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In Contextual Intelligence in School Leadership the author presents a new leadership construct suitable for the 21st century context of school improvement. He presents school leadership from contextual intelligence perspective as a function of various elements, which interact within the leadership they shape and the context in which such leadership is exercised to exert influence on the core areas of practice, including student learning, teacher development and school-community engagement. The construct represents a departure from the contemporary leadership theories, which place emphasis on separate elements of leadership and inadvertently create a problem of disintegration that does not bode well for sustainable school improvement.

Educational leadership. --- School improvement programs. --- Contextual intelligence

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Correct word identification and processing is a prerequisite for accurate reading, and decades of psycholinguistic and neuroscientific research have shown that the magical moments of visual word recognition are short-lived and markedly fast. The time window in which a given letter string passes from being a mere sequence of printed curves and strokes to acquiring the word status takes around one third of a second. In a few hundred milliseconds, a skilled reader recognizes an isolated word and carries out a number of underlying processes, such as the encoding of letter position and letter identity, and lexico-semantic information retrieval. However, the precise manner (and order) in which these processes occur (or co-occur) is a matter of contention subject to empirical research. There’s no agreement regarding the precise timing of some of the essential processes that guide visual word processing, such as precise letter identification, letter position assignment or sub-word unit processing (bigrams, trigrams, syllables, morphemes), among others. Which is the sequence of processes that lead to lexical access? How do these and other processes interact with each other during the early moments of word processing? Do these processes occur in a serial fashion or do they take place in parallel? Are these processes subject to mutual interaction principles? Is feedback allowed for within the earliest stages of word identification? And ultimately, when does the reader’s brain effectively identify a given word? A vast number of questions remain open, and this Research Topic will cover some of them, giving the readership the opportunity to understand how the scientific community faces the problem of modeling the early stages of word identification according to the latest neuroscientific findings. The present Research Topic aims to combine recent experimental evidence on early word processing from different techniques together with comprehensive reviews of the current work directions, in order to create a landmark forum in which experts in the field define the state of the art and future directions. We are willing to receive submissions of empirical as well as theoretical and review articles based on different computational and neuroscience-oriented methodologies. We especially encourage researchers primarily using electrophysiological or magnetoencephalographic techniques as well as eye-tracking to participate, given that these techniques provide us with the opportunity to uncover the mysteries of lexical access allowing for a fine-grained time-course analysis. The main focus of interest will concern the processes that are held within the initial 250-300 milliseconds after word presentation, covering areas that link basic visuo-attentional systems with linguistic mechanisms.

Psychology. --- compound words --- Eye Movements --- word recognition --- word-initial letter constraint --- reading --- contextual predictability --- word frequency

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At the dawn of the third millennium, we are confronted with a disturbing phenomenon: although global life expectancy still increases, this is not the case for healthy life expectancy! The explanation of this seemingly contradiction is mainly due to the rising prevalence of the new pandemia of chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Even in low and middle income countries, the improvement in healthcare status and life expectancy is paralled by the increase of NCDs, as in all countries worldwide. Since the United Nations General Assembly held in New York in 2011, many publications have emphasized the close link between NCDs and nutrition. The NCDs epidemic forces us to reconsider the public health perspectives. Many governments, non-governmental organizations and other institutions are actively involved in educational nutrition programs and campaigns; however their efforts seldom obtain the results hoped for. It is extremely difficult to induce changes in lifestyle and behavior that have built up over a long period of time. However, it becomes urgent to adapt to our changing life-environment where traditional wisdom and intuitive choices are giving way to individual thinking and search for (often uncontrolled) information. This engenders a number of unprecedented challenges and it calls for a re-appraisal of the existing paradigms to achieve an adequate management of the upstream determinants of health instead of a (pre)dominant medical and hospital-centric approach. In the era of personalized healthcare, it is time to empower policy makers, professionals and citizens for achieving an evidence-based change in the health-disease interface and decision-making process for public health interventions. The scientific and professional society Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) has recognized nutrition as a health technology by creating a Interest Group (IG) dedicated to research on methodologies and assessments of nutrition-related public health, while taking into account contextual factors (ethical, legal, social, organizational, economic, ...) in order to generate meaningful outcomes for establishing evidence-based health policies. This Research Topic aims to elaborate on some of the potential hurdles which have to be overcome for the sake of sustainable healthcare provisions anywhere in the world, such as shortcomings in methodological approaches, regulatory frameworks, gaps between evidence, its hierarchy and final recommendations for public health management.

nutrition --- sustainable public health --- Health Outcomes --- Cost Effectiveness --- Health Technology Assessment --- Contextual research --- diet quality --- ecosystems health --- Non communicable diseases

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The emotions that we feel and also those that we perceive in others are crucial to the social functioning of both humans and non-human animals. Although the role of context has been extensively studied in basic sensory processing, its relevance for social cognition and emotional processing is little understood. In recent years, several lines of research at the behavioral and neural levels have highlighted the bidirectional interactions that take place between emotions and social context. Experienced emotions, even when incidental, bias decision-making. Remarkably, even basic emotions can be strongly influenced by situational contexts. In addition, both humans and non-human animals can use emotional expressions strategically as a means of influencing and managing the behavioral response of others in relation to specific environmental situations. Moreover, social emotions (e.g., engaged in moral judgment, empathic concern and social norms) seem to be context-dependent, which also questions a purely abstract account of emotion understanding and expression, as well as other social cognition domains. The present Research Topic of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience highlights the need for a situated approach to emotion and social cognition. We presented theoretical and empirical work at the behavioral and neural levels that contribute to our understanding of emotion within a highly contextualized social realm, and vice-versa. Relevant contributions are presented from diverse fields, including ethology, neurology, biology, cognitive and social neuroscience, and as well as psychology and neuropsychiatry. This integrated approach that entails the interaction between emotion and social context provide important new insights into the growing field of social neuroscience.

Social perception. --- Interpersonal relations. --- Neuropsychiatry --- Social Behavior --- social neuroscience --- Embodied Cognition --- Emotion Regulation --- contextual social cognition --- Social Decision Making --- Emotions

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Contrasting conditions with and without conscious experience has served consciousness research well. However, research based on this simple contrast has led to controversies about the neural basis of conscious experience. One key reason for these ongoing debates seems to be that the simple contrast between conditions with and without consciousness is not specific for unraveling the neural basis of conscious experience, but rather also leads to other processes that precede or follow it. Acknowledging this methodological problem implies that some of the previous research findings about the neural underpinnings of conscious experience are actually reflecting the prerequisites and consequences rather than the direct correlates of conscious perception. Thus, it is required to re-evaluate the previous results to find out which of them are telling us anything about the neural basis of consciousness. But first and foremost, to overcome this methodological problem we need new experimental paradigms that go beyond the simple contrastive analysis or find the ways how some older but well forgotten paradigms may foster a new look at this emerging problem. Accordingly, this research topic is looking for empirical and theoretical contributions that: 1) envision new and suitable experimental approaches to study consciousness that are free from the limitations of the simple contrastive analysis; 2) provide empirical data that help to separate the neural correlates of conscious experience from the prerequisites and consequences of it; 3) help to re-assess previous research findings about the neural correlates of conscious perception in the light of the methodological problems with the traditional contrastive analysis. We hope that the theoretical insights and experimental approaches collected within this Research Topic help us to gain a more refined understanding of the neural basis of conscious experience.

Consciousness --- Neurology --- Psychology. --- Social sciences. --- Physiological aspects. --- Research. --- EEG --- contextual effects --- neural correlates of consciousness --- Contents of consciousness --- TMS --- levels of consciousness --- Contrastive analysis --- oscillations --- multivariate analysis