"This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It's an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity." --Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife One of Behavioral Scientist's "Notable Books of 2021" From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from? Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow. But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists--a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty--and worse than that, boring.

Language Acquisition offers, in one convenient reader, work by the most outstanding researchers in each field and is intended as a snapshot of the sort of theory and research taking place in language acquisition in the 1990s. All of the articles and chapters were chosen to reflect topics and debates of current interest, and all take an interdisciplinary approach to language development, relating the study of how a child comes to possess a language to issues within linguistics, computational theory, biology, social cognition, and comparative psychology.While there are several introductory texts on language development, and countless collections of articles, these scientists are asking about language acquisition, the important experimental findings, and the key theoretical debates, suitable for students at advanced levels and scholars with a range of different perspectives and interests.The readings are organized into six sections: - the onset of language development, - word learning, - syntax and semantics, - morphology, - acquisition in special circumstances, and- alternative perspectives. Each section serves as an introduction to a specific area and provides sufficient background for further reading.ContributorsDare A. Baldwin. Paul Bloom. Melissa Bowerman. Kathie L. Carpenter. Eve V. Clark. Stephen Crain. Richard F. Cromer. Anne Fernald. Lila Gleitman. Richard Goldberg. Susan Goldin-Meadow. Peter Gordon. Jess Gropen. Michelle Hollander. Janellen Huttenlocher. Annette Karmiloff-Smith. Ellen M.Markman. Peter Marler. Jay L. McClelland. Carolyn Mylander. Elissa L. Newport. Laura Ann Petitto. Steven Pinker. David E. Rumelhart. Patricia Smiley. A Bradford

The fifteen original contributions in Language and Space bring together the major lines of research and the most important theoretical viewpoints in the areas of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience, providing a much needed synthesis across these diverse domains. The study of the relationship between natural language and spatial cognition has the potential to yield answers to vexing questions about the nature of the mind, language, and culture. The fifteen original contributions in Language and Space bring together the major lines of research and the most important theoretical viewpoints in the areas of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience, providing a much needed synthesis across these diverse domains. Each chapter gives a clear up-to-date account of a particular research program. Overall, they address such questions as: how does the brain represent space, how many kinds of spatial representations are there, how do we learn to talk about space and what role does culture play in these matters, should experimental tests of the relations between space and language be restricted to closed-class linguistic elements or must the role of open-class elements be considered as well? Throughout authors speak to each other's arguments, laying bare key areas of agreement and disagreement. Contributors Manfred Bierwisch, Paul Bloom, Melissa Bowerman, Karen Emmorey, Merrill Garrett, Ray Jackendoff, Philip Johnson-Laird, Barbara Landau, Willem Levelt, Stephen Levinson, Gordon Logan, Jean Mandler, Lynn Nadel, John O'Keefe, Mary Peterson, Daniel Sadler, Tim Shallice, Len Talmy, Barbara Tversky