Description
Psychology is all around us. If ever there was a subject that permeates our everyday lives, it is psychology. Behavior occurs everywhere, and the study of behavior can help shed light on the widest range of events and issues.
This textbook Psychology Around Us helps to open students’ minds to the notion that psychology is indeed around them every day and that its principles are immediately applicable to a whole host of life’s questions. It also features classroom-proven pedagogy to keep students engaged and help them master the material.
Between the two of us, we have taught Introductory Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, and Neuroscience for about 50 years. Throughout those years, we have always been struck by how differently students react to various subjects of psychology. For example, most students find Abnormal Psychology fascinating, relevant, and “alive,” while many consider other areas of psychology to be flat and removed from their lives. Thus, while excited by their abnormal psychology text, they are often disappointed by their introductory psychology text.
There is something very wrong with this. After all, like abnormal psychology, general psychology deals with people and with behavior; and what can be more interesting than that? Granted, abnormal behaviors are often exotic and puzzling, and people who display them generate empathy, sympathy, and curiosity; but, certainly, normal behavior is every bit as remarkable.
This gap between the appeal of abnormal behavior and that of normal behavior occurs throughout psychology. Students are fascinated by instances of “memory gone bad” yet take for granted that people can remember in the first place. They love to follow the activity of serotonin and dopamine when studying mood disorders and schizophrenia, but not when learning about these neurotransmitters in an introductory psychology course. Students are captivated by failures in attention (ADHD), thought (schizophrenia), communication (autism), or coping (posttraumatic stress disorder), yet almost nonchalant about the fact that people usually attend, think, communicate, and cope quite well. They keenly appreciate the importance and effects of psychotherapy, yet almost overlook everyday instances of attitude, behavior, and mood change.
Our textbook is dedicated to helping students appreciate that both normal and abnormal behavior are fascinating, and to energizing, exciting, and demonstrating for them the enormous relevance of psychology. It encourages students to examine what they know about human behavior and how they know it, and opens them up to an appreciation of psychology outside of the classroom.
About the Text
As instructors and researchers, we (the authors) are both passionate about the study of psychology and genuinely fascinated by behavior, thought, and emotion. When we teach a course, we consider ourselves successful if we have engaged our students in the rigorous study of psychology while simultaneously transferring our passion for the subject. These same criteria of success should be applied to a textbook in psychology: It should broaden the reader’s knowledge about the field and, at the same time, move, excite, and motivate the student. To achieve this goal, our textbook includes a range of features—some traditional, others innovative.
While implementing the traditional introductory psychology concepts and theories, this textbook also introduces two special pedagogical tools, the Cut Across Connection and What Happens in the Brain When… These features help to demonstrate how psychology’s various topics are relevant to each other and also to everyday life.