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Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding
Provide the framework students need to go from inquiry to understanding. By continuously modeling the application of six key principles of scientific thinking for students, Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding teaches students how to test their assumptions, and motivates them to use scientific thinking skills to better understand the field of psychology and the world around them. For introductory psychology courses at two- and four-year colleges and universities.
669 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 2007
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October 12, 2019UNIVERSITY REQUIRED TEXTBOOKS COUNT TOWARDS MY READING GOAL!!
THEY COUNT!
THEY COUNT!
September 15, 2012
I've read the Australian version first then read the American edition.
Major points were virtually identical except the fillers in between, Australian edition was more centred around multi-culturism, encouraging self awareness, sparking an interest in self development and communication. Where as the American edition was heavily focused on disparaging against new age or pseudo scientific medical practises as they cant or are difficult to be proven in a falsifiable scientific testing. The whole, "there are only black swans" falsifiability statement.
Though i thoroughly enjoyed reading them both, I found the way the American edition was written and portrayed kept my attention alot easier. however the study guides that accompany each book are completely different as in references to specific socio cultural relevance to the daily life's of the student. After completing both editions I found myself going back to the Australian edition due to one being in Australia and secondly it was more specific to the core material of what I am studying instead of convincing me that there are pseudo con artists.
My personal point is that no matter what, a hug is a placebo that can have major consequences on the treatment of patients due to oxytocin alone and the creation of new neural synaptic receptors, one needs the desire for specific neuropeptides to initially change desire to positive limbic (Paleomammalian Brain) development. If what a patient does or the charges responsible for there development can produce a positive disposition, then the very act of attention alone of focusing on there self awareness, also the catalyst reason, instead of overwhelming them with what there condition is, will have exponential qualities rather than informing purely cognitively.
Smile, Hug say a nice word then oxytocin and meditate me up Scotty.
Major points were virtually identical except the fillers in between, Australian edition was more centred around multi-culturism, encouraging self awareness, sparking an interest in self development and communication. Where as the American edition was heavily focused on disparaging against new age or pseudo scientific medical practises as they cant or are difficult to be proven in a falsifiable scientific testing. The whole, "there are only black swans" falsifiability statement.
Though i thoroughly enjoyed reading them both, I found the way the American edition was written and portrayed kept my attention alot easier. however the study guides that accompany each book are completely different as in references to specific socio cultural relevance to the daily life's of the student. After completing both editions I found myself going back to the Australian edition due to one being in Australia and secondly it was more specific to the core material of what I am studying instead of convincing me that there are pseudo con artists.
My personal point is that no matter what, a hug is a placebo that can have major consequences on the treatment of patients due to oxytocin alone and the creation of new neural synaptic receptors, one needs the desire for specific neuropeptides to initially change desire to positive limbic (Paleomammalian Brain) development. If what a patient does or the charges responsible for there development can produce a positive disposition, then the very act of attention alone of focusing on there self awareness, also the catalyst reason, instead of overwhelming them with what there condition is, will have exponential qualities rather than informing purely cognitively.
Smile, Hug say a nice word then oxytocin and meditate me up Scotty.
March 31, 2009
good if you like books i helped make. see my name on the copyright page under 'production assistant' if you like.
June 22, 2026
Enjoyability: ★★★
This is a well-written textbook, quite readable and pedagogical: key ideas are announced, then explained and then summarized. Every chapter contains an application of the scientific method to verifying some hypothetical claim, myths to be dispelled and interesting anecdotes to enliven and anchor whatever is under discussion.
Enlightenment: ★★★
While I learned some new stuff I wasn’t aware of, it wasn’t all that much. This is not so much the book’s fault as a consequence of the ubiquity of pop-psychology articles, blog posts and books, many of which I have perused (even though I am not particularly interested in psychology).
Originality: ★★★
Textbooks aren’t going to score high in this category, unless you’re talking about really foundational and long-lasting ones for their disciplines (e.g., Euclid’s Elements), but I found the exposition and, particularly, the recurring use of the six principles of scientific thinking throughout the text quite fresh (also, perhaps, the interactive videos you’re supposed to watch while reading the book, which I didn’t).
Cultural weight: N/A (Not applicable)
This category only really applies when you’re talking about classics or classics-like texts, but I think this is a textbook that has a good reputation for its no-nonsense, data and science driven approach and for not relying on significant ideological shibboleths.
*The Dismal Sciences*
I have been very skeptical of social science and of its claims to scientific status for as long as I can remember. When I was young and foolish, this was because I found stats dull and I was convinced that Marxism was the true social science and anything else was just bourgeois ideology and propaganda. Now that I am old(er) and foolish, I feel these disciplines are just not very amenable to a strict scientific methodology through no fault of their own, and also mostly ideologically captured by leftist thought (and this is their fault). But I still think I will benefit from getting to know the basics of at least some of these disciplines. Last year I went through an Economics textbook that was a very enlightening discovery and opened my eyes to a great many things. This year I decided to try psychology. The book I read was actually recommended to me by Diana Fleischman, a psychologist I respect and whom I asked for a suggestion.
Overall, and before getting into the details, I’ll say that the book was quite good. This is probably what a good introductory psychology textbook has to be: skeptical, method-conscious, empirical, suspicious of pseudoscience, and relatively free of ideological sermonizing. My lukewarm response has more to do with the aforementioned doubts I have about the discipline (all the more so after the replication crisis), the fact that I don’t find its subject-matter particularly interesting and with my frustration with any discipline in which you only get small islands of reliable knowledge amidst a sea of fuzziness, weak correlations, modest effect sizes and scarcity/difficulty/impossibility of experimental testing and verification. If you want to get a good, quite rigorous, overall view of the field of psychology, I think Lilienfeld’s book is a good place to start.
*Contents*
The fourth edition of Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding, which is the one I’ve read, is a massive behemoth of a book, with over 800 pages organized into 16 chapters. Its coverage is very wide, as you will see in the chapter summaries below.
A unifying thread is for the whole volume is the importance of applying scientific thinking principles to all of these areas of research, while presenting agreed-upon facts and the different theories, models and interpretations and the amount of evidence they can muster in their support. The book also has a strong ‘debunking pseudoscience and popular but fake beliefs about psychology’ vibe. The following is a summary of the main and most review-worthy theses of each chapter:
1. Psychology and Scientific Thinking
Psychology is not just refined common sense (in fact, the latter often leads us astray because we are naive realists, pattern-seekers, and confirmation-bias machines). The chapter tries to explain why psychology is a science and ends by presenting a brief overview of its history. We also get a view of what pseudoscience consists of and why its claims can be so attractive to many people.
2. Research Methods
If psychology is a science, then what makes psychology scientific? Chapter 2 tries to answer this question, mostly through the presentation of a methodological toolkit that includes naturalistic observations, case-study designs, self-report measures and correlational and experimental designs, each with their pros and cons. Emphasis is placed in the fact that research design matters more than just thinking up interesting ideas.
3. Biological Psychology
The chapter goes heavy on biology, explaining how nerve cells, the brain and the endocrine system work. The nature versus nurture is introduced for the first time, as well as technologies (like MRI and PET scans) for studying the brain. One of its central lessons is that the brain has a lot (but not an infinite amount) of plasticity. Another, we are informed in it that nature and nurture cannot be easily separated in most cases.
4. Sensation and Perception
here we get an exploration of the senses, and how our brain actively constructs reality from incomplete sensory input by using assumptions, expectations, attention, and context. Some funny and interesting sense illusions are given as illustrations. The way this works is likely one of the book’s most intriguing aspects, but I had already encountered these arguments in a book I read relatively recently by Anil Seth: we do not simply see the world: we infer and, in a way, ‘hallucinate’ it.
5. Consciousness
One would expect a debate here on what consciousness is, but what you get instead is a brief exploration of ‘altered states’, dreams, hypnosis, drugs, near-death and mystical experiences. A very strong anti-Freudian case is made as respect to the interpretation of dreams.
6. Learning
A lot of behavior can be shaped by classical conditioning (Pavlov), operant conditioning (Skinner), observational learning, and biological preparedness. Learning is not just conscious study or rational adjustment; other significant aspects about is are that it is often automatic, associative, reward-shaped, and species-constrained. Unfortunately, there’s no high road to easy-and-fast learning, like some of my favorite pseudo-educational theories that get pushed on and parroted to us teachers all the time (learning styles, discovery learning) and that here get the dusting they deserve.
7. Memory
Like perception, memory is reconstructive: instead of working like an archive, it is better seen as a kind of story-teller: we rebuild memories when we need them, place a lot of unwarranted confidence in them and sometimes, we construct and believe in completely false ones. We get an overview of the three basic types of memory (sensory, short-term, long term), its three main processes (encoding, storage and retrieval) and an exploration of how false memories can be built.
8. Thinking, Reasoning, and Language
One of my favorite chapters. Human reasoning is optimized for efficiency rather than strict truth-tracking, so we have heuristics that help us navigate the world quickly but which also produce a lot of systematic errors (this should bring to your mind Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow if you’ve had the chance to take a look at it). We also get a brief exploration of topics I remember studying in my linguistics university course many years ago: features of language, critical periods and theories of language acquisition.
9. Intelligence and IQ Testing
This is likely one of the strongest and most contentious chapters, as one might expect. It starts with different definitions of intelligence and an explanation of IQ tests: what and which they are and broad brushstrokes on how they work. The book tries to adopt some kind of middle ground about the most controversial aspects of this topic, i.e.e, IQ as imperfect, politically explosive, and historically abused but also predictive and scientifically meaningful. You also get references to interesting twin studies which have been important at bringing some light to the nature versus nurture controversies in this field.
10. Human Development
Development is (big surprise!) a complex issue, with genes, environment, maturation, culture, parenting, peers, and bidirectional effects all playing their part as ingredients in a complex recipe. You get the stuff that is usually synthesized in preparation-for-teaching courses like Vigotsky’s and Piaget’s claims about child development, moral and social changes as we grow and the transitions through different stages in human lives from conception to old age.
11. Emotion and Motivation
What is it that drives us? Emotions are studied from different theories and perspectives (discrete emotions theory; cognitive theories) as well their non-verbal expression through as body language. The chapter concludes with sections on truth-detection, happiness/self-esteem and attraction which mostly deflate pop ideas about these areas, and illustrate the fact that human beings are very poor predictors of what we want and what will actually make us happy.
12. Stress, Coping, and Health
Chapter 12 treats stress through three different approaches: as stimuli, as response (bodily reactions) and as a transaction between circumstances and the person’s appraisal of them. We also get an overview of how stress affects health and about what measures have been shown to be effective in reducing it.
13. Social Psychology
One of the most enlightening chapters for me because of its explanation of the fundamental attribution error, i.e., human behavior is far more situation-dependent than we would like to believe. Most of the chapter, in fact, goes out of its way to show how we are affected in our thoughts and behavior by social influence, how we decide to help (or not) strangers in need, how we can change our minds and/or persuade others and how we act out (or stop to do so) in matters of discrimination and prejudice. You also get the usual suspects talked about here: the Milgram experiment, bystander effects, implicit biases, etc…
14. Personality
The chapter explores the main theories of personality (psychoanalytic, behavioral-social, humanistic and traits). The overall theme seems to be that personality seems to be something real and measurable to some degree, partly heritable, and that some models of personalityfare much better scientifically than the others (like those employed in personality assessment). The chapter also emphasizes how easily clinicians and laypeople tend to invest in and overinterpret patterns.
15. Psychological Disorders
Mental disorders are a bit like Wittgenstein’s family resemblances: many, you know them when you see them but they are difficult to classify cleanly or to made to fit into discrete buckets. The chapter stresses these tensions, along with historical issues and the best tools for diagnosis (like DSM-5 or RDoC). We get a rather exhaustive exploration of different disorders, which are classified as anxiety-related, mood-related, personality and dissociative, schizophrenia and childhood disorders.
16. Psychological and Biological Treatments
Not all therapies are created equal, but for most treatments, there isn’t a ton of difference between them how successful they are are when you compare with one another, and it’s even difficult to distinguish a lot of their effects from pure placebos. Some popular interventions may in fact be be ineffective or harmful (like Thought Field Therapy or EMDR), whereas some less glamorous treatments seem to have stronger support behind them (like pharmacological treatments).
*Takeaways*
I already mentioned that this seems like a very good textbook to introduce oneself to the main areas and ideas in psychology, but I can’t compare it with others, as this is the only one I’ve read. I like the debunking and scientific-seriousness vibe it pursues all through the pages, even if how little of the field is based on solid, incontrovertible finds can feel frustrating at times and work against psychology’s status. It seems all low hanging fruit, if any exists, has been picked, and all that remains are are diverse, mostly incompatible models, some suggestive finds, many qualifications, and lots warnings not to overstate the scant evidence. Chapter 16 is a very good example of this. It moves through psychodynamic, humanistic, group, family, behavioral, CBT, third-wave therapies, pharmacological treatments, combined treatments, ECT, and cautions about ineffective or harmful therapies. Its learning objectives explicitly include evaluating whether all therapies are equally effective, explaining why ineffective therapies can seem effective, and identifying cautions and misconceptions about drug treatment. That is admirable, but also slightly damning: the field needs enormous effort merely to distinguish real treatment effects from placebo effects, regression to the mean, spontaneous recovery, therapist charisma, client expectations, and post hoc storytelling. Not everything is like this, but it does feel like it most of the time. Then again, the issue is not with the scientists or even, strictly speaking, with the science: as we’ve said before, humans are complicated, chaotic and unpredictable, and it seems unlikely we’ll ever be able to generate Hari Seldons and predictive, rigorous and testable models. We make do with what we have. And this will have to do for now.
This is a well-written textbook, quite readable and pedagogical: key ideas are announced, then explained and then summarized. Every chapter contains an application of the scientific method to verifying some hypothetical claim, myths to be dispelled and interesting anecdotes to enliven and anchor whatever is under discussion.
Enlightenment: ★★★
While I learned some new stuff I wasn’t aware of, it wasn’t all that much. This is not so much the book’s fault as a consequence of the ubiquity of pop-psychology articles, blog posts and books, many of which I have perused (even though I am not particularly interested in psychology).
Originality: ★★★
Textbooks aren’t going to score high in this category, unless you’re talking about really foundational and long-lasting ones for their disciplines (e.g., Euclid’s Elements), but I found the exposition and, particularly, the recurring use of the six principles of scientific thinking throughout the text quite fresh (also, perhaps, the interactive videos you’re supposed to watch while reading the book, which I didn’t).
Cultural weight: N/A (Not applicable)
This category only really applies when you’re talking about classics or classics-like texts, but I think this is a textbook that has a good reputation for its no-nonsense, data and science driven approach and for not relying on significant ideological shibboleths.
*The Dismal Sciences*
I have been very skeptical of social science and of its claims to scientific status for as long as I can remember. When I was young and foolish, this was because I found stats dull and I was convinced that Marxism was the true social science and anything else was just bourgeois ideology and propaganda. Now that I am old(er) and foolish, I feel these disciplines are just not very amenable to a strict scientific methodology through no fault of their own, and also mostly ideologically captured by leftist thought (and this is their fault). But I still think I will benefit from getting to know the basics of at least some of these disciplines. Last year I went through an Economics textbook that was a very enlightening discovery and opened my eyes to a great many things. This year I decided to try psychology. The book I read was actually recommended to me by Diana Fleischman, a psychologist I respect and whom I asked for a suggestion.
Overall, and before getting into the details, I’ll say that the book was quite good. This is probably what a good introductory psychology textbook has to be: skeptical, method-conscious, empirical, suspicious of pseudoscience, and relatively free of ideological sermonizing. My lukewarm response has more to do with the aforementioned doubts I have about the discipline (all the more so after the replication crisis), the fact that I don’t find its subject-matter particularly interesting and with my frustration with any discipline in which you only get small islands of reliable knowledge amidst a sea of fuzziness, weak correlations, modest effect sizes and scarcity/difficulty/impossibility of experimental testing and verification. If you want to get a good, quite rigorous, overall view of the field of psychology, I think Lilienfeld’s book is a good place to start.
*Contents*
The fourth edition of Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding, which is the one I’ve read, is a massive behemoth of a book, with over 800 pages organized into 16 chapters. Its coverage is very wide, as you will see in the chapter summaries below.
A unifying thread is for the whole volume is the importance of applying scientific thinking principles to all of these areas of research, while presenting agreed-upon facts and the different theories, models and interpretations and the amount of evidence they can muster in their support. The book also has a strong ‘debunking pseudoscience and popular but fake beliefs about psychology’ vibe. The following is a summary of the main and most review-worthy theses of each chapter:
1. Psychology and Scientific Thinking
Psychology is not just refined common sense (in fact, the latter often leads us astray because we are naive realists, pattern-seekers, and confirmation-bias machines). The chapter tries to explain why psychology is a science and ends by presenting a brief overview of its history. We also get a view of what pseudoscience consists of and why its claims can be so attractive to many people.
2. Research Methods
If psychology is a science, then what makes psychology scientific? Chapter 2 tries to answer this question, mostly through the presentation of a methodological toolkit that includes naturalistic observations, case-study designs, self-report measures and correlational and experimental designs, each with their pros and cons. Emphasis is placed in the fact that research design matters more than just thinking up interesting ideas.
3. Biological Psychology
The chapter goes heavy on biology, explaining how nerve cells, the brain and the endocrine system work. The nature versus nurture is introduced for the first time, as well as technologies (like MRI and PET scans) for studying the brain. One of its central lessons is that the brain has a lot (but not an infinite amount) of plasticity. Another, we are informed in it that nature and nurture cannot be easily separated in most cases.
4. Sensation and Perception
here we get an exploration of the senses, and how our brain actively constructs reality from incomplete sensory input by using assumptions, expectations, attention, and context. Some funny and interesting sense illusions are given as illustrations. The way this works is likely one of the book’s most intriguing aspects, but I had already encountered these arguments in a book I read relatively recently by Anil Seth: we do not simply see the world: we infer and, in a way, ‘hallucinate’ it.
5. Consciousness
One would expect a debate here on what consciousness is, but what you get instead is a brief exploration of ‘altered states’, dreams, hypnosis, drugs, near-death and mystical experiences. A very strong anti-Freudian case is made as respect to the interpretation of dreams.
6. Learning
A lot of behavior can be shaped by classical conditioning (Pavlov), operant conditioning (Skinner), observational learning, and biological preparedness. Learning is not just conscious study or rational adjustment; other significant aspects about is are that it is often automatic, associative, reward-shaped, and species-constrained. Unfortunately, there’s no high road to easy-and-fast learning, like some of my favorite pseudo-educational theories that get pushed on and parroted to us teachers all the time (learning styles, discovery learning) and that here get the dusting they deserve.
7. Memory
Like perception, memory is reconstructive: instead of working like an archive, it is better seen as a kind of story-teller: we rebuild memories when we need them, place a lot of unwarranted confidence in them and sometimes, we construct and believe in completely false ones. We get an overview of the three basic types of memory (sensory, short-term, long term), its three main processes (encoding, storage and retrieval) and an exploration of how false memories can be built.
8. Thinking, Reasoning, and Language
One of my favorite chapters. Human reasoning is optimized for efficiency rather than strict truth-tracking, so we have heuristics that help us navigate the world quickly but which also produce a lot of systematic errors (this should bring to your mind Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow if you’ve had the chance to take a look at it). We also get a brief exploration of topics I remember studying in my linguistics university course many years ago: features of language, critical periods and theories of language acquisition.
9. Intelligence and IQ Testing
This is likely one of the strongest and most contentious chapters, as one might expect. It starts with different definitions of intelligence and an explanation of IQ tests: what and which they are and broad brushstrokes on how they work. The book tries to adopt some kind of middle ground about the most controversial aspects of this topic, i.e.e, IQ as imperfect, politically explosive, and historically abused but also predictive and scientifically meaningful. You also get references to interesting twin studies which have been important at bringing some light to the nature versus nurture controversies in this field.
10. Human Development
Development is (big surprise!) a complex issue, with genes, environment, maturation, culture, parenting, peers, and bidirectional effects all playing their part as ingredients in a complex recipe. You get the stuff that is usually synthesized in preparation-for-teaching courses like Vigotsky’s and Piaget’s claims about child development, moral and social changes as we grow and the transitions through different stages in human lives from conception to old age.
11. Emotion and Motivation
What is it that drives us? Emotions are studied from different theories and perspectives (discrete emotions theory; cognitive theories) as well their non-verbal expression through as body language. The chapter concludes with sections on truth-detection, happiness/self-esteem and attraction which mostly deflate pop ideas about these areas, and illustrate the fact that human beings are very poor predictors of what we want and what will actually make us happy.
12. Stress, Coping, and Health
Chapter 12 treats stress through three different approaches: as stimuli, as response (bodily reactions) and as a transaction between circumstances and the person’s appraisal of them. We also get an overview of how stress affects health and about what measures have been shown to be effective in reducing it.
13. Social Psychology
One of the most enlightening chapters for me because of its explanation of the fundamental attribution error, i.e., human behavior is far more situation-dependent than we would like to believe. Most of the chapter, in fact, goes out of its way to show how we are affected in our thoughts and behavior by social influence, how we decide to help (or not) strangers in need, how we can change our minds and/or persuade others and how we act out (or stop to do so) in matters of discrimination and prejudice. You also get the usual suspects talked about here: the Milgram experiment, bystander effects, implicit biases, etc…
14. Personality
The chapter explores the main theories of personality (psychoanalytic, behavioral-social, humanistic and traits). The overall theme seems to be that personality seems to be something real and measurable to some degree, partly heritable, and that some models of personalityfare much better scientifically than the others (like those employed in personality assessment). The chapter also emphasizes how easily clinicians and laypeople tend to invest in and overinterpret patterns.
15. Psychological Disorders
Mental disorders are a bit like Wittgenstein’s family resemblances: many, you know them when you see them but they are difficult to classify cleanly or to made to fit into discrete buckets. The chapter stresses these tensions, along with historical issues and the best tools for diagnosis (like DSM-5 or RDoC). We get a rather exhaustive exploration of different disorders, which are classified as anxiety-related, mood-related, personality and dissociative, schizophrenia and childhood disorders.
16. Psychological and Biological Treatments
Not all therapies are created equal, but for most treatments, there isn’t a ton of difference between them how successful they are are when you compare with one another, and it’s even difficult to distinguish a lot of their effects from pure placebos. Some popular interventions may in fact be be ineffective or harmful (like Thought Field Therapy or EMDR), whereas some less glamorous treatments seem to have stronger support behind them (like pharmacological treatments).
*Takeaways*
I already mentioned that this seems like a very good textbook to introduce oneself to the main areas and ideas in psychology, but I can’t compare it with others, as this is the only one I’ve read. I like the debunking and scientific-seriousness vibe it pursues all through the pages, even if how little of the field is based on solid, incontrovertible finds can feel frustrating at times and work against psychology’s status. It seems all low hanging fruit, if any exists, has been picked, and all that remains are are diverse, mostly incompatible models, some suggestive finds, many qualifications, and lots warnings not to overstate the scant evidence. Chapter 16 is a very good example of this. It moves through psychodynamic, humanistic, group, family, behavioral, CBT, third-wave therapies, pharmacological treatments, combined treatments, ECT, and cautions about ineffective or harmful therapies. Its learning objectives explicitly include evaluating whether all therapies are equally effective, explaining why ineffective therapies can seem effective, and identifying cautions and misconceptions about drug treatment. That is admirable, but also slightly damning: the field needs enormous effort merely to distinguish real treatment effects from placebo effects, regression to the mean, spontaneous recovery, therapist charisma, client expectations, and post hoc storytelling. Not everything is like this, but it does feel like it most of the time. Then again, the issue is not with the scientists or even, strictly speaking, with the science: as we’ve said before, humans are complicated, chaotic and unpredictable, and it seems unlikely we’ll ever be able to generate Hari Seldons and predictive, rigorous and testable models. We make do with what we have. And this will have to do for now.
December 12, 2012
It is a psychology text book that includes some biases of modern culture when viewing the religious perspective of certain scientific elements.
August 9, 2020
Learned a ton and it actually read well despite being a textbook.
April 9, 2024
I read this textbook from cover to cover so yes I will count it towards my reading goal!!! I’m so glad to be done it but WOW the knowledge i’ve gained has benefited me profoundly and instilled in me a deeper appreciation for psychology. Time to ace that final exam!! 🥸
December 24, 2018
For Class
June 9, 2020
This is pretty on par for a textbook.
April 12, 2024
مفيد جداً كمقدمة لمجال علم النفس لمن يريد أن يقرأ أكثر من مجرد مقدمة شديدة التبسيط والاختصار، لكنه لا يتوفر باللغة العربية ولغته فوق المستوى المتوسط
قرأته كمقرر جامعي
قرأته كمقرر جامعي
June 15, 2025
screaming crying throwing up during PSY100
September 9, 2025
interesting and practical for use in Healthcare and everyday life
April 10, 2012
This is probably one of the (if not THE) best textbooks I've ever read. Perhaps a part of that is because Psychology is my field of study right now, but I don't think that actually gave me too much of a bias. This textbook is well put together. It's engaging, written in an intelligent but somewhat laid-back way (in the sense that they make jokes and talk about things in interesting ways as well as giving great scientific/detailed explanations as well). Full of lots of pictures, fun facts, and sections covering all sorts of topics, this was a great starting textbook to my schooling career in psychology. It was also a great study tool and (most of the time) a pleasure to read (though it was very time consuming).
April 4, 2012
Great little textbook to accompany an intro to Psych course. It covers a lot of topics and has interesting examples.
....But i do wish the style of it was different. It sounds too much like the same textbooks I read in grade 3 where the authors just tried to be funny and ends up not explaining as much as it could, so it eventually gets a bit annoying. Still helpful enough, if you don't mind that style.
....But i do wish the style of it was different. It sounds too much like the same textbooks I read in grade 3 where the authors just tried to be funny and ends up not explaining as much as it could, so it eventually gets a bit annoying. Still helpful enough, if you don't mind that style.
April 25, 2020
This is actually the textbook of one of the modules of a certificate in psychology , and I HAD to read it.
Extremely helpful in understanding various aspects of human behaviour.
The scientific rigor with which the topics are covered doesn't conflict with the pedagogical method. Readers are continuously encouraged to question the concepts and analyze from different points of view.
I am actually reading for the second time. Enjoying it without the rush.
Extremely helpful in understanding various aspects of human behaviour.
The scientific rigor with which the topics are covered doesn't conflict with the pedagogical method. Readers are continuously encouraged to question the concepts and analyze from different points of view.
I am actually reading for the second time. Enjoying it without the rush.
August 22, 2013
Best textbook I've ever read. I loved how the authors referenced themselves and their own experiences throughout the text along with silly jokes and morals. Definetly recommend checking it out if ever you want an introduction to psychology!
April 11, 2012
Well written and uses good examples to help students understand the vast number of topics.
April 30, 2014
this is one of the more well-written textbooks that I've encountered. We read the entire text for class and it was consistently enjoyable and interesting.
Read
September 9, 2016150 L728 2014
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