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Elsevier

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.

  • Psychology of Human Movement

    • 1st Edition
    • Mary M. Smyth + 1 more
    • English
    The Psychology of Human Movement is a collection of papers dealing with experimental work involving psychology, kinesiology, physical education, and neurophysiology. These papers have as their central theme, the higher order, organizational processes contributing to coordinated goal-directed movement. These papers discuss theories in motor neurophysiology, voluntary control of simple aim movements, memory for movement, perception and action, sequencing of movements, and the demands made by movement on information-processi... resources. Other papers deal with the changes that result from the organization and execution of movement in training, physical development, or damage occurring in the central nervous system. The latter papers give weight to the hypothesis that any studies in movement, action, and skill should cover a wider range of data, and not only from studies of "normal" adult subjects. One paper explains skills acquisition in terms of the changes in the way the nervous system is organized, the changes due to practice, to interactions with the environment, and to the development of the cognitive system of the individual. Another paper notes that movement is the result of the operation of a set of underlying processes where each process has its own distinct function. This collection can be useful for undergraduate physical education or physical therapy students, and those studying psychology in areas of motor behavior and human movement.

  • Progress in Behavior Modification

    Volume 17
    • 1st Edition
    • Michel Hersen + 2 more
    • English
    Progress in Behavior Modification, Volume 17 covers the developments in behavior modification. The book discusses psychophysiological assessment; behavioral counseling; and applications of behavioral medicine with children at risk of coronary heart disease. The text also describes the intervention for behavioral risk factors in coronary heart disease in children; behavioral medicine in children with pain disorders, seizures, neuromuscular disorders, diabetes, and pediatric oncology; and the training of behavior change agents. The private practice of behavior therapy is also considered. Psychologists and paediatricians will find the book invaluable.

  • 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.

  • Aspects of Motion Perception

    International Series of Monographs in Experimental Psychology
    • 1st Edition
    • Paul A. Kolers
    • H. J. Eysenck
    • English
    International Series of Monographs in Experimental Psychology, Volume 16: Aspects of Motion Perception details the fundamental concepts of the visual system perception of motion. The text first details the various findings about illusory and veridical motions along with the theories conceptualized from those findings. Next, the selection covers the research that studies the reliability and validity of the theories about motion perception. The book also discusses the importance of two-component model of motion perception. The last chapter covers the characteristics of the status of perceptual experiences. The book will be of great use to behavioral scientists and biologists. Ophthalmologists will also benefit from the text.

  • Human Memory

    Basic Processes
    • 1st Edition
    • Gordon H. Bower
    • English
    Human Memory: Basic Processes provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of human memory. This book provides a general theoretical framework for human memory, information processing, and retrieval. Organized into seven chapters, this book begins with an overview of the permanent features of memory. This text then outlines several experimental findings that support a multiple-store model of memory, with emphasis on the free recall with extension made to other recall tasks. Other chapters describe the results of a number of experiments designed to test specific models that can be obtained from the overall theory. This book discusses as well the permanent, structural features of the memory system. The final chapter deals with the representation of the memory trace of an event in terms that are compatible with the multicomponent theory. This book is a valuable resource for advanced students in experimental psychology. Psychological researchers will also find this book useful.

  • The Ethics of Psychological Research

    • 1st Edition
    • J. D. Keehn
    • English
    The Ethics of Psychological Research contains expanded versions of original presentations reported in a two-day symposium on Ethics in Psychological Research held at Atkinson College, York University, near Toronto in September 1980. The book is organized into three major sections, wherein the first deals with ethical principles and regulations, the second with ethics of research with special populations, and the third with problems associated with applications of scientific knowledge. A concluding section then details the results of a psychological research method applied to the question of a psychological ethic.

  • Transvestism

    A Handbook with Case Studies for Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Counsellors
    • 1st Edition
    • Harry Brierley
    • English
    Transvestism: A Handbook with Case Studies for Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Counsellors presents the rapid change in social attitudes towards so-called sexual problems. This book provides an understanding of the transvestite, transsexual, and homosexual as whole people characterized by the array of their talents and deficiencies rather than by the nature of their sexuality alone. Organized into 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the classic study of the genetics of homosexuality. This text then examines the importance of self-help societies for transvestites in various countries. Other chapters consider the role of sexual need in human development. This book discusses as well the psychodynamic theories based on the principle that all human behavior is primarily sexual. The final chapter deals with the classification of cross-dressing and the uneasy state of sexual non-conformity. This book is a valuable resource for psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, and clinical researchers. Transvestites, transsexuals, and homosexuals will also find this book useful.

  • Neuropsychology

    A Textbook of Systems and Psychological Functions of the Human Brain
    • 1st Edition
    • Stuart J. Dimond
    • English
    Neuropsychology: A Textbook of Systems and Psychological Functions of the Human Brain provides a comprehensive account of the physiography of the brain and its working systems. This textbook explores how the human brain produces behavior and mental function out of identifiable systems or subcomponents. Comprised of 18 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the systems of the brain as well as the architecture of the brain and nervous system. The discussion then turns to the micropsychology of the brain; the fabric of the nervous system; and how the brain becomes modified by experience. The following chapters focus on the motor and auditory functions of the brain; the physiological mechanisms of sexual behavior; how emotion is generated out of the activity of specific mechanisms of the brain; and how the brain conducts vision. The regions of the brain involved in space perception, sleep, memory, learning, and language are also considered. The final chapter is devoted to discrete centers of the brain responsible for mental functions. This monograph will be a useful source of knowledge for neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, neurosurgeons, and others interested in the human brain and its behavior.

  • Invitation to Psychology

    • 2nd Edition
    • John P. Houston + 2 more
    • English
    Invitation to Psychology provides an introduction to fundamental concepts in psychology. It seeks to address the need of both teachers and students by offering two different kinds of chapters. The first variety covers the basic data and research within each of the traditional areas of psychology. In these "basic" chapters, the authors provide up-to-date and complete coverage of important developments in each area. The second type of chapter is innovative. These "exploring" chapters examine some of the practical applications and implications of the findings discussed in the basic chapters. These describe how basic psychological data are being used in the outside world, and discuss ongoing, often controversial explorations into some frontier areas of psychology. In other words, information about explorations and applications that is often scattered through the pages of other texts is brought together into systematic chapters in this text. The dual-chapter approach helps resolve the dilemma of differing expectations of teachers and students. Key topics covered include the definition of psychology; the psychological basis of behavior; sensation and perception; states of awareness; learning, memory, and cognition; motivation and emotion; abnormal psychology and social behavior.

  • Rehumanizing Housing

    • 1st Edition
    • Necdet Teymur + 2 more
    • English
    Rehumanizing Housing is a proceeding of a conference of the same name, which was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, on 27 February 1987. This conference is a gathering of experts from different fields who discussed the subject of housing. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 discusses topics such as concepts, principles, and terminologies, related to housing; prescription in housing design; and problems in housing, while Part 2 deals with housing design, space and enclosure, and management. Part 3 covers the history of housing; its possible direction in the future; and the restructuring of the housing market. The text is recommended for suburban planners, architects, and those involved in real estate and the housing business, especially those who would like to know more about the trends in the subject.

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