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Books in Psychology

Elsevier's Psychology collection is vital for students and psychologists, providing a thorough understanding of the mind and behavior. Covering human thought, development, personality, emotion, and motivation, it offers insights into both theoretical and practical aspects. Through topics like cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology, it equips researchers and students to address real-world challenges and advance their understanding of the field.

  • Losing Control

    How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation
    • 1st Edition
    • Roy F. Baumeister + 2 more
    • English
    Self-regulation refers to the self's ability to control its own thoughts, emotions, and actions. Through self-regulation, we consciously control how much we eat, whether we give in to impulse, task performance, obsessive thoughts, and even the extent to which we allow ourselves recognition of our emotions. This work provides a synthesis and overview of recent and long-standing research findings of what is known of the successes and failures of self-regulation.Peop... the world over suffer from the inability to control their finances, their weight, their emotions, their craving for drugs, their sexual impulses, and more. The United States in particular is regarded by some observers as a society addicted to addiction. Therapy and support groups have proliferated not only for alcoholics and drug abusers but for all kinds of impulse control, from gambling to eating chocolate. Common to all of these disorders is a failure of self-regulation, otherwise known as "self-control."The consequences of these self-control problems go beyond individuals to affect family members and society at large. In Losing Control, the authors provide a single reference source with comprehensive information on general patterns of self-regulation failure across contexts, research findings on specific self-control disorders, and commentary on the clinical and social aspects of self-regulation failure. Self-control is discussed in relation to what the "self" is, and the cognitive, motivational, and emotional factors that impinge on one's ability to control one's "self."
  • Animal Learning and Cognition

    • 1st Edition
    • N. J. Mackintosh
    • English
    How do animals learn? By what means can animals be conditioned? This volume of the acclaimed Handbook of Perception and Cognition, Second Edition, reviews such basic models as Pavlovian conditioning as well as more modern models of animal memory and social cognition. Sure to represent a benchmark of a vast literature from diverse disciplines, this reference work is a useful addition to any library devoted to animal learning, conditioning behavior, and interaction.
  • Learning and Memory in Normal Aging

    • 1st Edition
    • Donald H. Kausler
    • English
    Donald Kausler is one of the founding fathers of research on aging. Internationally recognized, his efforts have formed the cornerstone of research on how age affects memory and learning. Now, in one comprehensive volume, Kausler condenses research findings in this realm into one engaging and forthright book. What are the effects of aging on classical and operant conditioning? How does age affect memory capacity/transfer of learning skill acquisition? Kausler addresses all of these issues and more in a clearly presented, easily understood review of major research findings.
  • Cognitive Science

    The Science of Intelligent Systems
    • 1st Edition
    • George F. Luger + 4 more
    • English
    The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together elements of cognitive psychology, mathematics, perception, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Given this breadth, textbooks have had difficulty providing balanced coverage-most resort to disjointed edited treatises that prove difficult to use.Cognitive Science provides a unified and comprehensive look at the field, from foundations to applications. Luger explores the logical and philosophical bases of cognitive science with multiple models of intelligence, including neural networks and connectionism. Practical programming examples are included along with an introduction to PROLOG.
  • The Psychology of Risk Taking Behavior

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 107
    • R.M. Trimpop
    • English
    This book aims to help the reader to understand what motivates people to engage in risk taking behavior, such as participating in traffic, sports, financial investments, or courtship. The consequences of risk taking may be positive, or result in accidents and injuries, especially in traffic. The wealth of studies and theories (about 1000 references) is used to offer a cohesive, holistic view of risk motivation. The risk motivation theory is a dynamic state-trait model incorporating physiological, emotional and cognitive components of risk perception, processing and planning. If a deficit exists between desired and perceived risk, risk compensation behavior results. A feedback loop provides new information for the next perception-motivatio... process. Assumptions were tested and support was found with 120 subjects in a longitudinal study. The concepts and findings are discussed in relation to psychological theories and their meaning for our daily lives.
  • Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, Volume 2

    • 1st Edition
    • Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
    • English
  • Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, Volume 3

    • 1st Edition
    • Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
    • English
  • Inhibitory Processes in Attention, Memory and Language

    • 1st Edition
    • Dale Dagenbach + 1 more
    • English
    The book identifies how excitory and inhibitory messages in the human nervous system combine and coordinate to affect attention, cognition, memory and language. Communication within the nervous system involves the excitation and inhibition of neurons. How these processes interact to affect cognition and behavioural performance has been an area of ongoing investigation that is once again at the forefront of cognitive research. This volume brings together cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists to identify the neural evidence for inhibitory mechanisms in cognitive processing and discusses how these inhibitory mechanisms subsequently affect cognition and behaviour.
  • Intelligence, Mind, and Reasoning

    Structure and Development
    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 106
    • A. Demetriou + 1 more
    • English
    This volume aims to contribute to the integration of three traditions that have remained separate in psychology. Specifically, the developmental, the psychometric, and the cognitive tradition. In order to achieve this aim, the text deals with these three aspects of human knowing that have been the focus of one or more of the three traditions for many years. Answers are provided to questions such as the following: What is common to intelligence, mind, and reasoning? What is specific to each of these three aspects of human knowing? How does each of them affect the functioning and development of the other?The chapters are organized into two parts. Part I focuses on intelligence and mind and has reasoning at the background. The papers in this part present new theories and methods that systematically attempt to bridge psychometric theories of intelligence with theories of cognitive development or information processing theories. Part II focuses on mind and reasoning and has intelligence at the background. The papers in this part develop models of reasoning and attempt to show how reasoning interacts with mind and intelligence. Two discussion chapters are also included. These highlight the convergences and the divergences of the various traditions as represented in the book.
  • The Grasping Hand

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 104
    • C.L. MacKenzie + 1 more
    • English
    The simple task of grasping objects has been studied for centuries by scientists, therapists and engineers who have tried to understand and duplicate the versatility of the human hand. Using an interdisciplinary approach and new framework for looking at prehension, the authors uncover the subleties of the amazing interaction between the hand and the brain. They draw from such diverse fields as experimental psychology, kinesiology, robotics, neural networks, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and rehabilitation. A triangle strategy is presented, starting from conceptual models that suggest both experimental and computational models. Chapters describe the multiple postures established by the hand, phases in the dynamic process of reaching for, grasping and manipulating various objects, and the constraints acting on such activity.Appendices provide the complete anatomy of the upper limb, the basics of computational modelling, and the fundamentals of prosthetic and dextrous robot hands. The ultimate goal of this book is to develop a common vocabularly for multidisciplinary researchers who strive to understand a system as complex as the hand under the control of the human brain.