Psychology For Dummies ((NEW))
Adam Cash is a clinical psychologist who has practiced in a variety of settings including forensic institutions and outpatient clinics. He has taught Psychology at both the community college and university levels. He is currently in private practice specializing in psychological assessment, child psychology, and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Psychology for Dummies
Enter the magical world of the human mind What makes us tick? Why do we humans do the things we do? The science of psychology is a fascinating adventure, and this book makes it approachable and understandable. Filled with insight, explanations, and practical examples, Psychology For Dummies explores how human behavior and the mind work and how understanding psychology can help us improve our relationships, our decisions, our careers, and our overall lives. Learn to manage stress, and find guidance on developing a greater sense of personal well-being. Inside... Insights into identity
Tips for coping with stress
Why psychological wellness is so important
The connection between biology and psychology
Finding a good therapist
Communicating and connecting with others
Healing the mind
About the Author
Dr Peter J. Hills, PhD, is a principal lecturer and Head of Education in psychology at Bournemouth University. Dr J Michael Pake is a senior lecturer in Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University. Permissions Request permission to reuse content from this site
With this book as your guide, you'll: gain profound insights into human nature; understand yourself better; make sense of individual and group behaviors; explore different approaches in psychology; recognize problems in yourself and others; make informed choices when seeking psychological counseling; and much more.
Psychology For Dummies is a fun, user-friendly guide to the basics of human behavior and mental processes. In plain English and using lots of everyday examples psychologist Dr. Adam Cash cuts through the jargon to explain what psychology is all about and what it tells you about why you do the things you do. From B. F. Skinner to bipolar disorder, anorexia to xenophobia, Psychology For Dummies takes you on a fascinating journey of self-discovery.
Adam Cash, PsyD, is Clinical Director of Specialized Psychology Solutions, a child psychology clinic specializing in behavior, learning, development, and autism spectrum disorders. He has taught at the community college and university levels and also worked as a forensic psychologist.
Thinking of a career that indulges your CSI fantasies? Want to understand the psychology of crime? Whether studying it for the first time or an interested spectator, Forensic Psychology For Dummies gives you all the essentials for understanding this exciting field, complemented with fascinating case examples from around the world.
Inside you'll find out why people commit crime, how psychology helps in the investigative process, the ways psychologists work with criminals behind bars - and how you too can become a forensic psychologist. You'll discover what a typical day is like for a forensic psychologist, how they work with the police to build offender profiles, interview suspects or witnesses, and detect lies!
If you're a student considering taking forensic psychology or just love to learn about the science behind crime, Forensic Psychology For Dummies is everything you need to get up-to-speed on this fascinating subject.
This book is for people who need and want to know about cognitive psychology. For the former, we present all the information covered in school and the first year of a university course (anywhere in the world) in a highly accessible way. We map the content onto the most common courses of cognitive psychology. If you simply want to know about cognitive psychology, we present some of the most interesting and fun psychology here too. We pack the book with examples and exercises you can try out and demonstrate on your friends and family to amaze them!
Hundreds of books on cognitive psychology exist. Many are technical, long, dry, specialised or cover a very narrow area of cognition. We wrote Cognitive Psychology For Dummies assuming the following:
jargonbuster Like most sciences, cognitive psychology has a lot of terms and particular usages. We highlight them with this icon so that you can join in the conversation wherever cognitive psychologists gather.
In an online cheat sheet found at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/cognitivepsychology, we include a quick guide to some central cognitive psychology ideas on memory, language and problem solving, among other topics.
We also describe the plethora of research methods that psychologists employ to study cognitive psychology. The rest of this book uses the philosophies and methods that we describe here, and so this chapter works as an introduction to the book as well.
tip Cognitive psychology employs the scientific method vigorously. Everything we describe in this book comes from experiments that have been conducted following this method. Although this does sometimes limit the questions you can ask, it establishes standards that all research must follow.
In Part I, we review the applications of cognitive psychology and why studying it is important. Cognitive psychology has produced some incredibly exciting and interesting findings that have changed how people view psychology and themselves (as you can discover in Chapter 2). But also, people have learnt a great deal about how best to teach, learn and improve themselves from cognitive psychology, something we address in Chapter 3. The applications of cognitive psychology are so wide that studies are used in such disparate fields as computing, social work, education, media technology, human resources and much more besides.
All cognition fits within this framework. Cognitive psychologists research each box (stage) and each arrow (process) in Figure 1-1 in many different domains. In other words, this framework provides a good structure for how to think about and learn about cognitive psychology (and oddly matches the framework of this book).
People have devised a number of methods for researching cognitive psychology. Plus, technological advances allow psychologists to explore how the brain functions. In this section, we describe how experiments, computational models, work with patients and brain scanning helped psychologists to understand how the cognitive system works.
jargonbuster Cognitive neuropsychology is the study of brain-damaged patients in an attempt to understand normal cognition. Often the ingenious studies that cognitive psychologists devise are run on people with various types of brain damage to see whether they perform differently. The aim is to identify what processes take place where in the brain, and what groups of tasks are related in terms of cognitive functioning.
If you're a student considering taking forensic psychology or just love to learn about the science behind crime, Forensic Psychology For Dummies is everything you need to get up-to-speed on this fascinating subject. 041b061a72