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Sabtu, 09 April 2016

Free Psychology Books: Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology by Sonu Shamdasani

Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology by Sonu Shamdasani

Occultist, Scientist, Prophet,Charlatan, Philosopher, Racist,Guru, Anti-Semite, Liberator of Women, Misogynist, Freudian Apostate, Gnostic, Post-Modernist, Polygamist, Healer, Poet, Con-Artist, Psychiatrist and Anti-Psychiatrist – what has C. G. Jung not been called? Mention him to someone, and you are likely to receive one of these images. For Jung is someone that people – informed or not – have opinions about. The swift reaction time indicates that people respond to Jung’s life and work as if they are sufficiently known. Yet the very proliferation of “Jungs” leads one to question whether everyone could possibly be talking about the same figure. In 1952, Jung responded to the fact that he had been variously described as a theist, an atheist, amystic, and amaterialist by noting: “When opinions over the same subject differ widely, according to my view, there is the well-founded suspicion that none of them is correct, i.e., that there is a misunderstanding.” 2 Nearly fifty years later, the number of divergent views and interpretations of Jung has prodigiously multiplied. He has become a figure upon whom an endless succession of myths, legends, fantasies, and fictions continues to be draped. Travesties, distortions, and caricatures have become the norm. This process shows no signs of abating.

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Free Psychology Books: Research in Psychology by J. Goodwin

Research in Psychology by J. Goodwin

The most obvious reason for taking a course in research methods is to begin the process of learning how to do research in psychology. My ideal scenario would be for you to become fascinated by research, decide that you would like to do some, get your feet wet as an undergraduate (e.g., collaborate with a professor and perhaps present your research at a research conference), go to graduate school and complete a doctorate in psychology, begin a career as a productive researcher, get lots of publications and win lots of grants, achieve tenure, and eventually be named recipient of the APA’s annual award for ‘‘Distinguished Scientific Contributions’’! Of course, I’m also a realist and know that most psychology majors have interests other than doing research, most do not go on to earn doctorates, most who earn doctorates do not become productive researchers, and very few productive scholars win prestigious APA awards. If you won’t be a famous research psychologist some day, are there still reasons to take this course? Sure. For one thing, a course in research methods provides a solid foundation for other psychology courses in more specific topic areas (social, cognitive, developmental, etc.). This is an important reason why your psychology department requires you to take a methodology course.

The difference between the methods course and these other courses is essentially the difference between process and content. The methods course teaches a process of acquiring knowledge about psychological phenomena that is then applied to all the specific content areas represented by other courses in the psychology curriculum. A social psychology experiment in conformity might be worlds apart in subject matter from a cognitive psychology study on eyewitness memory, but their common thread is method— the way in which researchers gain their knowledge about these phenomena. Fully understanding textbook descriptions of research in psychology is much easier if you know something about the methods used to arrive at the conclusions. To illustrate, take a minute and look at one of your other psychology textbooks. Chances are that virtually every paragraph makes some assertion about behavior that either includes a specific description of a research study or at least makes reference to one. On my shelf, for example, is a social psychology text by Myers (1990) that includes the following description of a study about the effects of violent pornography on male aggression (Donnerstein, 1980). Myers wrote that the experimenter ‘‘showed 120...men either a neutral, an erotic, or an aggressive-erotic (rape) film.

Free Psychology Books: Foundation of Cognitive Psychology by D. J. Levitin

Foundation of Cognitive Psychology by D. J. Levitin

What Is Cognition? Cognition encompasses the scientific study of the human mind and how it processes information; it focuses on one of the most difficult of all mysteries that humans have addressed. The mind is an enormously complex system holding a unique position in science: by necessity, we must use the mind to study itself, and so the focus of study and the instrument used for study are recursively linked. The sheer tenacity of human curiosity has in our own life-times brought answers to many of the most challenging scientific questions we have had the ambition to ask. Although many mysteries remain, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we find that we do understand much about the fundamental laws of chemistry, biology, and physics; the structure of space-time, the origins of the universe. We have plausible theories about the origins and nature of life and have mapped the entire human genome. We can now turn our attention inward, to exploring the nature of thought, and how our mental life comes to be what it is. There are scientists from nearly every field engaged in this pursuit. Physicists try to understand how physical matter can give rise to that ineffable state we call consciousness, and the decidedly nonphysical ‘‘mind stuff ’’ that Descartes and other philosophers have argued about for centuries. Chemists, biologists, and neuroscientists join them in trying to explicate the mechanisms by which neurons communicate with each other and eventually form our thoughts, memories, emotions, and desires. At the other end of the spectrum, economists study how we balance choices about limited natural and financial resources, and anthropologists study the influence of culture on thought and the formation of societies. So at one end we find scientists studying atoms and cells, at the other end there are scientists studying entire groups of people. Cognitive psychologists tend to study the individual, and mental systems within individual brains, although ideally we try to stay informed of what our colleagues are doing. So cognition is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, and this collection of readings is intended to reflect that.

Free Psychology Books: Forensic and legal psychology (2012) by Costanzo & Krauss

Forensic and legal psychology (2012) by Costanzo & Krauss

Every year, each of us teaches a course in either Forensic Psychology or Psychology and Law. This combined teaching experience—spanning more than three decades—prompted us to write this book and guided our writing process. Our goal was to produce a student-friendly textbook, a book that is both acces-sible and rigorous. Drawing on research in social, cognitive, clinical, and devel-opmental psychology, we have attempted to show how psychological science can be used to enhance the gathering of evidence, improve legal decision-making, re-duce crime, and promote justice. One aspect of this book that makes it a distinctive alternative to existing text-books is writing style. Of necessity, all textbooks designed for a particular course must be similar in content. Often, it is how content is presented that makes a book appealing to students and instructors. Great care has been taken to write Forensic and Legal Psychology in a lively, engaging style. When presenting research findings, we have tried to portray the research process as a kind of detective story—an ef-fort to unravel a mystery through systematic data collection. We have also made extensive use of real cases and trials to draw students into the material and to illustrate the relevance of research findings. To make sure our writing was clear and engaging, every chapter was reviewed and edited by both students and scholars. Finally, to enhance the visual appeal of the book and to clarify research findings, we have used tables, graphs, photos, and figures throughout the text.

Forensic and Legal Psychology is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to the varied, expanding field of psychology and law. The chapters that follow explore virtually every aspect of the legal system that has been studied by psychologists. We emphasize how research and theory can deepen our under-standing of key participants (e.g., criminals, police, victims, lawyers, witnesses, judges, and jurors) and basic psychological processes (e.g., decision-making, persuasion, perception, memory, and behavior change) in the legal system. In ad-dition to core chapters on topics such as eyewitness identification, jury decision-making, child custody, and the insanity defense, we have included full chapters on a few topics not well-covered in most textbooks. For example, our chapter on the psychology of forensic identification(DNA, fingerprints, and physical trace ev-idence) explores an increasingly important area of psychology and law. Contrary to media depictions, the process of matching trace evidence to a criminal suspect relies heavily on human judgment and is prone to error based on perceptual and cognitive biases. We have also devoted an entire chapter to the rapidly evolving area of workplace law(a topic that includes issues such as sexual harassment, prejudice and discrimination, and work-family conflicts). Full chapters are also devoted to risk assessment(a key consideration in arrest, sentencing, and parole...........

Free Psychology Books: Pathways into the Jungian World by Roger Brooke

Pathways into the Jungian World by Roger Brooke

Analytical psychology and phenomenology have had an uneasy relationship. Jung liked to describe himself as an “empiricist” concerned with “facts,” but clearly what he meant by this was not how these terms are usually understood in psychology, defined as it is (or was) as an extension of natural science into the human realm. To use Dilthey’s classic terms, Jung understood “facts” not in terms of the Natuurswissenschaften but in terms appropriate to the Geisteswissenschaften,the human sciences. 1 In other words, Jung’s appeals to the scientific status of his ideas rested on the legitimacy of meanings as the fundamental evidence of human experience. From this perspective, there is less tension between Jung’s claim to being a scientist concerned with “facts” and his insistence that he was a phenomenologist. His appeal to phenomenology was central to his criticism of Freudian reductionism, the tendency to interpret the magnitude and range of experience as “nothing but” something else, at a lower order of explanation—religious experience, for example, as regressive, Oedipal, and defensive. In line with the phenomenological tradition, Jung was concerned to address the phenomena of psychological life “on their own terms,” in ways that did not violate the integrity of experience. That is a fair definition of phenomenological psychology: it is the systematic attempt to describe the phenomena of psychological life without violating the integrity of experience. The question then is why the pioneers of phenomenology paid so little attention to Jung and were generally so unsympathetic, even though their essential criticisms of Freud were not only articulated by Jung but in general anticipatedby him. Before pioneers such as Ludwig Binswanger and Erwin Straus, it was Jung who cogently critiqued Freud’s psychophysiological and materialist assumptions, historical determinism, and his apparent inability to acknowledge that his “findings” were not merely “objective” but were constituted by a certain historically conditioned perspective.Herbert Spiegelberg (1972), in his definitive study of the history of phenomenological psychology, devotes only a page and a half to Jung, and says that Jung’s claim to being a phenomenologist owed to the movement’s popularity rather than to anything substantial. Spiegelberg’s neglectof Jung merely reflects the field.

Free Psychology Books: Medicine, Magic and Religion by WHR Rivers

Medicine, Magic and Religion by WHR Rivers

MEDICINE, magic, and religion are abstract-terms, each of which connotes a large group of social processes, processes by means of which mankind has come to regulate his behaviour towards the world around him. Among ourselves these three groups of process are more or less sharply marked off from one another. One has gone altogether into the background of our social life, while the other two form distinct social categories widely different from one another, and having few elements in common. If we survey mankind widely this distinction and separation do not exist. There are many peoples among whom the three sets of social process are so closely inter-related that the disentanglement of each from the rest is difficult or impossible; while there are yet other peoples among whom the social processes to which we give the name of Medicine can hardly be said to exist, so closely is man’s attitude towards disease identical with that which he adopts towards other classes of natural phenomena.

METHODS OF INQUIRY In any attempt to study a social institution there are three chief lines of approach and methods of inquiry. We may examine the institution historically, seeking to learn how it has been built up, how this advance has taken placc here and that there;we may study the social conditions under which it has progressed in one place, been stationary in another, and degenerated in a third; and we may attempt to go back to its origin, and ascertain the steps by which it has become differentiated from other institutions, and has acquired an independent existence. A second method is the psychological. We may attempt to study the states of mind, individual and collective, which underlie the acts, again individual and collective, the sum of which make up the institution in question.

Free Psychology Books: Freud, Jung, Klein the Fenceless Field by Fordham

Freud, Jung, Klein the Fenceless Field by Fordham

Dora’s analysis was conducted in 1900 after Freud had completed The Interpretation of Dreams,which was the basis for his later work and development. ‘Dora’, as the case was called, was written as a supplement to that volume and shows us, amongst other things, Freud analysing two dreams of his patient. The case was first written up in 1901 but not published till 1905, which is the version translated in the Standard Edition(SE). It appears that the ‘Postscript’ was written some time after the main body of the text, for it contains a discussion of the transference which Freud does not refer to much in his account of Dora’s analysis. This is the first of the masterly clinical studies to be considered. They are all descriptions of Freud at work and repay reading over and over again. It starts with thoughts about the problem of case presentation and reveals Freud’s sensitivity to his patient’s feelings. Early on in this first part is an account of how impossible it is to obtain a coherent history of an hysterical patient, so that only at the end of treatment can a more complete account of it be constructed. There are at the beginning deliberate concealments but more gaps due to repression. In other words, the difficulty of history taking is recognized as a symptom. Freud commented that in current accounts of hysterical patients the histories were made coherent—other clinicians had not understood, or had even observed incorrectly. This is only one example of Freud’s acute, indeed astonishing, capacity for observation, which converts what others might call theories or speculation into facts. It is this capacity which lends so often to conviction as to the truth of what he says. Freud remarks that he has not gone into the technique of his work, but I think that it is sufficiently displayed in the account he gives. It is quite clear, for instance, that he has given up the use of forced association derived from the practice of hypnosis: he now lets the patient choose the subject matter to be gone into, a claim which must be thought of in relation to Freud’s sophisticated questioning, translations and interpretations, which all influence the direction the analysis takes. None the less, he always records and listens to his patient’s response, making his relation to Dora much more of a dialectic than the stern projection screen which pictures how psychoanalysts are supposed to behave. Whether that was ever psychoanalytic procedure I do not know, but it is not so in Dora’s case nor in case material which we will examine later.

Free Psychology Books: Catching the Thread - Sufism, Dreamwork & Jungian Psychology by Vaughan Lee

Catching the Thread - Sufism, Dreamwork & Jungian Psychology by Vaughan Lee

Spiritual life is a response to a call. Of our own accord we would never turn away from the world and begin the long and painful journey home. But Someone calls to us, calls to us from within the depths of our heart, awakening our own deepest longing. This call is like a golden thread that we follow, guiding us deeper and deeper within, always pointing to the beyond. It is both intimate and elusive, for it does not belong to the mind but to the deepest core of our being. We hear it most easily when the conscious mind is still, which can be in meditation or when we are surrounded by the beauty of nature. But it is often in dreams that this call can be heard most clearly. In our sleep, when the outer world vanishes, our innermost secret can speak to us and guide us on this most difficult journey. Dreams are like mirrors in which we can see ourselves. They reflect back our hidden self, revealing the true face of our own nature. In our sleep we are shown the mysteries, the beauty, and the horror of our inner world. Through dreams we can get to know this strange and yet familiar land. And when we wake, our dreams can be a doorway through which we can walk back into this inner world, can step into the landscape of the soul.

Free Psychology Books: Childhood Re-imagined by Shiho Main

Childhood Re-imagined by Shiho Main

In this book, childhood is re-imagined from the perspective of analytical psychology. The book is concerned with what childhood means symbolically rather than with literal childhood. It takes a different approach from the two most widely recognised approaches to childhood today: the view of child-hood as consisting of purely objective facts discoverable by scientific methods, and the view of childhood as consisting entirely of social constructions cre-ated and recreated by human subjectivity conditioned by specific times, places, societies, cultures, and so forth. 1 Unlike these approaches, the present study does not aim to determine causal relationships or correlations between the physical and psychological functioning and development of a child (brain and behaviour, for instance) or to identify the roots of particular images about childhood in society or culture (as the image of the innocent child might be traced to Romanticism, for instance). Instead, it explores the view of childhood as a symbol or a metaphor –a metaphor for a path towards self-realisation –inspired by the view of ‘the child’, that is, the child archetype as a symbol of the self, which was proposed by the Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). The book looks at Jung’s psychological approach to childhood, which claims to be scientific but not in the same way as main-stream psychology is considered to be scientific, and also explores what is beneath various images of childhood, but not in the same way as social constructionism explores what underpins particular images of childhood. The book also considers Jung’s concept of ‘the child’in relation to the long-standing psychoanalytic view of a child as dependent; Michael Fordham’s (1905–95) views of the child as independent of its parents; and the dominant view of childhood as adults’past affecting their present, as found in both depth psychology in general and Fordham’s view in particular.

Jumat, 08 April 2016

Free Psychology Books: Theories of Personality by G.J. Feist and J. Feist

Theories of Personality by G.J. Feist and J. Feist

What makes people behave as they do? Are people ordinarily aware of what they are doing, or are their behaviors the result of hidden, unconscious motives? Are some people naturally good and others basically evil? Or do all people have potential to be either good or evil? Is human conduct largely a product of nature, or is it shaped mostly by environmental influences? Can people freely choose to mold their personality, or are their lives determined by forces beyond their control? Are people best described by their similarities, or is unique-ness the dominant characteristic of humans? What causes some people to develop disordered personalities whereas others seem to grow toward psychological health? These questions have been asked and debated by philosophers, scholars, and religious thinkers for several thousand years; but most of these discussions were based on personal opinions that were colored by political, economic, religious, and social considerations. Then, near the end of the 19th century, some progress was made in humanity’s ability to organize, explain, and predict its own actions. The emergence of psychol-ogy as the scientific study of human behavior marked the beginning of a more systematic approach to the study of human personality. Early personality theorists, such as Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, relied mostly on clinical observations to construct models of human behavior. Although their data were more systematic and re-liable than those of earlier observers, these theorists continued to rely on their own individualized way of looking at things, and thus they arrived at different conceptions of the nature of humanity. Later personality theorists tended to use more empirical studies to learn about human behavior. These the-orists developed tentative models, tested hypotheses, and then reformulated their models. In other words, they applied the tools of scientific inquiry and scientific theory to the area of human personality. Science, of course, is not divorced from speculation, imagination, and creativity, all of which are needed to formulate theories. Each of the personality theorists discussed in this book has evolved a theory based both on empirical observa-tions and on imaginative speculation. Moreover, each theory is a reflection of the personality of its creator. Thus, the different theories discussed in these pages are a reflection of the unique cultural background, family experiences, and professional training of their originators. The usefulness of each theory, however, is not evaluated on the personality of its author but on its ability to (1) generate research, (2) offer itself to fal-sification, (3) integrate existing empirical knowledge, and (4) suggest practical answers to everyday prob-lems. Therefore, we evaluate each of the theories discussed in this book on the basis of these four criteria as well as on (5) its internal consistency and (6) its simplicity. In addition, some personality theories have fer-tilized other fields, such as sociology, education, psychotherapy, advertising, management, mythology, coun-seling, art, literature, and religion. The Seventh Edition...............

Free Psychology Books: Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences by Gravetter & Wallnau

Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences by Gravetter & Wallnau

By one definition, statistics consist of facts and figures such as average income, crime rate, birth rate, baseball batting averages, and so on. These statistics are usually in-formative and time saving because they condense large quantities of information into a few simple figures. Later in this chapter we return to the notion of calculating statistics (facts and figures) but, for now, we concentrate on a much broader definition of statistics. Specifically, we use the term statistics to refer to a set of mathematical procedures. In this case, we are using the term statistics as a shortened version of statistical procedures. For example, you are probably using this book for a statistics course in which you will learn about the statistical techniques that are used for research in the behavioral sciences. Research in psychology (and other fields) involves gathering information. To de-termine, for example, whether violence on TV has any effect on children’s behavior, you would need to gather information about children’s behaviors and the TV programs they watch. When researchers finish the task of gathering information, they typically find themselves with pages and pages of measurements such as IQ scores, personality scores, reaction time scores, and so on. In this book, we present the statistics that.....................

Free Psychology Books:Julia Kristeva Psychoanalysis and Modernity Suny Series in Gender Theory (2004) by Sara Beardsworth

Julia Kristeva Psychoanalysis and Modernity Suny Series in Gender Theory (2004) by Sara Beardsworth

What moves the argument of this book is the thought that unacknowl-edged suffering is the remnant of freedom in conditions of late modernity. This is Kristeva’s thought. . . . Let me begin again by outlining this project’s three major objectives. The first is to explicate the central psychoanalytic, aesthetic, ethical, and political concepts in Kristeva’s writings from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, with a special emphasis on her 1980s thought. The second is to develop an interpretation of her thought as a philosophy of modernity sensitive to the problem of modern nihilism, arguing that this inter-pretation best captures her vision and project and best enables the assessment of that project, especially Kristeva’s choice of psychoanalysis and the aesthetic to structure her thought, but also her relationship to religion. Third, I revisit the most troubled questions in the reception of her writings on the basis of this interpretation, in order to clarify why so many are intrigued by them, and then all but the few move on. This book introduces and readdresses the problems but also works to illuminate and reinforce the intrigue by clarifying the reasons for it. It needs to be acknowledged that, at first sight, the classification of her oeuvreas a philosophy of modernity might strike readers of Kristeva as uncon-vincing. Given her turn to psychoanalysis and art, it would seem to be necessary to recognize that the oeuvreis best characterized as a philosophy of culture rooted in the psychoanalytic view of subjectivity. However, it is the very way in which psychoanalysis structures her thought which justifies the claim that it is a philosophy of modernity. I argue that the central texts of Kristeva’s writings of the 1980s contain a self-consciousness of the emergence and significance of psycho-analysis as a discourse embedded in conditions of modern nihilism.

Jumat, 01 April 2016

Free Psychology Books: A Handbook for Social Science Field Research -Design and Methods by Perecman & Curran

A Handbook for Social Science Field Research -Design and Methods by Perecman & Curran

If you are a social scientist and you plan to write about the past—for example, about the ending of the Cold War or the vicissitudes of the Venezuelan oil industry or the twisting course of democracy promotion in the Philippines or in Haiti—then you will have to adopt the method of historians. 2 That is, you will have to go to the archives. Virtually all social scientists preparing to write a dissertation in international or comparative or area studies today take it for granted that they will be conducting research abroad, in the field, for 1 or 3 or 6 or 12 months, perhaps in Cairo or Jakarta, Maracaibo or Baku, Paris or Chiapas. Much of their training before and after taking general exams or writing qualifying papers is geared (we hope) toward developing the skills and techniques necessary for this fieldwork: studying Tagalog or Farsi or Spanish, designing appropriate survey instruments, making contacts with research institutions and scholars, taking classes in and practicing ethno-graphic methods, figuring out where to find data sets that they need or how to build their own, and the like. Virtually no one successfully obtains fund-ing and begins a project away from home without first demonstrating some degree of sophistication and rigor about place and about method. Writing seriously about a place in a time other than one’s own.....................

Free Psychology Books: Case Study Research Methods by Bill Gillham

Case Study Research Methods by Bill Gillham

What is a case study? Perhaps we should first ask: what is a case? The word 'case' (like 'intelligence' and 'neurosis') is one we all use, and feel we understand, but is rather challenging to define. Here is an attempt:

• a unit of human activity embedded in the real world;

• which can only be studied or understood in context;

• which exists in the here and now; .

• that merges in with its context so that precise boundaries are difficult to draw.

A case can be an individual: it can be a group - such as a family, or a class, or an office, or a hospital ward; it can be an institution - such as a school or a children's home, or a factory; it can be a large-scale community - a town, an industry, a profession.
All of these are single cases; but you can also study multiple cases: a number of single parents; several schools; two different professions. It all depends what you want to find out - which leads us on. A case study is one which investigates the above to answer specific research questions (that may be fairly loose to~begin with) and which seeks a range of different kinds of evidence, evidence which is there in the case setting, and which has to be abstracted and collated to get the best possible answers......................

Kamis, 31 Maret 2016

Free Psychology Books: Interviewing as Qualitative Research by Irving Seidman

Interviewing as Qualitative Research by Irving Seidman

This book is intended for doctoral candidates who are engaged in that search and who think that in-depth interviewing might be appropri-ate for them and their research topic. It will also serve more experienced researchers who are interested in qualitative research and may be turning to the possibilities of interviewing for the first time. Finally, the book is geared to professors in search of a supplementary text on in-depth inter-viewing that connects method and technique with broader issues of qualitative research. For both individual and classroom use, the book provides a step-by-step introduction to the research process using in-depth inter-viewing and places those steps within the context of significant issues in qualitative research. The text centers on a phenomenological approach to in-depth in-terviewing. The Introduction outlines how I came to do interviewing research. Chapter 1 discusses a rationale for using interviewing as a research method and the potential of narratives as ways of knowing. Chapter 2 presents a structure for in-depth, phenomenologically based interviewing that my associates and I have used in our research projects. The text provides specific guidance on how to carry out this ap-proach to interviewing and the principles of adapting it to one’s own goals. Chapter 3 explores issues that may make proposal writing daunt-ing and discusses meaningful but simple questions that can guide the researcher through the process. Chapter 4 stresses pitfalls and snares to avoid in the process, and discusses issues in establishing access to, mak-ing contact with, and selecting participants. Chapter 5, responding to the increasing concern about ethical issues in interviewing research, intro-duces the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process and its implications for researchers who interview. This chapter explains the risks inherent in interviewing research that lead IRBs to require Informed Consent Forms. The chapter explicates the major points that an informed con-sent form should include, alerts readers to corresponding ethical issues.............

Free Psychology Books: the Emotional Nature of Qualitative Research by C. R. Figley eds

the Emotional Nature of Qualitative Research by C. R. Figley eds

Emotional intelligence, a concept coined by Goleman,1 is the ability to dis-cern, utilize, and shape the emotional reactions of self and others. Emotions represent an area rich in tradition and span fields of study, as well as culture and time. This is the latest book in the series, Innovations in Psychology. Professor Kathleen Gilbert, through this book, introduces the field to an important new area, emotion-focused research. Emotions include, but are not limited to, stress and flow or lack of it (the manifestation of emotions), feelings (that represent and cause the emotion stress), and emotional controls (our efforts to modulate our emotional effects). Emotions account for an extraordinary amount of the human expe-rience. It is remarkable how little we know about this phenomenon. It is about time that we address the emotional nature of research. “How do we manage the emotions stimulated by researchers? What does it mean if the researcher is profoundly affected by the experience, even to the extent of going through a spiritual epiphany?”Dr. Gilbert, a professor at Indiana University for many years, addresses these and other related questions in a book for researchers and practitioners who wish to apply qualitative (as opposed to simply quantitative/data analysis-driven) research methods to human research. The tradition of this book series represents substantial and trendsetting innovations in psychology, has set new agendas for burnout in families, 2and has opened new areas of clinical innovation by introducing energy psychol-ogy, 3 traumatology, 4,5 and poetry therapy. 6 In a period of substantial scholarly activity in the social and medical sciences, giving voice to research participants is suddenly more acceptable beyond anthropology and those practitioners of qualitative research meth-ods. This trend is part of a larger cultural trend, even a global trend. In part this is due to the impersonal aspects of the internet, the growing concentration of people in the cities, and other demographic explanations. However, some suggest that psychology has lost its heart and soul. Gone are the influences of social psychology that led to major breakthroughs in......

Free Psychology Books: Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology, by Carla Willig

Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology, by Carla Willig

How, and what, can we know?
•Positivism
•Empiricism
•Hypothetico-deductivism
•Critique of the ‘scientific method’
•Feminist critique of established epistemologies
•Social constructionism
•Epistemology and methodology
•Qualitative research
•Overview of the book
•Three epistemological questions
•Further reading

‘It involves opening up to new and possibly unsettling experiences.’ ‘It means venturing into new territory.’ ‘It’s discovering something new and exciting; there’s a little bit of danger.’ ‘It is exciting and unusual, out-of-the-ordinary. There’s a big element of enjoyment and there may be an element of challenge. It’s something that will develop me as a person.’ ‘Enid Blyton stories . . . [laughs] . . . It’s exciting, possibly involving a degree of risk to oneself; scary on occasion but it comes out alright at the end. You’re glad you’ve had them.’ ‘An exploration involving new places, meeting new people and having new experiences outside of the norm. These could be both positive and negative in nature.’ ‘Adventures are sudden, surprise events which are pleasurable, because they are unexpected.’ Talk of an ‘adventure’captures the imagination. We want to know what it was like, how it felt, what happened next. We look upon the adventurer as someone who has been changed by the experience, someone who will never be quite the same again.

Rabu, 30 Maret 2016

Free Psychology Books: Transpersonal in Psychology by Andrew Shorrock

Transpersonal in Psychology by Andrew Shorrock

Transpersonal psychology is a branch of psychology that recognizes and accepts spirituality as an important dimension of the human psyche and of the universal scheme of things. It also studies and honors the entire spectrum of human experience, including various levels and realms of the psyche that become manifest in non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC). Here belong, for example, experiences and observations from meditation and other forms of systematic spiritual practice, spontaneous mystical raptures, psychospiritual crises (‘spiritual emergencies’), psychedelic therapy, hypnosis, experiential psychotherapy, and near-death situations (NDE). (Boorstein, 1996, p. 44).

Abrief exploration of the transpersonal from the perspective of neurobiology mainly because clinicians and theorists from all areas of psychology and psychotherapy pursue an active interest in the advances being made in neurological research. Moreover, contemporary neuroscientists themselves, Solms and Turnbull (2002), are increasingly able to direct their neurological research towards subjective mental states such as consciousness. This means that the exploration of subjective experience now need not be restricted only to psychological and philosophical schools. This has been made possible by the increasing sophistication of neurobiological tests, which in turn have been made possible by the advent of sophisticated brain imaging technology and advances in the understanding of molecular neurobiology.

Free Psychology Books: The Psychology Book - DK Publishing by Cathrine Collin et al.

The Psychology Book - DK Publishing by Cathrine Collin et al.

Among all the sciences, psychology is perhaps the most mysterious to the general public, and the most prone to misconceptions. Even though its language and ideas have infiltrated everyday culture, most people have only a hazy idea of what the subject is about, and what psychologists actually do. For some, psychology conjures up images of people in white coats, either staffing an institution for mental disorders or conducting laboratory experiments on rats. Others may imagine a man with a middle-European accent psychoanalyzing a patient on a couch or, if film scripts are to be believed, plotting to exercise some form of mind control.
Although these stereotypes are an exaggeration, some truth lies beneath them. It is perhaps the huge range of subjects that fall under the umbrella of psychology (and the bewildering array of terms beginning with the prefix “psych-”) that creates confusion over what psychology entails; psychologists themselves are unlikely to agree on a single definition of the word. “Psychology” comes from the ancient Greek psyche, meaning “soul” or “mind,” and logia, a “study” or “account,” which seems to sum up the broad scope of the subject, but today the word most accurately describes “the science of mind and behavior.”......

Selasa, 29 Maret 2016

Free Psychology Books: Person-Centred Counselling Psychology - An Introduction by Ewan Gillon

Person-Centred Counselling Psychology - An Introduction by Ewan Gillon

In the opinion of Dorothea Brandt, author of the famous Becoming a Writer (1981), all writing is autobiographical in one way or another. Hence this book may be seen to represent not only something about its topic, person-centred counselling psychology, but also something about me, as its author. Certainly, the focus of the book evolved from the disparate strands of my own career, firstly as an academic psychologist, then, as a person-centred counsellor, and now as a counselling psychologist. During the time I spent in these different professional domains, I grappled with many questions asking how each related to the other, and in particular, how the person-centred approach fitted within the field of contemporary psychology, a field which so often prioritises empirical methods and scientific expertise in trying to understand and attend to the human condition. Although, as a counselling psychologist I was well acquainted with difficulties in reconciling different world views, what I missed, even from within this setting, was a clear understanding of how the person-centred approach could be understood from a psychological point of view.

The purpose of this book is to address this shortfall by providing a clear, thorough and up-to-date appraisal of the person-centred approach as a form of psychology. It offers an exploration of the history, theory, practice/s and context/s of person-centred therapy from a psychological perspective, and is written for readers who have an interest in the area of contemporary counselling psychology but who are perhaps less familiar with the complexity of person-centred concepts and methods, as well as the challenges these present and the opportunities they afford. Person-centred therapy is often misunderstood and simplified within contemporary psychology, a process that has had some very significant consequences over the years. Hence an added intention of the book is to touch upon the areas of the approach that are often ignored, misinterpreted, forgotten or neglected (e.g. its research tradition), and bring these back into focus. However, the book is not a historical narrative. Far too many developments have occurred within the personcentred framework in recent years to allow for this.

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