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. 

 

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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.”......

 
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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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Free Psychology Books: The World of Psychology by Samuel E. Wood

The World of Psychology by Samuel E. Wood

Do you have a Facebook account? We’re pretty sure that you do since Facebook is currently the most popular social networking site in Canada with nearly 1.6 million users (Eldon, 2011). Facebook and other social media, such as Twitter, are changing the very nature of social relationships. It is estimated that as many as 90 percent of college and university students check their Facebook at least once per day, making it one of the most visited sites on the internet (Rosenbush, 2006). As all of you know, Facebook is used as a way of interacting with others, finding online friends, keeping friends aware of the changes in your life, showing pictures, and even starting— or ending—relationships. While popular, engaging, and convenient, Facebook is not without its problems. For instance, Facebook opens up a person’s world—activities, list of friends, and personal information—to full public scrutiny (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), creating some serious concerns over issues of personal privacy (Christofides, Muise, & Desmarais, 2009). It’s commonly assumed that adolescents and young people are far more likely to exchange information that may cause damaging privacy consequences, but a recent study suggests that midlife adults are equally...

 

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Free Psychology Books: Designing and Reporting Experiments in Psychology by Peter Harris

Designing and Reporting Experiments in Psychology by Peter Harris

 

This is a book about how to write undergraduate practical reports. It is designed to help students with every stage of the report writing process by giving them clear and detailed advice about what to put in each section of the report and describing broader issues of format, style and other issues involved in producing good reports of their practical work. As this book is first and foremost about how to write reports, this material forms the focus of the main body of the book, Part 1. Part 2 of this book contains material on design and statistics. It is designed to give students the background they need in key aspects of design and statistics to help them better understand what is required of them in report writing. Material in both parts is supplemented by a Web site that contains additional material on report writing and design. The Web site can be found at http://mcgraw-hill.co.uk/ openup/harris/ First published in 1986, this book has been reprinted many times and is now in its third edition, so several generations of undergraduate students have benefited from using it in their studies. I hope that this edition continues to prove a boon to students and look forward to receiving their emails about it. There are several changes and updates in this new edition. The most obvious is that, for the first time, it has been paired with two statistics textbooks from the same publisher, both of which have been selected because they are comparatively easy to use and have the appropriate breadth of coverage. Both of these are best sellers in their own right. J. Greene and M. D’Oliveira’s (2006) Learning to use statistical tests in psychology is the more basic and introductory and

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Free Psychology Books: Applied Social Psychology by Gun Semin & K. Fiedler

Applied Social Psychology by Gun Semin & K. Fiedler

 

The first systematic study of the attitude-behaviour relationship was reported by Richard LaPiere (1934). LaPiere was interested in knowing whether people's behaviour towards members of an ethnic minority could be predicted by their self-reported attitudes towards that ethnic minority. To examine this issue he travelled around the United States in the company of a young Chinese couple. They stopped at a total of 251 establishments (e.g. hotels, restaurants); in all but one of these, according to LaPiere, the Chinese couple were treated courteously, despite the fact that in that era many Americans held negative attitudes towards Chinese people. On returning home, LaPiere wrote to each of the establishments they had visited, asking whether they would accept members of the Chinese race as guests. Of the 128 replies received, 92 per cent said that they would not serve Chinese guests. Taken at face value, these results suggest a sharp discrepancy between a measure of 'attitude' (the expressed policy of the establishment) and actual behaviour (how the Chinese couple were actually received). However, if one stops to think about the study more closely, one can see that the results are not all that damaging to the notion that attitudes and behaviour should be positively correlated. Perhaps the most basic flaw in LaPiere's procedure is that we have no way of knowing whether the person who was responsible for accepting the Chinese couple as guests was the same person as the one who replied to LaPiere's subsequent letter. If these two measures were not taken from the same individual, it is clearly inappropriate to conclude that the results indicate an inconsistency between attitudes and behaviour.

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Free Psychology Books: Psychological Well-Being by Ingrid, E. Wells

Psychological Well-Being by Ingrid, E. Wells

 

Psychological well-being is a subjective term that means different things to different people. Psychological health, otherwise called mental health, is a relative state of mind in which a person who is healthy is able to cope with and adjust to the recurrent stresses of everyday living in an acceptable way. This book discusses topics such as: sexuality as acritical factor for health, quality of life and well-being, the well-being of Russian  and Ukranian adolescents in the post-Perestroika period, participation in sports and its potential toconfer numerous physical and psychological health benefits, work-related stress and its relation to ill-health and decreased productivity, among others.

Chapter 1- Referring to the popular saying that laughter is the best medicine, many thingsare mixed up, for instance, laughter, exhilaration, humor, cheerful mood, and cheerfulness asa trait. In the media, putative facts are wrongly interpreted or made up and unreflectivelycopied again and again. Several of the misconceptions  have even found their way into scientific publications. This chapter attempts to clear up some popular misunderstandings and the confusion of concepts, and explains which of those are related to health or well-being and which cannot be related to health at all. Special emphasis is placed on cheerfulness, which is awell-defined psychological construct. Added to this are some explanations and tips that mayhelp the readers to be more critical towards study reports themselves. Finally,  author  discusswhat may be the use of common laughter- and humor-related courses or workshops, and howthe development of a more cheerful disposition could be promoted.

Chapter2- The positive psychological functioning has received several approaches alongthe history. Author must distinguish between the hedonic approach, which speaks of the―subjective well-being‖ relating it to happiness, and the eudaemonic approach, which relates the ―psychological well-being‖ to human potential development. In this second thinking trend author find authors like Maslow and Rogers. These authors focused on self-actualization andon the view of the fully functioning person respectively, as ways to achieve well-being and personal fulfillment.More recently, Carol Ryff has divided this construct in 6 dimensions: Self-acceptance,Positive relations with others, Autonomy, Environmental Mastery, Purpose in Life andPersonal Growth. In order to asses the 6 dimensions mentioned, Ryff created the―Psychological well-being  scales‖, with 20 items each. After that, shorter versions have been proposed, due to the 120 items of the original ones.

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Free Psychology Books: Brainwashed by S. Satel and Lilienfeld

Brainwashed by S. Satel and Lilienfeld 

 

You’ve seen the headlines: This is your brain on love. Or God. Or envy. Or happiness. And they’re reliably accompanied by articles boasting pictures of color- drenched brains— scans capturing Buddhist monks meditating, addicts craving cocaine, and college sophomores choosing Coke over Pepsi. The media— and even some neuroscientists, it seems— love to invoke the neural foundations of human behavior to explain everything from the Bernie Madoff fi nancial fi asco to slavish devotion to our iPhones, the sexual indiscretions of politicians, conservatives’ dismissal of global warming, and even an obsession with self- tanning.1 Brains are big on campus, too. Take a map of any major university, and you can trace the march of neuroscience from research labs and medical centers into schools of law and business and departments of economics and philosophy. In recent years, neuroscience has merged with a host of other disciplines, spawning such new areas of study as neurolaw, neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing, and neurofi nance. Add to this the birth of neuroaesthetics, neurohistory, neuroliterature, neuromusicology, neuropolitics, and neurotheology.

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Free Psychology Books: Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind Research and Everyday by E. Bruce Goldstein

Cognitive Psychology Connecting Mind Research and Everyday

 

The decade of the 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution—a shift in psychology from the behaviorist’s stimulus-response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind. Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s book was only one of many events in the 1950s that reintroduced the mind to psychology. These events provided a new way to study the mind, called the information-processing approach—an approach that traces the sequence of mental operations involved in cognition. One of the events that inspired psychologists to think of the mind in terms of information processing was a newly introduced device called the digital computer.  

In this book, Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning. According to this idea, children imitate speech that they hear and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded. But in 1959 Noam Chomsky, a linguist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a scathing review of Skinner’s book, in which he pointed out that children say many sentences that have never been rewarded by parents (“I hate you, Mommy,” for example), and that during the normal course of language development, they go through a stage in which they use incorrect grammar, such as “the boy hitted the ball,” even though this incorrect grammar may never have been reinforced. 

Chomsky saw language development as being determined not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across cultures. Chomsky’s idea that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed, as opposed to being caused by reinforcement, led psychologists to reconsider the idea that language and other complex behaviors, such as problem solving and reasoning, can be explained by operant conditioning. Instead, they began to realize that to understand complex cognitive behaviors, it is necessary not only to measure observable behavior, but also to consider what this behavior tells us about how the mind works.

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Free Psychology Books: Applying Psychology to Everyday Life by K. T. Strongman

Applying Psychology to Everyday Life 

 

The fact that psychology is such a broad subject and that it is usually regarded as dependent on empiricism is simultaneously a strength and a weakness. The strength, as many academic psychologists would point out, is that it has its basis squarely in the scientific endeavour and so there is an emphasis on methodological rigour and great care is taken not to over-generalise, that is, not to ‘go beyond’ the observations made. The weakness is that this approach has tended to make psychology a rather arid and cautious discipline, one that has not led to as penetrating an understanding of the human condition as might be expected. 

Interestingly, the humanities (many of which have little or nothing to do with empirical science) are best described as those subjects that are concerned with what it is to be human. Psychologists are frequently concerned more simply with what humans do rather than with the human condition. This can make the subject somewhat disappointing to the beginning student who seems to want rather more than this. For many students, one of the core reasons for studying psychology is to fi nd out more about oneself and others and to fi nd things that might be useful as one goes about one’s daily life. All too often, such knowledge is not to be found in psychology texts.

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