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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.

  • Contributions to Medical Psychology

    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • S. Rachman
    • English
    The role of the clinical psychologist has traditionally been confined to psychiatry, but with the development in medicine of the importance of treating the 'whole man' it has been realized that we have neglected the psychological aspect of medical care. This book, the first in a series of volumes on the subject of medical psychology, provides 10 important contributions on how psychologists can provide a service and implement research in areas of medicine where the 'human aspect' has been eroded by technological advances

  • The Development of Prosocial Behavior

    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • Nancy Eisenberg
    • English
    Developmental Psychology Series: The Development of Prosocial Behavior focuses on the advancement of techniques, methodologies, and approaches involved in studies on prosocial behavior, including moral reasoning and judgment, altruism, liberalism, and conservatism. The publication first elaborates on the general conceptual and theoretical issues in the study of prosocial and altruistic behavior; early development and socialization of prosocial behavior; and the relationship between prosocial behavior and moral reasoning. The text then takes a look at the generality of altruism in children, social learning theory and development of prosocial behavior, and the development of altruism. Discussions focus on directions for research on prosocial behaviors; research findings and interpretations on the early forms of altruism; social learning of prosocial behavior and moral judgment; and generality of prosocial behavior. The manuscript examines personality development and liberal sociopolitical attitudes, development of prosocial motivation, and the effects of mood on prosocial behavior in children and adults. Topics include motivational mechanisms of prosocial acts, dialectics of development, antecedents of liberalism and conservatism in adults, and personality and socialization in relation to adolescents' political orientations. The book is a dependable source of data for researchers interested in the development of prosocial behavior.

  • Current Topics in Clinical and Community Psychology

    Volume 2
    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • Charles D. Spielberger
    • English
    Current Topics in Clinical and Community Psychology, Volume 2 covers the need of scientific work in the field of clinical and community psychology to the problems of modern society. The book discusses a new area of specialization - clinical neuropsychology; and the behavior deficits that result from brain damage in humans that may result from agents such as mind-altering drugs, alcohol, tranquilizers, and inadequate diet. The text also describes the sequential system for personality scale development; the prediction of violence with psychological tests; the relationship between depression and oral contraception. The quest for valid preventive interventions is also considered. Clinical psychologists, community psychologists, psychiatrists and students taking related courses will find the book useful.

  • Personality: The Human Potential

    Pergamon General Psychology Series
    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • Melvin L. Weiner
    • Arnold P. Goldstein
    • English
    Personality: The Human Potential is a collection of psychological studies that reflect some of the author's experiences in analyzing human conflict and suffering. Based on the spirit of psychotherapeutic work whose goal is to uncover the core of the patient's personality, the book explores the major emotional problems of contemporary life, particularly the critical turning-points in people's lives. Its purpose and challenge is to indicate how our underdeveloped and conflicted minds may be better understood and, through understanding, help us to realize our human potentialities. It demonstrates how psychological understanding offers a person a rare, and not often repeated, challenge and opportunity to truly alter the course of his life. This volume consists of 17 chapters and begins with an introduction to the social and psychological ills of today, laying particular emphasis on the ""signals of decay."" Attention then turns to the emotional development of man from infancy to adulthood in hopes of understanding the roots of our irrationalities and inner conflicts and discovering ways of resolving them. The chapters that follow focus on the concept of repetition compulsion, the behavior of uncommitted people, and problems such as schizophrenia, drug addiction, homosexuality, suicide, sexual problems, and pregnancy and abortion. The book also discusses panic states, marital relationships, antisocial behavior, and how psychology can help resolve the basic roots of an individual's inner conflicts so that he may be freed to fully realize his potentialities. Patients and psychotherapists will find this book extremely helpful.

  • Anxiety

    Psychological Perspectives on Panic and Agoraphobia
    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • Bozzano G Luisa
    • English
    This volume analyses the perplexing and often disabling form of distress known as anxiety from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective, illustrating the rich contribution that psychological theory has made and is making to this topic.**The first section extensively examines the clinical literature, describing and delineating with case examples the cluster of characteristic features termed panic-anxiety. Research findings in other clinical areas such as alcohol dependence are shown to have conceptual and empirical links with panic-anxiety. The second section of the book reviews and evaluates the main theoretical approaches to anxiety, including specific models of panic and agoraphobia, challenging many traditional assumptions and advocating the analysis of anxiety as a socially constructed meaning imposed on experience rather than a theoretical concept or psychopathological state. The methodological implications are discussed and a schematic model of panic-anxiety is proposed.**The theoretical integration represents a major contribution to the resurgence of interest in this field and will be of relevance to all researchers and postgraduate students within the mental health professions.**FROM THE PREFACE: This book has two main objectives. The first is to describe a dimension of psychological distress I have called panic-anxiety. This takes up the first part of the book, which surveys literature that is primarily descriptive and psychiatric. The second objective is pursued in the second part of the book, in which I examine a large number of theories of anxiety to see what they might have to offer in explaining the panic-anxiety cluster of complaints. I am therefore concerned to apply psychological theory to a real-world problem, that is, to what people who seek professional help loosely describe as panic, anxiety and fears of public situations.**The theoretical and experimental literature on anxiety is so vast that I have had to be disciplined and in no small measure prejudiced in favour of a particular theoretical perspective. I have attempted as far as possible to treat anxiety as a lay construct, that is, as a social construction and not a scientific concept. For this reason, I have endeavoured to refer to reports of anxiety or to complaints of anxiety in order to avoid the common tendency to reify anxiety as a an entity which exists independently of the social origins of the term. Accordingly, I believe that the relevant question to ask is not, What is anxiety? but, What are the antecedents of reports (or complaints) of anxiety?**It is intended that this book should provide a coherent perspective on a common form of psychological distress, of value to therapists, researchers and students of abnormal psychology. In many ways, the problems for which people seek help do not define 'natural' areas of scientific research, and so it is difficult to combine theoretical and practical interests in one book. The complaints with which I am particularly concerned--panic and fears of public places--can be analysed to reveal scientific questions which have a significance much wider than the explanation of particular complaints made to professionals working in a clinical context. Apart from its obvious social significance, a clinical area is therefore simply a point of departure for scientific investigation. My intention, then, is to use this clinical area as an illustration of how such problems might be tackled from a theoretical perspective which is essentially psychological.**The theoretical position I have adopted owes much to the views of Sarbin (1964, 1968), Mandler (1975) and Averill (1980a,b). In taking anxiety to be a lay construct, I assume that the 'What is?' questions rightly belong to the sociology of knowledge. Of course, the applied psychologist also has substantive issues to consider. For example, How can this individual be helped to report calmness rather than anxiety? or, How can that individual be helped to travel freely on public transport? I suggest that the most positive contribution a social constructivist position has to offer is to dissuade researchers from regarding these real-life problems as reflecting an underlying emotion of anxiety, or, even less helpful, an anxiety disorder.**Biologica... and medical research on anxiety is also considered in this light. Reductive biological and pathological hypotheses are rejected, but an attempt is made to integrate the biological aspects at a higher level of analysis. For this reason, the book differs from others which tend to confine themselves to a description and explanation of postulated disorders or syndromes. Because the emphasis of this book is essentially conceptual, there is relatively little discussion of assessment and therapy, apart from a general critique of current approaches.**Most experiences described as fear or anxiety in an everyday context have an identifiable source or object. When these experiences are reported as unbearably intense or lead to the avoidance of various situations, they are generally referred to as phobias. In the past 20 years there has been a considerable advance in the technology of reducing and eliminating unwanted phobias. The new methods of imaginal and real-life confrontation are successful in the majority of cases when anxiety is reported in connection with specific eliciting stimuli. The same success cannot be claimed for methods of dealing with complaints of anxiety that appear to be unrelated to identifiable circumstances. In one form of these complaints, a person may suddenly feel overwhelmed by unpleasant sensations which are usually described as a panic attack. Panic and other complaints of anxiety which are perceived as irrational form the principal interest of this book. A second major concern is the problem of fears of public places, often referred to as agoraphobia. Typically, the person who complains of these fears is unable to leave the home unaccompanied, although travel by car, a 'safe' environment, is usually possible. Although agoraphobia is tied to situations, the fear is not reported to be about these situations but is usually expressed as a fear of experiencing a panic attack in these situations. As I will argue, fears of public situations appear to be associated with panic and complaints of anxiety of a nonspecific kind.**FROM THE FOREWORD: This book is a welcome addition to a growing literature that treats perplexing and sometimes disabling conduct from a psychological rather than a biomedical perspective. It is one of an increasing number of treatises that boldly assume that psychological events may be studied in their own right without reducing the phenomena to biological or mentalistic categories. Among other topics, Hallam critically reviews the clinical and experimental work on self-reported anxiety, panic and agoraphobia. He demonstrates with considerable force the disutility of the traditional practice of assigning such phenomena to a world of disordered minds.**Anxiety has been employed as a key concept in many psychoanalytic and psychological theories. Before its use as a theoretical construct, anxiety was a lay construct, a metaphor invented to communicate about vaguely perceived and poorly understood sensory experience. This lay construct, or metaphor, was metonymically transformed by certain theorists seeking a universal intervening variable to account for puzzling conduct. That is to say, the theorists transfigured anxiety to a cause from its original use as a metaphor for effects of interpersonal actions and physiological responses. As a staple of biomedical research and practice, anxiety is a reified metaphor. One of the results of the uncritical use of the reified metaphor was the creation of such unproductive diagnostic categories as anxiety neurosis, anxiety hysteria and anxiety state. Hallam's review of research and practice makes abundantly clear that this metaphor-to-myth transformation has little utility, either as a heuristic for research or as a model for therapy.**Many lessons are to be learned from this book, not the least of which is the demonstration that the lay construct, anxiety, is multireferential. When a clinician asks a client for referents for such complaints as, 'I am anxious' (or 'panicky' or 'agoraphobic'), the client's response is drawn from a limitless pool of vague and ambiguous descriptors. Examples of the interpretations offered by clients include such diverse referents as 'I had the feeling I was about to die', 'I was suffocating, gasping for air', 'My legs became rubbery', 'I was about to faint', 'My brain was racing ahead of my thought', and so on.**From Hallam's detailed analysis of the multireferential nature of anxiety complaints, one could formulate the following rule for praxis: When a client employs 'anxiety' or a similar descriptor in his or her self-report, regard it as metaphoric utterance, not as a statement that demands causal analysis. The metaphoric utterance, that is, the complaint, is a social construction whose building blocks include the client's beliefs, linguistic skills, purposes and concurrent existential or identity problems.**Another lesson to be learned from this book is the continuity of anxiety complaints as reported in clinical settings with those of persons who do not come to the attention of professional helpers. Such continuity is an argument against the identification of anxiety complaints as a psychiatric disorder. For example, the fear of strange places may be universal and not restricted to a clinical population if the definition of strange places is broad enough.**The author holds that the client, like the rest of us, constructs his or her world from perceptions, beliefs, imaginings and rememberings. Thus anxiety is a construction, and it is communicated to others (and to the self) with the aid of metaphoric and metonymic translations. This constructivist view is fast displacing the entrenched biomedical view that treats human beings as passive reactors to stimuli according to still-to-be discovered mechanistic laws. Metaphors drawn from physics, geology and technology, so tightly woven into the texture of the mechanistic world view, have lost the power to stimulate meaningful research and theory about the complexities of human action. As a result, social scientists are turning to humanistic disciplines for their working metaphors, among them, game playing, narrative, drama and rhetoric.**The use of such descriptive metaphors reflects a world view that is in sharp contrast to the mechanistic world view that has dominated scientific thought, including that of psychology and psychiatry, for so long. Contextualism is the name assigned to this alternative world view, and its root metaphor is the historical act. Among other things, this root metaphor entails that the actors who participate in the creation of historical acts are agents. They engage in intentional actions not only to solve problems of a practical nature, but also to maintain or enhance their identities. Toward this end, they construct their worlds. Some constructions provide the backdrop for personal drama, one outcome of which may be the self-report of anxiety. Another element of the contextualist metaphysic is that change and novelty, rather than invariance, are to be expected.**Hallam's critical review of the scientific literature on anxiety and emotion supports the conclusion that the failure of modern science to formulate a general theory of anxiety is traceable to the slavish (and often unrecognized) adherence to the biomedical model. The users of this model seek causality within the organism, either in the somatic networks or in the assumed mind-space. It is not an inappropriate strategy, given their stance that the objects of their attention are regarded as passive, not as active agents. The supporters of the biomedical model have failed to achieve a consistently workable theory as a basis for therapy because human beings are, in fact, agents. Thus, a clinican who reads this book and elects to apply its wisdom would not address a person's complaint of anxiety with the question, What is the cause of the anxiety? but rather with questions of this sort: What are the antecedent and concurrent interpersonal conditions that influence a person as agent to turn his or her attention to vaguely defined internal events, to choose the sick role or to describe perplexing happenings with particular metaphors or metonymies? What are his or her concerns about death and dying, being abandoned or loss of face? What are the person's power relations and how does the sick role influence his or her relative power? How does the person's self-narrative fit into the self-narratives of significant others?**In my own experience, I have found it useful to look upon complaints of anxiety as a form of attention deployment, not unlike the attention deployment of the classical hypochondriac. The broad focus on bodily symptoms, besides providing the basis for adopting the sick role, effectively supports efforts in the context of significant social relationships not to spell out certain imagined or perceived flaws in one's character. The question that guides the search for understanding is, What are the client's reasons for turning attention to complaints of anxiety? In this respect, the clinician might entertain the hypothesis of self-deception and its implications for discovering and formulating reasons for the client's attention deployment to events described as anxiety.**The foregoing remarks are but a sample of the clinical and theoretical notions generated in my reading of Hallam's treatise. A bountiful harvest of insights awaits both the practicing clinician and the laboratory scientist engaged in solving the mystery of anxiety. The rich yield is due in no small measure to the author's ability simultaneously to reflect his experience as clinician and as scientist. As clinician*b1scientis... he illuminates many puzzling observations and opens the way for a better understanding of human problems.

  • Creating Change in Mental Health Organizations

    Pergamon General Psychology Series
    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • George W. Fairweather + 2 more
    • Arnold P. Goldstein
    • English
    Creating Change in Mental Health Organizations discusses the findings of the experiment designed to identify the parameters of social change in mental health organizations. The title details the results from a variety of perspectives, such as experimental and hospital employees. The text first covers the need for social change in treating mental illness, and then proceeds to tackling organizational change background and research plan of the experiment. Next, the selection talks about the process of approach and persuasion. The next chapters cover the concerns in activating adoption, such as the factors, process, and conditions. Chapter 7 deals with the follow-up diffusion for the community lodge, while Chapter 8 talks about the principles for creating change in metal health organizations. The text also discusses the social policy decision aimed at solving human problems. The book will be of great use to professionals in the mental health care industry.

  • Psych City

    A Simulated Community
    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • Robert I. Cohen + 2 more
    • English
    Psych City is a book that is used as a guide to organize a simulated community. The goal of the book is not only to create a simulated community, but also to provide opportunities for those involved in the experience to learn the events and patterns of life found in the community and examine the psychological, social, and political systems that are found in the community. The book is divided into two sections. Section I is the simulation proper, and gives detailed descriptions of simulated living conditions such as geography, population, housing, government, education, finance, and taxes. The first part also assigns the participants to the different roles they have to play and gives the community problems to solve. The second part is made up of sets of readings and exercises that pertain to the different situations found in the simulated community. The text is recommended for psychology, sociology, and anthropology professors that wish to give an interactive learning experience for the entire class, as well as those who wish to further study about community and conduct social experiments.

  • Advances in the Psychology of Religion

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 11
    • October 22, 2013
    • Michael Argyle
    • English
    This collection of previously unpublished papers, written by well known researchers in the psychology of religion, is unique in its broad coverage and in its comparison between quite different and strictly theoretical perspectives. The subjects range from theoretical analyses of social science perspectives on religion and its methods, to reports of experimental, correlational or descriptive studies of religious experience and attitudes. The emphasis throughout is on the directions in which this work might move in the future.

  • Counseling and Accountability

    Methods and Critique
    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • Harman D. Burck + 2 more
    • Arnold P. Goldstein + 1 more
    • English
    Counseling and Accountability: Methods and Critique deals with methodological problems and strategies of counseling and psychotherapy research. This book is divided into two parts. Part I sets forth both conceptual foundations and working principles related to research on psychotherapeutic change that includes such features as theoretical bases, design, criteria, sampling, treatment, and measurement. Ethical and legal considerations are also discussed. Part II follows naturally as an application of the principles and essential characteristics of research identified in Part I. This publication is intended for students in social work, educational psychology, vocational rehabilitation, and employment counseling, including professional workers in human behavioral change-producing relationships.

  • Progress in Behavior Modification

    Volume 9
    • 1st Edition
    • October 22, 2013
    • Michel Hersen + 2 more
    • English
    Progress in Behavior Modification, Volume 9 covers the developments in the study of behavior modification. The book discusses the future of behavior therapy; an examination of the rationale and treatment effectiveness of overcorrection; and the therapeutic innovations and emerging conceptual challenges in the behavioral treatment of test anxiety. The text also describes the conceptual and empirical status of rational-emotive therapy; the behavior modification procedures for training chronically institutionalized schizophrenics; and the behavior modification of the elderly. The behavioral assessment and training of children's social skills are also considered. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and educators will find the book invaluable.

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