Focusing on the various aspects of human behaviour, the book introduces the nature and theories of sensation, perception, learning, memory, psychophysics and other areas involved in psychology. It also highlights the importance of cognitive processes such as thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. Besides, the book provides essential knowledge and skills for using statistical tools in organising and computing research data. Designed in an easy-to-understand and illustrative manner, this book is primarily aimed at undergraduate students of psychology. The text will also prove useful to all those students who have been introduced with this subject for the first time.
The legitimate and illegitimate use of incentives in society today Incentives can be found everywhere—in schools, businesses, factories, and government—influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses. Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas—plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered. Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, Strings Attached questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.
Categories of Human Learning covers the papers presented at the Symposium on the Psychology of Human Learning, held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor on January 31 and February 1, 1962. The book focuses on the different classifications of human learning. The selection first offers information on classical and operant conditioning and the categories of learning and the problem of definition. Discussions focus on classical and instrumental conditioning and the nature of reinforcement; comparability of the forms of human learning; conditioning experiments with human subjects; and subclasses of classical and instrumental conditioning. The text then takes a look at the representativeness of rote verbal learning and centrality of verbal learning. The publication ponders on probability learning, evaluation of stimulus sampling theory, and short-term memory and incidental learning. Topics include short-term retention, stimulus variation experiments, reinforcement schedules and mean response, systematic interpretations, and methodological approaches. The book then examines the behavioral effects of instruction to learning, verbalizations and concepts, and the generality of research on transfer functions. The selection is highly recommended for psychologists and educators wanting to conduct studies on the categories of human learning.
In this book, a distinguished historian of medicine surveys the basic elements that have constituted psychological healing over the centuries. Dr. Stanley W. Jackson shows that healing practices, whether they come from the worlds of medicine, religion, or philosophy, share certain elements that transcend space and time.Drawing on medical writings from classical Greece and Rome to the present, as well as on philosophical and religious writings, Dr. Jackson shows that the basic ingredients of psychological healing-which have survived changes of name, the fall of their theoretical contexts, and the waning of social support in different historical eras-are essential factors in our modern psychotherapies and in healing contexts in general.
Behaviorism has been the dominant force in the creation of modern American psychology. However, the unquestioned and unquestioning nature of this dominance has obfuscated the complexity of behaviorism. Control serves as an antidote to this historical myopia, providing the most comprehensive history of behaviorism yet written. Mills successfully balances the investigation of individual theorists and their contributions with analysis of the structures of assumption which underlie all behaviorist psychology, and with behaviorism's role as both creator and creature of larger American intellectual patterns, practices, and values. Furthermore, Mills provides a cogent critique of behaviorists' narrow attitudes toward human motivation, exploring how their positivism cripples their ability to account for the unobservable, inner factors that control behavior. Control's blend of history and criticism advances our understanding not only of behaviorism, but also the development of social science and positivism in twentieth-century America.
What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of characters, narrators, and speakers as if they were comparable to our own? In Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind, Joshua Gang offers a radical new approach to these questions, which are among the most challenging philosophical problems faced by literary study today. Recent cognitive criticism has tried to answer these questions by looking for similarities and analogies between literary form and the processes of the brain. In contrast, Gang turns to one of the twentieth century's most infamous psychological doctrines: behaviorism. Beginning in 1913, a range of psychologists and philosophers—including John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryle—argued that many of the things we talk about as mental phenomena aren't at all interior but rather misunderstood behaviors and physiological processes. Today, behaviorism has relatively little scientific value, but Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life. Turning to behaviorism's own literary history, Gang offers the first sustained examination of the outmoded science's place in twentieth-century literature and criticism. Through innovative readings of figures such as I. A. Richards, the American New Critics, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and J. M. Coetzee, Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind reveals important convergences between modernist writers, experimental psychology, and analytic philosophy of mind—while also giving readers a new framework for thinking about some of literature's most fundamental and exciting questions.
The author examines ideas of the nature and localization of the functions of the brain in the light of the philosophical constraints at work in the sciences of mind and brain in the 19th century. Particular attention is paid to phrenology, sensory-motor physiology and associationist psychology.
