Description

Emphasizes critical thinking, culture, and gender

Invitation to Psychology, 6/e, shows students why scientific and critical thinking is so important in the decisions they make. In clear, lively, warm prose, this edition continues the title’s integration of gender, culture, and ethnicity. By the end, readers will learn how to interpret research and to address and resolve controversies.

Features

• Explores Roles of Gender, Culture, and Ethnicity in Psychology – Research on gender, culture, and ethnicity is not limited to a specific chapter; it is integrated into the entire text. Get Involved Exercises, quick demonstrations, relate course material to students’ own lives.
• Supports Learning and Comprehension – The 6^th edition uses the Read-Recite-Review approach (3R), which is based on empirical research demonstrating its benefits for learning and memory. In a nutshell: students read a section, close the book, and actually recite out loud as much as they can about what they have just learned. They then reread and review that section to make sure they understood it correctly.

New to this Edition

Chapter 1:

• Replaced three of the “Psychology in the News” stories with more recent ones: Boston’s weight-loss campaign, Lance Armstrong’s doping admission, and the Israeli-Hamas conflict.
• Deleted, for space reasons, the Taylor & Kowalski study of how an introductory psychology course affects students’ performance on a psychological information questionnaire. This would make a good study to mention in an introductory lecture.
• Kept psychoanalysis in “Psychology’s Past,” but deleted it from the list of major perspectives in the “Psychology’s Present” section, which now focuses strictly on psychological science. Psychoanalysis is still discussed in the personality and psychotherapy chapters.
• Introduced a new section, “Using Psychology to Study Psychology,” which tells students about four strategies that are central to learning and remembering the material in their course. These include the 3R technique (Read, Recite, Review), which is then reinforced in all of the book’s quizzes.
• In the section on critical thinking, added research on the uncritical acceptance of material turned up by Internet searches. Students tend to assume the topmost hit is the most accurate, and are not always able to detect hidden agendas in what they read online.
• In “Case Studies,” added a paragraph on the famous story of Sybil, who, it turns out, was never a multiple personality and who tailored her symptoms to please her psychiatrist. This is a terrific cautionary tale about the uncritical acceptance of sensational stories in the media.
• In “Descriptive Studies,” expanded the discussion of the disproportionate number of studies based on “WEIRDos”–students from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies–and noted the use of technology to address this issue (e.g., use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site to recruit study participants from throughout the world). To make room, deleted the AMA study that used an unrepresentative sample of college women to draw conclusions about behavior during spring break.
• In the correlation section, changed the graphs so that they all pertain to a hypothetical study of performance on a psychology exam.
• In the discussion of control groups, deleted the example of research on self-esteem in girls; it is discussed in another chapter.
• In the section on statistics, sharpened the discussion of problems with significance tests and p values (adding the latter term), added an explanation of confidence intervals; and modified the definitions of effect size and meta-analysis. Note that the appendix has been dropped from the printed book but can be accessed online.
• Replaced the “Taking Psychology with You” feature on “What Psychology Can Do for You” with one on using critical thinking to recognize misleading or deceptive statistics. We think this will be more useful to students.

Chapter 2:

• Changed the opening story from Madonna to Steve Jobs, a complex “personality” if ever there was one.
• In evaluation of the psychodynamic perspective, added a 2012 study suggesting that homophobia may sometimes be an attempt to deal with unconscious but threatening homosexual feelings.
• Updated the research on the Big Five, discussing how experience shapes these traits over the life span. Added a study of an enormous cross-sectional sample, involving more than 1,200,000 people ages 10 to 65, which revealed that whereas adult trends are overwhelmingly in the direction of greater maturity and adjustment, maturity actually plummets between late childhood and adolescence.

Table of Contents

1. Brief Table of Contents

2. Full Table of Contents

 

 

1. Brief Table of Contents:

 

Chapter 1: What is Psychology?

 

Part One: Your Self

Chapter 2: Theories of Personality

Chapter 3: Development Over the Life Span

 

Part Two: Your Body

Chapter 4: Neurons, Hormones, and the Brain

Chapter 5: Body Rhythms and Mental States

Chapter 6: Sensation and Perception

 

Part Three: Your Mind

Chapter 7: Thinking and Intelligence

Chapter 8: Memory

 

Part Four: Your Environment

Chapter 9: Learning and Conditioning

Chapter 10: Behavior in Social and Cultural Context

 

Part Five: Your Mental Health

Chapter 11: Psychological Disorders

Chapter 12: Approaches to Treatment and Therapy

 

Part Six: Your Life

Chapter 13: Emotion, Stress, and Health

Chapter 14: The Major Motives of Life: Food, Love, Sex, and Work

 

 

 

2. Full Table of Contents

 

Chapter 1: What is Psychology?

The Science of Psychology

What Psychologists Do

Critical and Scientific Thinking in Psychology

Descriptive Studies: Establishing the Facts

Correlational Studies: Looking for Relationships

The Experiment: Hunting for Causes

Evaluating the Findings

 

Part One: Your Self

Chapter 2: Theories of Personality

Psychodynamic Theories of Personality

The Modern Study of Personality

The Modern Study of Personality

Environmental Influences on Personality

Cultural Influences on Personality

The Inner Experience

 

Chapter 3: Development Over the Life Span

From Conception Through the First Year

Language Development

Cognitive Development

Moral Development

Gender Development

Adolescence

Adulthood

The Wellsprings of Resilience

 

Part Two: Your Body

Chapter 4: Neurons, Hormones, and the Brain

The Nervous System: A Basic Blueprint

Communication in the Nervous System

Mapping the Brain

A Tour Through the Brain

The Two Hemispheres of the Brain

The Flexible Brain

 

Chapter 5: Body Rhythms and Mental States

Biological Rhythms: The Tides of Experience

The Rhythms of Sleep

Exploring the Dream World

The Riddle of Hypnosis

Consciousness-Altering Drugs

 

Chapter 6: Sensation and Perception

Our Sensational Senses

Vision

Hearing

Other Senses

Perceptual Powers: Origins and Influences

Perception without Awareness

 

Part Three: Your Mind

Chapter 7: Thinking and Intelligence

Thought: Using What We Know

Reasoning Rationally

Barriers to Reasoning Rationally

Measuring Intelligence: The Psychometric Approach

Dissecting Intelligence: The Cognitive Approach

The Origins of Intelligence

Animal Minds

 

Chapter 8: Memory

Reconstructing the Past

Memory and the Power of Suggestion

In Pursuit of Memory

The Three-Box Model of Memory

The Biology of Memory

How We Remember

Why We Forget

Autobiographical Memories

 

Part Four: Your Environment</