Psychology

A History of Modern Experimental Psychology

This is a splendid book by an author who has himself made an outstanding contribution to cognitive psychology. As indicated by the sub-title, it does not…

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A History of Social Psychology

Although the term, 'social psychology' was not formally introduced to the literature until the middle of the nineteenth century, as Jahoda demons…

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A History of the Mind

Despite our most compelling intuitions, perhaps the most truly mysterious thing about consciousness is simply the feeling of mystery we have about it. I…

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A Place for Consciousness

In A Place for Consciousness, Gregg Rosenberg presents a detailed examination of the link between consciousness and causation, arguing that it's t…

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A Social History of Psychology

            The book is a study of "practical psychology," by which is meant professional practices, not academic theories or experiments.  It…

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A Stroll With William James

Jacques Barzun is most likely known to American audiences as the author of the massive…

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A System Architecture Approach to the Brain

Andrew L. Coward has a lofty goal, which is nothing less than the "Holy Grail" of cognitive science, namely, to generate a comprehensive and de…

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Abducted

Half a century ago, during the cold war, the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues studied a millennial sect who believed that the earth…

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Accounts of Innocence

The subject of the subtitle informs you from the start that the book has three parts: a historical exploration of the systemic meanings applied to the su…

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Adapting Minds

Ours is an evolutionary heritage.  Lately one can observe a keen interest in developing a naturalistic understanding of human cognition and behavior by t…

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An Argument for Mind

Jerome Kagan is a name that pops up regularly in developmental and introductory psychology texts.  His work is also known well outside the professio…

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Animals in Translation

Animals in Translation offers unique insights into a diverse array of problems from animal handling to selective breeding and animal cognition. Au…

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Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone

The co-authors of Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone are not academics nor clinicians, but seven people labeled as autistic who provide the c…

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Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind

In any other discipline, a gathering of minds with only half the intellectual prowess and experience of the consultants brought together in Edwin Shneidm…

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Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era

      The tone of Behavioral Genetics in the Post-Genomic Era is authoritative and triumphalist. The book weighs in at 636 pages, with 26 articles…

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Being No One

In Being No One,Thomas Metzingerdefends a representationalist and functionalist analysis of the first-person phenomenal experience of being someon…

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Beyond Madness

This book is an edited collection of essays from authors who have all been involved with the Arbours Crisis Centre (…

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Blindsight & The Nature of Consciousness

Jason Holt set himself the goal to write a book on consciousness and the phenomenon of blindsight. He intends to illuminate philosophical questions conce…

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Bounded Rationality

Even intuitively standard descriptions of what rational behavior consists of face strange difficulties. I cite two instances. It is fairly common to thin…

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Brain Arousal and Information Theory

It is well known that the capacity of the human central nervous system (CNS) to be aroused is an essential aspect of not only our basic biological functi…

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Cerebrum 2007

Cerebrum's Web edition has yielded its fruits and a soon to be annual anthology of the best of what…

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Changing the Subject

Changing the Subject, originally published in 1984, is a collection of articles advocating a radical approach to psychology.  It contains six pape…

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Character Strengths and Virtues

In this comprehensive tour de force, the authors and a long list of contributors have brought together just about everything that's currently known €“ an…

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Child and Adolescent Psychological Disorders

While Child & Adolescent Psychological Disorders was published in 1999, and so will not include some of the latest scientific studies, it is s…

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Children and Mental Health Talk

Children and Mental Health Talk is an interesting read, even if the reader is not very familiar with conversation analysis. It takes some time to get used to the transcription of the recorded conversations, but the analysis of the conversations is fascina

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Coaching Athletes to Be Their Best

Ever since Miller and Rollnick published their first works in the 1980’s, the world at large has recognized the fields of motivational interviewing, together with Deci and Ryan’s self-determination science, as the epitome of Carl Roger’s client-centred ap

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Cognitive Fictions

In the closing chapter of his recent bestseller The Blank Slate, Steven Pi…

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Consciousness

The study of consciousness has truly become an interdisciplinary endeavor.  In perhaps no other domain of study is the theoretician and philosopher so informed by the empirical sciences.  This is evidenced by Adam Zeman's Consciousness: A User's Guide.  W…

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Consciousness Recovered

Consciousness Recovered provides a synthesis and overview of psychologist George Mandler’s research on the psychological functions and evolut…

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Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science

The significance of Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, a book edited by Robert J. Stainton, originates from the complexity of the s…

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Corporate Psychopathy

The title of the book written by Katarina Fritzon, Nathan Brooks, and Simon Croom is both enticing, striking the reader's curiosity for its skillful analysis of research findings, and unsurprising, revealing predictable conclusions. Corporate psychopathy:

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Critical New Perspectives on Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Scientifically speaking, the status of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is shaky. There is no physiological or genetic test for the condit…

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Critical Thinking About Psychology

In Critical Thinking about Psychology the contributors attempt to motivate psychologists to think critically about the issue of human behavior as…

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Deafness In Mind

As the introduction says, this book came into being as a result of Sally Austen's frustration at the mental health services' lack of awareness of the nee…

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Descartes' Baby

Antonio Damiso's popular book Descartes' Error was first recommended to me by a psychiatrist in Germany.  She explained to me that philosophers, s…

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Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974)

Gilles Deleuze was the other postmodernist (poststructuralist) French philosopher -- the one who wasn't Derrida and whose work never quite caught…

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Destructive Emotions

Every once in a while, I have the fortunate opportunity to read a book that invigorates and rekindles my hope in the future of psychology. By the time I…

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Development of Psychopathology

What sort of factors lead to psychopathology?  This is the central question that the authors of this book attempt to answer.  The first half of the book…

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Digital Hemlock

I have on my shelves a number of 'must read' books.  These are treasures of which I often own multiple copies and which I recommend and loan to others. …

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Emotion

This pocket presentation of emotion includes Introduction, five chapters, Glossary, Bibliography, and Index. There are neither footnotes nor endnotes and to each chapter is appended a one-page Further Reading section.

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Emotion Experience

The selection of papers presented in this special issue of The Journal of Consciousness embodies a genuine interdisciplinary dialogue on emotion. Though…

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Emotionally Involved

In Emotionally Involved, Rebecca Campbell tackles the tough topic of how research is affected by the emotional reactions of the researchers, and v…

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Emotions in Humans and Artifacts

Emotions in Humans and Artifacts is a difficult but truly rewarding collection of 12 essays on emotions by leading researchers in areas as varied…

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Emotions, Stress, and Health

The cognitive revolution in psychology has become well-established, and the field is now turning attention to emotions and affective processes. Although…

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Everyday Mind Reading

There are some books that, although rewarding, are very hard going. Other books, although they transport us into the depths of complex problems, guide th…

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Evidence-Based Mental Health Practice

Robert Drake and his colleagues have been prime researchers in evidence based practice for some time and have helped define its place in mental health. T…

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Evolutionary Psychology and Violence

To begin with, I feel I should warn you that reading this book might be hazardous to your equanimity. As you study the exceptionally well-written and wel…

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Exacting Beauty

There has been a 228 per cent increase in cosmetic procedures between 1997 and 2002. During the same time period, there has been a 2446 per cent increase…

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Extending Self-Esteem Research

In today's world, where psychology has been disseminated throughout the popular media, many people assume that they are self-esteem experts, because they…

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Fatigue as a Window to the Brain

Some symptoms are so ubiquitous that their inclusion in any diagnosis is too non-specific to be of value, and fatigue is one of those symptoms.  A sympto…

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Feeling Good

Dangerous ideas At MIT, there is a seminar for researchers called "Dangerous Ideas."  The main question each researcher is asked…

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From Scientific Psychology to the Study of Persons

Canadian psychologist Jack Martin has provided readers with a carefully constructed, clearly motivated memoir within six concise chapters. As befits the title, From Scientific Psychology to the Study of Persons, Martin charts the unravelling of his initia

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Getting Under the Skin

Working within the rather wide field of "body criticism," Wegenstein adventurously probes the relation between media and the body in Getting…

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Got Parts?

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is one of the more problematic diagnostic categories in the psychiatric compendium, not least because of its rise to…

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Growing Up Girl

Growing up Girl is a sociological analysis of gender and class, interwoven with commentaries drawn from the authors' applications of psychoanalyti…

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Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy

As an academic who is currently involved in the area of interpersonal relationship research, I was excited when this book was finally published.  Being f…

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Happiness

Sigmund Freud made psychology famous. The terms and theories that seemed so easily to spin out of his vast imagination quickly entered common vernacular and became in certain circles a set of informal parlor games.  Oedipal complex, anal retentive, fixati…

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Happiness

There is a different and important research program that has developed in the last decade or so within the science of psychology.  It is the study of happiness or, as it's sometimes put, subjective well-being.  What is different in this field is its combi…

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Hatred

Hatred by Willard Gaylin, M.D. is a good introduction to understand the dynamics of hatred. Gaylin, a psychiatrist differentiates hatred from othe…

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Healing the Split

In the search for how psychosis might be reinterpreted Healing the Split investigates "neuropsychiatry" and Eastern philosophy (specif…

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How Families Still Matter

In theory, there is such a thing as a perfect family and raising the perfect kids. In theory, if a parent just knows enough, has enough facts, and can ap…

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How the Body Shapes the Way We Think

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone several important conceptual changes over the years. The classical approach (also known as GOFAI=…

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How the Mind Explains Behavior

Questions regarding the sources of our own behavior and that of others are common in our lives. At times, we ask ourselves questions that help us make se…

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How to Sleep Well

There are many books about sleep and on how to improve one's sleep, all emphasizing how important sleep is to living well and health. Different "experts" have different theories and recommendations, though there is a good deal of overlap between many of t

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Hypnotism

The immense, untapped power of the human mind continues to fascinate us. Although many medical professionals - and other people, including law enforcemen…

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Imitation and the Social Mind

Imitation and the Social Mind comprises eighteen predominantly Anglo-American contributions from researchers mainly drawn from Departments of Ps…

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In the Wake of 9/11

My advice about this book is: Read It Now. At a time when military action against Iraq looms large on the horizon, and ‘war on terrorism’ appe…

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Inner Presence

While I found Revonsuo's style engaging and the subject matter fascinating -- although I must admit to having a vested interest in this type of conscious…

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Integrated Behavioral Health Care

With Integrated Behavioral Health Care, Donohue et al. provide a handbook that both health care administrators and practitioners will find infor…

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Integrating Psychotherapy and Pharmacotherapy

The authors of Integrating Psychotherapy and Pharmacotherapy chose the rather seductive subtitle of Dissolving the Mind-Brain Barrier.  Whi…

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Intelligence

Apart from the faculty of language, the other most important species-specific psychological faculty that human beings possess is perhaps intelligence. It…

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Into the Minds of Madmen

I must admit looking forward to receiving this book. I thought I'd learn something about criminal profiling.  Unfortunate title, I thought, but ... let's…

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Intuition

It is with great ease that most of us pass through life without even imagining what human life is really about, let alone ponder on its meaning and its p…

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Inventing Personality

This book reminds me of a tired joke:  A psychiatrist interviewing a prospective patient shows him a picture of a triangle and asks, "What does that…

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Key Thinkers in Psychology

Defining the twentieth century by its key achievements is clearly difficult: the discoveries of atomic energy, antibiotics, instrumentation for the explo…

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Kids of Character

In Kids of Character, David Shumaker and Robert Heckel posit that certain changes in American society are inimical to fostering character and mo…

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Killing Monsters

Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones is an engrossing reflection on the importance…

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Language, Consciousness, Culture

The book is an effort to emphasize the value of investigating cognition in terms of mental structures. In 1960s the most prevailing theme was that some a…

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Living Narrative

Narrative studies seem to have become one of the major trends in the humanities and social sciences. More and more journals and books are devoted to them…

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Love at Goon Park

In the early 20th century, infants in foundling homes died at an alarming rate. Doctors recommended sterility and isolation, keeping children separated a…

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Making a Good Brain Great

Making a Good Brain Great is intended to be a practical guide to understanding and optimizing brain functioning.  The author, Daniel G. Ame…

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Making Up the Mind

"Our research must be relevant, understandable, and, best of all, fun." (p. 102) says Chris Frith, Professor in Neuropsychology at the Wellcome…

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Man, Beast, and Zombie

Would the first fully conscious humans have perceived themselves as categorically different from the other creatures that inhabited their world?  If…

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Memory and Dreams

In Memory and Dreams, George Christos presents an interesting and engaging introduction to research findings regarding REM sleep and discusses the…

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Memory And Understanding

Renate Bartsch's Memory and Understanding is the 63rd volume of the series on Advances in Consciousness Research from John Benjamins Publishing Co…

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Minding Animals

Marc Bekoff has for years been a leading figure in cognitive ethology, the branch of the study of animal behavior that acknowledges the common-sense trut…

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Models of Madness

When an editor declares that a book does not attempt to be even handed or objective you know you're in for a bit of a ride. There's a disarming frankness…

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Muses, Madmen, and Prophets

"You'd better get away from there!  Get away from there!  Leave!"It's 3am and I wake to the s…

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My Family Album

My Family Album is a wonderful book of black and white photographs of apes and monkeys by Franz de Waal, the C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology…

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Narrative Identities

Several years ago, while writing my doctoral dissertation, I came across an essay by the Russian neuropsychologist, Luria, where he reflects on how his i…

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Narratives in Psychiatry

This is a working text, aimed clearly at trainee psychiatrists and those new to their field, although it will prove useful to anyone working in the clini…

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Neurochemistry of Consciousness

In 1921 a German physiologist (Loewi) dreamed a dream that inspired his discovery of the chemical nature of neurotransmission. This book contains a broad…

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Neurological Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience

Neurological Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience is a collection of eleven contributed chapters that attempt to bridge the cognitive neuroscient…

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On Nature and Language

On Nature and Language makes me wonder how editors and publishers go about choosing the titles for collections like this one. While this volume do…

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On the Frontier of Adulthood

Take one hundred years. It is an impressive span in time, for a human being. There was wars, economic breakthroughs, migrations, inventions, revolutions,…

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Opening Skinner's Box

The author of Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren Slater, claims that the goal of her book is to make accessible to the general public ten relevant psyc…

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Origin of Mind

Why and how have humans developed a type of consciousness unlike that of other creatures?  Although targeted at readers already knowledgeable in this are…

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Origins of Psychopathology

The common conception of mental illness or psychopathology is that it’s a breakdown or malfunction of the human mind; a very personal problem that s…

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Other Minds

Since Descartes, the problem of other minds has been a classic discussion in the tradition of Western philosophy. It consists of different questio…

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Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude

In his essay on the work of the theologian Raymond de Sebond that his father asked him to elucidate, Michel de Montaigne raises a many-sided question typ…

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Parenting and the Child's World

There is no problem more at the heart of developmental psychology than how to explain individual differences.  Why do some children succeed in school whi…

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Pathologies of the West

Roland Littlewood is already well known for his contribution to socially contextualised psychiatric literature, and this book not only reprises some them…

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Patient-Based Approaches to Cognitive Neuroscience

The book is divided into 5 parts, beginning with a history of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral neurology; part two looks at perception and attention…

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Perspectives on Imitation

Imitation is a hot topic in developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, animal studies, philosophical considerations of theory of mind and intersub…

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Phantoms in the Brain

Written with wit and enthusiasm, for the general reader wishing to know more about the mechanics of their mind and how it may be affected by changes in t…

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Practical Ethics for Psychologists

Psychologists confront ethical dilemmas on a daily basis.  These may range from issues around maintaining patient confidentiality to complex issues…

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Preference, Belief, and Similarity

In Preference, Belief and Similarity, Eldar Shafir has cleverly assembled a representative array of articles written by Amos Tversky, a cognitive…

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Prenatal Testosterone in Mind

Although the role of hormones, and specifically of testosterone in the development of fetal organs, including the brain, is unquestionable, the psycholog…

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Psychiatry and Its Discontents

But be forewarned—Professor Scull’s pronouncements are as pessimistic as the jeremiads articulated by the Hebrew prophet whose writings inspired this English-language noun. In fact, much of this book evokes the Book of Jeremiah, and not only because Prof

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Psychologists Defying the Crowd

   I've seen Robert J. Sternberg in action at the American Psychological Association conventions, and he's always been a favorite of mine. Given a list o…

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Psychology for Screenwriters

Calling all frustrated psychiatrists who just happen to be screenwriters...this book is your Bible. Psychology for Screenwriters by William Indick…

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Reality Check

Reality Check shrilly sounds a clarion call for curiosity, humility, and open mindedness regarding the fathomless profundities of the human mind. …

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Reconstructing the Cognitive World

Until recently, cognitive science (and the philosophy of it) has been very much dominated by the 'Representationalist approach', the basic idea of which,…

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Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity

This major work on schizophrenia brings together psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists and one historian to address how culture is manifest in an…

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Seeing and Visualizing

This is a very fine book on the psychology of vision and visualizing.  In it Pylyshyn defends in detail the information-processing account he has develop…

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Self-Awareness Deficits in Psychiatric Patients

Whether in psychology, neuroscience and biology, or philosophy the study of self-consciousness is currently a very dominant research area in which, more…

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Sexual Disorders

In Sexual Disorders, Peter Fagan applies the approach to psychiatry proposed by McHugh and Slavney in their profoundly important book…

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Shame and Guilt

There have been a number of attempts to define and distinguish the painful emotions of shame and guilt.  One of the most influential distinctions is Hele…

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Social Neuroscience

A colleague of mine in Adelaide makes the point that we were not born to be free of fear; if we were, we not have made it through to day two of creation. Some features are meant to be hardwired if an organism is to survive, and this should include basic f…

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Structure and Agency in Everyday Life

Structure and Agency chronicles the rise of symbolic interactionism (SI), a perspective on human nature that rose to prominence in the social scie…

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Stumbling on Happiness

Curiously, one of the saddest periods of my life occurred shortly after I finished my Ph.D. and started my first tenure track faculty position. Graduate…

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Sway

Pragya Agarwal's book, Sway: Unravelling unconscious bias, is three things: an interesting and lively scholarly account of different types of human biases, including their sources, modes of operation, and consequences; a personal, but also intensely invol

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Synaptic Self

In the last few decades neuroscientific research has significantly advanced our understanding of learning and memory. In Synaptic Self, LeDoux pro…

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Talking to Babies

Talking to Babies instructively transmits teachings relating to psychoanalysis and newborns.  The mantra of the author, Myriam Szejer, is t…

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Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching

There have been many excellent books published about teaching but this book has something very special about it. I am currently in my thirty seventh year…

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The Accidental Mind

Neuroscience has gone a long way to opening up the old behaviorist black box. So much so that Linden is able to end his book with an example tracing the…

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The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry

In this new edition, there are significant changes from the third edition of The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry. …

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The Anxious Brain

In this modern age, a plethora of books in the field of psychology and psychiatry are increasingly educating on brain structures and functions in various…

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The Bifurcation of the Self

Despite, or maybe because of, more so many reports in the literature the nature, indeed the plausible existence of dissociative states, or more commonly…

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The Birth of the Mind

   This is a wonderful book which I heartily recommend to any interested readers who want to explore either genomics or the workings of the mind/brain. …

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The Cognitive Approach to Conscious Machines

The author in this book argues that the conscious machines can be built, but rejects artificial intelligence and classical neural networks in favor of th…

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The Creating Brain

Nancy C. Andreasen' s book, The Creating Brain, is an interesting and insightful hypothesis about the nature of creativity.  Her style is fluid a…

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The Developing Mind

This book explores how experience, that is, interactions with the environment, might shape the development of the brain. It does this in a way that integrates neurobiology with subjective experiences, particularly those that occur in the reciprocity of in…

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The Developing Mind

This book explores how experience, that is, interactions with the environment, might shape the development of the brain. It does this in a way that integ…

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The Development of Psychopathology

Bruce Pennington has written a book that will prove very useful in thinking about psychopathology. How dare one claim something like that amidst a virtu…

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The Dissolution of Mind

Provocative and imaginative, the first volume in the VIBS' Special Series in Cognitive Science is a critique of the traditional theoretical apparatus of…

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The Encyclopedia of Stupidity

        Originally published in the Dutch language as De Encyclopedie van de Domheid in 1999, this revised and enlarged English edition (2003) pro…

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The End of Gender

Soh's book is a mixed bag, then. It is didactic in places, but it also sets out a good deal of scientific information. Her claims about the scientific superiority of sexology are a bit hard to swallow, given the track record of the field, but it is still

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The Essential Difference

The author tackles with a lot of tender care what is the real substance behind many untutored observation and folksy beliefs about the cognitive differen…

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The Ethical Brain

In The Ethical Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga teaches us something about making informed decisions in settings where our personal sense of right and…

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The Evolving Brain

The Evolving Brain is stylistically an engaging and entertaining tour through a variety of contemporary topics in neuroscience, neurophysiology…

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The Executive Brain

This is a book about what makes us who we are and defines our identity, our personality, our essence, from a neurological point of view, namely by the ev…

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The First Idea

Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker's book The First Idea is a grand work of extensive erudition, ambition and of experience. Both have been aut…

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The Gift of Shyness

Being shy is often a problem for most people. It makes meeting new people awkward; can defeat even the best-prepared presentation of oneself anywhere pe…

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The Happiness Hypothesis

In the early middle ages, just as the first millennium was winding down, Abd Er-Rahman III, the successful and powerful Caliph of Cordoba, made the follo…

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The Human Face

The Human Face is a BBC documentary series originally broadcast in 2001.  On the first DVD disc are the four episodes of the series, and on…

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The Imagery Debate

Michael Tye's The Imagery Debate is an introduction to the issues in philosophy and psychology that define the debate over the content and structu…

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The Languages of the Brain

This book is the result of a conference with the same title in Paris in March 1998 and features an impressive collection of 23 papers by leading research…

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The Lie Detectors

In The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession, Ken Alder depicts the polygraph as an apparatus whose effectiveness as a lie detecto…

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The Man Who Lost His Language

The Man Who List His Language tells the story of John Hale, art historian and Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery London, who suffe…

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The Man Who Shocked the World

Stanley Milgram is without doubt one of the most famous of all psychology researchers. However, as Thomas Blass points out in this excellent, entertainin…

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The Mind and the Brain

The Mind and the Brain presents the outcome of an investigation by Jeffrey Schwartz, MD, (a neuropsychiatrist) into the question of how The Brain…

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The Mindful Brain

Appropriate for both professionals (clinical psychologists, counselors, etc.) and the general public, this text joins the growing number books that align…

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The Most Dangerous Animal

The statistics of the human and social cost of warfare in the Twentieth Century alone are staggering: 170 million dead, billions of dollars spent each da…

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The Myth of Self-Esteem

Patients suffering of depression during their crises tend to underrate themselves; and when the crisis ends, either spontaneously or because of therapy,…

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The Necessity Of Madness

This book is a sincerely felt attempt to add to the literature about the abuse of psychiatry. Thomas Szasz has probably been the major voice in this move…

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The Neuroscience of Human Relationships

If you thought the title was about boy meets girl, its not, it's about mum meets baby and baby meets mum in a reciprocal bonding and attachment relat…

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The New Brain

In The New Brain, Richard Restak explains the recent achievements of neuroscience and the future possibilities of the brain science. According to…

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The Paradoxical Primate

At first it was hard for me not to be gleeful reading Colin Talbot's The Paradoxical Primate: here was Talbot, an ex-Trotskyist (I grew up the dau…

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The Power of Play

I had a hard time getting into this book. I was looking for a primer on children's play and received something quite different; David Elkind's somew…

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The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life

Daniel Stern's new book, The Present Moment, has already generated in depth analysis and has been seen as an intervention in the ongoing struggle…

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The Psychology of Performance

The Psychology of Performance by Stewart T. Cotterill is a coherent and informative account of the conditions under which human performance may fit or fail environmental demands and expectations. The author’s writing is clear, and, most importantly, relia

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The Psychology of Stereotyping

As rightly pointed out in the introduction, the term 'stereotype' as a psychological concept dates back only some eighty years. Yet  the ide…

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The Quick Fix

Jesse Singal covers various ways in which theories in social psychology have been proposed as solutions for social problems. These include ideas about boosting self-esteem, the benefits of power-posing, positive psychology, the crucial nature of grit as a

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The Second Self

Very few and far between are the people who can still remember a life without computers. We now use computer technology without a thought as to the way…

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The Self-Sabotage Cycle

From the viewpoint of clinical practice, the book is an enlightening account of the dynamics of the repetition compulsion -- a tendency to repeat certain…

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The Talking Ape

According to Robin Burling questions about the evolution of language are intriguing but difficult to answer because researchers cannot rely on any direct…

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The Tending Instinct

In her book, The Tending Instinct, Shelley Taylor provides a new look at how nurturing is vital to the health and wellbeing of every human being. …

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The Unhappy Child

The Unhappy Child is a vastly illumining guidebook targeted particularly to parents of unhappy children.  The author, Kenneth N. Condrell, is…

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The Wow Climax

First, perhaps the ambiguous title of "The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture" needs a little explanation, in…

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Themes, Issues and Debates in Psychology

The goal of making psychology more accessible to novices is one of those things that many attempt but only a few achieve.  Richard Gross appears to be on…

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Those They Called Idiots

For sheer readability, Simon Jarrett has few peers in the burgeoning field popularly known as the Medical Humanities. This partly derives from a crucial task Those They Called Idiots sets itself. Each of the three parts of this monograph carefully context

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Thought in a Hostile World

Some might argue that we already know all we need to know about human evolution.  After all, works conjuring up intriguing pictures of human evolution ha…

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Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language

The study of the nature and development of the largely unique linguistic abilities of the human species has been a long standing enterprise for many gene…

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Toward Replacement Parts for the Brain

Frighteningly, as if we didn't yet know it, the age of the Cyborg is here: namely, the insertion and adhesion of electronic equipment which will main…

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Unlock the Genius Within

Written in a style accessible to the general reader, this volume is a good primer for those wishing to learn how effective learning via practical mentori…

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Virtue, Vice, and Personality

This edited volume explores human behavior from the perspective of personality psychology.  In particular, it examines the value of particular personalit…

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Visual Agnosia

In Visual Agnosia (second edition), Martha J. Farah provides an updated overview of the empirical evidence that has been collected to describe a d…

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We Know It When We See It

Lifelong learners will read this for fun. Expect this book to be regularly recommended for undergraduate or graduate courses in biology, neurobiology, microbiology, anatomy, or cognitive science. Philosophers (studying the mind, agency, or consciousness)

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We Who Are Dark

In We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Cultural Solidarity, Tommie Shelby appeals to blacks to come together under the banner…

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When Harry Became Sally

When Harry Became Sally is Ryan T. Anderson’s response to what the author calls the “Transgender moment”. Anderson believes that rather than focusing on transitioning for young children and teenagers who identify as Transgender, it is imperative to provid

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When the Impossible Happens

When the Impossible Happens is a part-anecdotal, part-theoretical exploration of 'non-ordinary' states of consciousness. Using both his…

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Why Love Matters

This is a very ambitious book. The author, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, sets out to show that, although our genetic inheritance may predispose us to…

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Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid

We all know of people like that. They are educated, intelligent, sophisticated, verbal and very often successful. They run companies, run for office, tea…

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Why We Lie

David Livingston Smith's Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind follows in the tradition of Steven Pinker…

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Why We Love

This book is an ambitious attempt to map the physiological basis of what we call love. The author is an anthropologist but in this work she cooperates w…

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Yoga and Psychology

For Harold Coward, Indian poetry and philosophy encapsulate "the creative tension between a profound attraction to sensual beauty and the yearning f…

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