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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.

  • The Discrimination Process and Development

    International Series of Monographs in Experimental Psychology
    • 1st Edition
    • Brian J. Fellows
    • English
    The Discrimination Process and Development, Volume 5 covers the fields of behavioral theory and experimental child psychology. This book aims to develop the theory of the discrimination process and relate this theory to certain features of the perceptual and cognitive development of the child. Organized into 21 chapters, this volume starts with a discussion of discrimination process whereby an organism responds to differences between stimuli. This text then discusses the classical discrimination experiment whereby it employs two discriminative stimuli, one of which is positive and the other negative. Other chapters consider the developmental aspects of the discrimination process. The final chapter deals with the hypothesis analysis of matching performances. This book is intended to be suitable for psychology students who are looking for an area of research less restricted than conventional learning theory, and more significant to pressing practical problems. Child psychologists and experimentalists will also find this book useful.

  • Progress in Behavior Modification

    Volume 2
    • 1st Edition
    • Michel Hersen + 2 more
    • English
    Progress in Behavior Modification, Volume 2 reviews issues and developments in the field of behavior modification, with emphasis on a wide spectrum of child and adult disorders. Topics covered range from behavioral assessment and treatment of alcoholism to sexual arousal in male sexual deviates, along with aversion therapy and research methods in behavior modification. Comprised of eight chapters, this volume begins with a discussion on the status and future trends in behavior assessment of alcoholism and behavior modification with alcoholics. The next chapter deals with therapy models, focusing on the domain of social learning, removal of fears, and assertive and social skill training. The discussion then turns to the measurement and generation of sexual arousal in male sexual deviates; applications of behavior modification in nursing practice; aversion therapy and its clinical effects; deceleration of aberrant behavior among retarded individuals; and research methods in behavior modification. The final chapter examines clinical issues regarding behavioral self-control. This book should be of value to theoreticians, researchers, or practitioners in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and behavior therapy as well as social work, speech therapy, education, and rehabilitation.

  • Early Childhood Education

    An International Perspective
    • 1st Edition
    • Gilbert R. Austin
    • Allen J. Edwards
    • English
    Early Childhood Education: An International Perspective presents the summarized outcomes of a five-year cross-cultural survey of early childhood education in the Western world. It provides understanding of some of the topics of debate surrounding preschool education. The text approaches the argument by centering on the history of philosophical thought in early childhood education and offers information on the political and social-cultural changes that have inspired interest in facilitating children’s early learning experience. The book discusses the historical background of early childhood education in the United States. It focuses on the ideas and evidence showing the significance of cooperation in international research. Another topic of interest is the early childhood education in England, Wales, Canada, and Sweden. The section that follows is a review of the aims and objectives of early childhood education. The text will provide valuable insights for teachers, educators, students, and researchers in the field of social sciences.

  • Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology

    • 1st Edition
    • James M. Sprague + 1 more
    • English
    Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology: Volume 11 is a collection of studies that discuss certain topics in behavioral neuroscience from different experts in the field. The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 discusses palatability of food as a response measure. Chapter 2 tackles the trigeminal system; trigeminal orosensation and ingestive reflexes; and the relationship of trigeminal denervation and operant behavior. Chapter 3 talks about the role of the stomach in the process of satiety, and Chapter 4 covers functional organization of X-, W-, and Y-cell pathways.

  • Psych City

    A Simulated Community
    • 1st Edition
    • 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.

  • Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology

    • 1st Edition
    • James M. Sprague + 1 more
    • English
    Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology, Volume 10 reviews progress in the fields of psychobiology and physiological psychology, with emphasis on the anatomy and function of the brain in terms of behavior expressed by the organism. Topics covered include neuronal plasticity maintained by the central norepinephrine system in the visual cortex of the cat; pain sensation in primates; and classical conditioning in the rabbit. Comprised of four chapters, this volume begins with a discussion on the elegant body of research relating the norepinephrine system of the brain and plasticity in the developing visual cortex. The next chapter offers a critical and insightful account of pain sensations and responses in monkeys and humans, the effect of morphine on them, and the neural pathways in the spinal cord mediating them. The third chapter investigates the neural basis of the nictitating membrane response (NMR) electrophysiological... recording from a number of brain sites. It shows that the memory trace for this conditioned response is localized in the cerebellum. The final chapter is devoted to the principles and methods of classical conditioning, centered on the NMR in the rabbit. Conditioning is analyzed within a broad experimental and theoretical context. This book should be of interest to biologists, psychologists, and physiologists.

  • Emotion in the Human Face

    Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings
    • 1st Edition
    • Paul Ekman + 2 more
    • Arnold P. Goldstein + 1 more
    • English
    Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings reviews research findings about the link between the face and emotion and provides some guidelines for study of this complicated but intriguing phenomenon. Some of the conceptual ambiguities that have hindered research and the methodological decisions that must be made in planning research on the face and emotion are discussed. How past investigators handled these matters is presented critically, and a set of standards is offered. This book is comprised of 21 chapters and begins with an overview of questions about how the face provides information about emotion, with emphasis on evidence based on scientific research (largely in psychology). The reader is then introduced to conceptual ambiguities and methodological decisions related to research on the face-emotion connection (including sampling), along with some important research findings. In particular, emotion categories and dimensions that observers can judge on the basis of facial behavior are analyzed, and whether such judgments can be accurate. The similarities and differences in facial behavior across cultures are also considered, along with the relative contribution of facial behavior and contextual information to the judgment of emotion. This monograph is intended primarily for students of psychology, anthropology, ethology, sociology, and biology, as well as those planning or already conducting research on the face.

  • The Cry for Help and the Professional Response

    • 1st Edition
    • Jack Kahn + 1 more
    • English
    At present any one of a large number of professional services may be called upon to deal with the distress of individuals and families. They may be concerned successively or simultaneously, in co-operation with one another or in competition. In this profusion of services a large number of problems fail to receive help. This book offers a way of defining the help that the different services can give. The authors maintain that each of the professions has its distinctive approach and that each of these approaches should have its justification in theory and practice.

  • Anxiety

    Psychological Perspectives on Panic and Agoraphobia
    • 1st Edition
    • 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.

  • The Neural Control of Behavior

    • 1st Edition
    • Richard E. Whalen + 2 more
    • English
    The Neural Control of Behavior contains some of the material presented and discussed at the first interdisciplinary conference on the neural control of behavior, held at the Department of Psychobiology of the University of California, Irvine in June 1968. The compendium presents papers prepared by scientists from a variety of disciplines, which touched upon the primary concerns of psychobiology. Main topics covered include neural mechanisms, evoked responses and network dynamics, perceptual mechanisms, and behavioral and cellular responses to novel and repeated stimuli. Hypothalamic mechanisms for motivational and species-typical behavior, learning and memory, and the behavior of hippocampal neurons during conditioning experiments are also discussed. Psychologists, neurologists, and psychobiologists will find the book very insightful.

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