautiful it is. The chapter goes on to show how the principles that enhance the strangeness and farfetchedness of simile put forth by al-Jurjānī are later systematized and organized in the science of eloquence as formalized by al-Sakkākī and al-Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnī. While the specific elements that allow for an experience of discovery in simile are unique to that figure, the general discovery-based theory of aesthetic experience forms the foundation for the aesthetics of metaphor and sentence construction, as well, which are tackled in Chapters 4 and 5.

It is frequently reported that processing speed slows and executive functions (EFs) become less effective in the course of healthy aging. This chapter highlights research supporting these claims in three areas of investigation: cognitive aging research, the neuropsychological perspective, and studies evaluating the association of EF with structural and functional imaging measures. Several themes emerge in this review. For example, diminished processing speed with aging appears to reflect aging-related changes in the anterior cingulate/superior medial frontal cortex, as well as perceptuomotor slowing. The definition of EF varies between different publications and there is a need for more precise operational definitions. There is also a need to decompose EFs into their component processes. Impairments of EF are strongly related to damage in prefrontal regions, but disorders of EF also occur with injury to nonfrontal regions, indicating that complex networks are involved in EF. Additionally, domain-specific changes beyond the changes in EF are important considerations in network analyses. We propose a method to advance future research on EF by using focal frontal lesion studies and neural network principles as frameworks to expand our understanding of aging-related changes in EF and processing speed.