Social interaction with friends and family is pivotal for our cognitive development, mental health, and overall wellbeing. These connections shape our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Research consistently highlights the positive impact of social engagement on cognition and mental health, from stimulating problem-solving skills to combating loneliness and reducing stress. The brain regions activated during social interactions underscore the significance of social cognition, empathy, and emotional processing. Particularly during adolescence, positive friendships play a crucial role in emotional resilience and healthy development. Studies suggest an optimal number of close friends for mental health benefits, emphasizing quality over quantity in social relationships. Social support networks bolster resilience and aid in recovery from mental health disorders. Conversely, social isolation poses risks to brain health and mental wellbeing, highlighting the importance of maintaining social connections throughout life. Engaging in social activities, whether through clubs, volunteering, or hobbies, fosters social interaction and enhances overall wellbeing. In a world increasingly driven by technology, prioritizing face-to-face social interaction remains essential for brain health, cognition, and mental wellbeing.

This chapter provides an overview of foundational principles that guide CA research, offered both on the basis of our own experiences as researchers, and from our discussions with other conversation analysts as they authored contributions for the present volume. We begin by briefly sketching of some of the fundamentals of human social interaction, in order to underscore CA’s central focus, the study of social action, and describe some of the basic features of how interaction is procedurally organized. These basic features of interaction, which CA research has rigorously evidenced and which guide our examination of new data, are then shown directly to inform CA as a research methodology. Put another way, it is precisely due to the procedural infrastructure of action in interaction that conversation analysts use and work with interactional data in particular ways. We conclude with advice for readers as they continue to explore the volume’s contents.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are a group of severe developmental and neuropsychiatric disorders usually apparent by the age of three. Autism, referred to as autism spectrum disorder in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by persistent deficits in social interaction and social communication, as well as a range of restricted, repetitive behaviours (World Health Organization 2018). The onset of autism is in the developmental period (0–18 years of age), though for some autistic persons the symptoms may manifest later in life, at a time of increased social demands (World Health Organization 2018). In addition to the aforementioned core autistic features, many autistic people have associated symptoms, including hypo- or hypersensitivities to sensory stimuli, difficulties describing their emotional state (alexithymia), and problems with gross motor co-ordination The chapter will discuss the interface between autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability and the potential management of the disorder. It will also cover the gender variations in presentation.

Chapter 3 shows how we can intend language as a social tool. The first part focuses on language and interaction; the second part on how we outsource our knowledge benefiting from others’ knowledge. First, I show that the traditional separations between phonetics, phonology, syntax, and semantics and between production and comprehension do not hold. Rather, language is profoundly interactive. Then I overview innovative approaches that investigate real-time linguistic interactions, illustrating new methods, such as hyperscanning. In the second part , I contend that language is also a social tool because it allows us to strengthen our knowledge by relying on others. I introduce the notion of "community of knowledge," show that we outsource part of our knowledge, and illustrate how children develop the ability to defer toward experts in acquiring and mastering linguistic meaning. Finally, I discuss the possible theoretical consequences of outsourcing knowledge.

This chapter describes the development of prosocial motives and the social contexts within which these motives emerge and differentiate. Initially, prosocial behavior is based on a blend of motives, namely, participating in social interaction and early forms of feeling for others. During early childhood, concern-based guilt emerges and mere participation transforms into contributing to collaborative activities. During childhood, the normative turn complements these motives by a sense of obligation (living up to), and, during adolescence, aspiring to one’s ideal self can become an important prosocial motive. In this sense, doing good often is an expression of central human motives, namely, belonging to others, feeling for others, contributing to joint endeavors, affirming a sense of responsibility and normative obligation, and striving for our ideal selves.

Mentalization-based treatment (MBT) for psychosis focuses on the decoupling of bodily and mental experience as well as the stresses of mentalizing during social interaction. In a framework of mentalizing, psychotic phenomena can be represented as severe disturbances to the experience of oneself as a coherent unit. Clinical treatment that aims to increase integration and stability of self-experience is illustrated in this chapter using clinical examples. The first task is to identify treatment objectives and define any obstacles to treatment, working with co-constructed representations of the clinical problem. The second task is to integrate the viewpoints of the patient, the clinical team, and the social care network, and to agree an overall working formulation. This is followed by therapeutic intervention to stabilize self-mentalizing using interventions from the core MBT model.

The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biology and psychology, the logic of rationality, or the workings of power and ideology. Instead, we consider the processes through which what seem to be constraints or universals serve as affordances that are ethicalized through historically contingent reflexive practices. Rather than being forced to choose between the individual and the collective in terms of who (or what) the ethical subject is, we demonstrate how social interaction is a critical site in which and through which such ethicalization occurs.

The introduction provides a brief overview of the topic, outlining the status of English as a global language and pointing at the lack of research when it comes to patterns of conversational interaction in Englishes of the Outer and Expanding Circle. Language and culture are closely interrelated, yet existing research on English interactions has so far focused on only one small part of the English language complex – that of Inner Circle varieties such as British or American English. The chapter ends with an overview of the research questions that will be addressed in this study as well as a detailed outline of the book.

Chapter 4 focuses on magicians’ clients. Adopting a similar format to Chapter 3, it begins with a summary of the way clients were portrayed in didactic texts, isolating some key characteristics that were persistently applied. Again, these are unflattering, and the rest of the chapter is dedicated to establishing the extent to which they were accurate. We see that popular portrayals of clients are often more sympathetic, and that, if the court records are anything to go by, the range of people who visited magicians was very diverse. We also find that clients were aware of the negative reputations they might garner, and as such tried either to hide or justify their activities. Finally, we see that clients, especially in the late medieval period, were very aware that they were indeed clients. As such, they carried certain expectations about what they would receive from a magician and were even prepared to seek redress when disappointed. This assertive stance may have become more aggressive as the period progressed and fear crept in over the potential link between witchcraft and other forms of magic. Simultaneously, new legislation outlawing various types of practical magic probably led to a drop in clients seeking formal redress.

This chapter examines the importance of family, social networks, social capital, and personal safety to people with mental health conditions and how these are often missing from their lives and replaced by social isolation and loneliness. For people with mental health conditions, social contacts and levels of support play a role in the genesis of their conditions as well as their recovery. People with mental ill-health often lack access to some forms of social capital but may benefit from the buffering effects of other forms. Social interaction may be curtailed by the subjective experiences of the mental health conditions, but also from the stigma and discrimination experienced by people with mental health conditions as personal experience of or fear of crime, aggression, and persecution. These are experiences that can set up a vicious cycle of loneliness and depression and exclusion for social contacts and important sources of support. These mental health and social conditions are unevenly distributed and exacerbated by the nature of the physical and social conditions of neighbourhoods. Whilst communities can be supportive, they may also present unacceptable risks to vulnerable groups in the form of crimes and victimisation.