Big ideas simply explained.

Introduction -- Philosophical roots: psychology in the making -- Behaviorism: responding to our environment -- Psychotherapy: the unconscious determines behavior -- Cognitive psychology: the calculating brain -- Social psychology: being in a world of others -- Developmental philosophy: from infant to adult -- Psychology of difference: personality and intelligence

All the big ideas, simply explained - an innovative and accessible guide to the study of human nature The Psychology Book clearly explains more than 100 groundbreaking ideas in this fascinating field of science

In this innovative and accessible guide to the study of human nature, pithy explanations cut away the jargon so that concepts of psychology are clearly explained. Diagrams untangle knotty theories, and quotations and illustrations provide plenty to intrigue and stimulate you

Philosophical roots : Psychology in the making -- Four temperaments of personality / Galen -- There is a reasoning soul in this machine / Descartes -- Dormez! / Abbé Faria -- Concepts become forces when they resist one another / Johann Friedrich Herbart -- Be that self which one truly is / Søren Kierkegaard -- Personality is composed of nature and nurture / Francis Galton -- Laws of hysteria are universal / Jean-Martin Charcot -- A peculiar destruction of the internal connections of the psyche / Emil Kraepelin -- Beginnings of the mental life date from the beginnings of life / Wilhelm Wundt -- We know the meaning of "consciousness" so long as no one asks us to define it / William James -- Adolescence is a new birth / G. Stanley Hall -- 24 hours after learning something, we forget two-thirds of it / Hermann Ebbinghaus -- Intelligence of an individual is not a fixed quantity / Alfred Binet -- Unconscious sees the men behind the curtains / Pierre Janet -- Behaviorism : Responding to our environment -- Sight of tasty food makes a hungry man's mouth water / Ivan Pavlov -- Profitless acts are stamped out / Edward Thorndike -- Anyone, regardless of their nature, can be trained to be anything / John B. Watson -- That great God-given maze which is our human world / Edward Tolman -- Once a rat has visited our grain sack we can plan on its return / Edwin Guthrie -- Nothing is more natural that for the cat to "love" the rat / Zing-Yang Kuo -- Learning is just not possible / Karl Lashley -- Imprinting cannot be forgotten! / Konrad Lorenz -- Behavior is shaped by positive and negative reinforcement / B.F. Skinner -- Stop imagining the scene and relax / Joseph Wolpe -- Psychotherapy : The unconscious determines behavior -- Unconscious is the true psychical reality / Sigmund Freud -- Neurotic carries a feeling of inferiority with him constantly / Alfred Adler -- Collective unconscious is made up of archetypes / Carl Jung -- Struggle between the life and death instincts persists throughout life / Melanie Klein -- Tyranny of the "shoulds" / Karen Horney -- Superego becomes clear only when it confronts the ego with hostility / Anna Freud -- Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself / Fritz Perls -- It is notoriously inadequate to take an adopted child into one's home and love him / Donald Winnicott -- Unconscious is the discourse of the other / Jacques Lacan -- Man's main task is to give birth to himself / Erich Fromm -- Good life is a process not a state of being / Carl Rogers -- What a man can be, he must be / Abraham Maslow -- Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning / Viktor Frankl -- One does not become fully human painlessly / Rollo May -- Rational beliefs create healthy emotional consequences / Albert Ellis -- Family is the "factory" where people are made / Virginia Satir -- Turn on, tune in, drop out / Timothy Leary -- Insight may cause blindness / Paul Watzlawick -- Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through / R.D. Laing -- Our history does not determine our destiny / Boris Cyrulnik -- Only good people get depressed / Dorothy Rowe -- Fathers are subject to a rule of silence / Guy Corneau Cognitive psychology : The calculating brain -- Instinct is a dynamic pattern / Wolfgang Köhler -- Interruption of a task greatly improves its chances of being remembered / Bluma Zeigarnik -- When a baby hears footsteps, an assembly is excited / Donald Hebb -- Knowing is a process not a product / Jerome Bruner -- A man with conviction is a hard man to change / Leon Festinger -- Magical number 7, plus or minus 2 / George Armitage Miller -- There's more to the surface than meets the eye / Aaron Beck -- We can listen to only one voice at once / Donald Broadbent -- Time's arrow is bent into a loop / Endel Tulving -- Perception is externally guided hallucination / Roger N. Shepard -- We are constantly on the lookout for causal connections / Daniel Kahneman -- Events and emotion are stored in memory together / Gordon H. Bower -- Emotions are a runaway train / Paul Ekman -- Ecstasy is a step into an alternative reality / Mihály Csíkszentmihályi -- Happy people are extremely social / Martin Seligman -- What we believe with all our hearts is not necessarily the truth / Elizabeth Loftus -- Seven sins of memory / Daniel Schacter -- One is not one's thoughts / Jon Kabat-Zinn -- Fear is that biology will debunk all that we hold sacred / Steven Pinker -- Compulsive behavior rituals are attempts to control intrusive thoughts / Paul Salkovskis -- Social psychology : Being in a world of others -- You cannot understand a system until you try to change it / Kurt Lewin -- How strong is the urge toward social conformity? / Solomon Asch -- Life is a dramatically enacted thing / Erving Goffman -- More you see it, the more you like it / Robert Zajonc -- Who likes competent women? / Janet Taylor Spence -- Flashbulb memories are fired by events of high emotionality / Roger Brown -- Goal is not to advance knowledge, but to be in the know / Serge Moscovici -- We are, by nature, social beings / William Glasser -- We believe people get what they deserve / Melvin Lerner -- People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy / Elliot Aronson -- People do what they are told to do / Stanley Milgram -- What happens when you put good people in an evil place? / Philip Zimbardo -- Trauma must be understood in terms of the relationship between the individual and society / Ignacio Martín-Baró -- Developmental philosophy : From infant to adult -- Goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things / Jean Piaget -- We become ourselves through others / Lev Vygotsky -- A child is not beholden to any particular parent / Bruno Bettelheim -- Anything that grows has a ground plan / Erik Erikson -- Early emotional bonds are an integral part of human nature / John Bowlby -- Contact comfort is overwhelmingly important / Harry Harlow -- We prepare children for a life about whose course we know nothing / Franc̦oise Dolto -- A sensitive mother creates a secure attachment / Mary Ainsworth -- Who teaches a child to hate and fear a member of another race? / Kenneth Clark -- Girls get better grades than boys / Eleanor E. Maccoby -- Most human behavior is learned through modeling / Albert Bandura -- Morality develops in six stages / Lawrence Kohlberg -- Language organ grows like any other body organ / Noam Chomsky -- Autism is an extreme form of the male brain / Simon Baron-Cohen -- Psychology of difference : Personality and intelligence -- Name as many uses as you can think of for a toothpick / J.P. Guilford -- Did Robinson Crusoe lack personality traits before the advent of Friday? / Gordon Allport -- General intelligence consists of both fluid and crystallized intelligence / Raymond Cattell -- There is an association between insanity and genius / Hans J. Eysenck -- Three key motivations drive performance / David C. McClelland -- Emotion is an essentially unconscious process / Nico Frijda -- Behavior without environmental cues would be absurdly chaotic / Walter Mischel -- We cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals / David Rosenhan -- Three faces of Eve / Thigpen & Cleckley