Preface
When I first started teaching introductory psychology, I found it difficult—much harder than teaching classes in statistics or research methods. I was passionate about the topic, and that helped a lot, but the students were having trouble grasping the big picture. I gave a great lecture on the sympathetic nervous system, created a stimulating discussion of Piaget's theories, and presented enlightening real-world examples of social cognition, but I was less sure how to link these disparate topics together for the student. I felt a bit like I was presenting a laundry list of research findings rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge.
Of course, what was difficult for me was harder still for my students. How could they be expected to remember and understand all the many phenomena of psychology? How could they tell what was most important? And why, given the abundance of information that was freely available to them on the web, should they care about my approach? My teaching needed something to structure, integrate, and motivate student learning.
Eventually, I found some techniques that helped my students understand and appreciate what I found to be important:
First, I realized that psychology actually did matter to my students, and that they could learn to think like psychologists. However, I needed to make clearer to them why psychology does matter and why they should care about the study of psychology. I therefore created a more consistent focus in my teaching on the central theme of action. Predicting our own actions and those of others is the fundamental and integrating goal of psychology—and yet that fact is often not made clear to students. Affect, cognition, and motivation are critical and essential, and they are best understood and made relevant through their links with action. Once I figured this out, I began tying all the material in the book to this idea: The sympathetic nervous system matters because it has specific and predictable influences on what we do. Piaget’s findings matter because they help us understand the child’s actions (not just his or her thinking). And social cognition matters because our social thinking helps us better relate to the other people in our everyday social lives. This integrating theme allows me to organize my lectures, my writing assignments, and my testing.
Second was the issue of empiricism: I increasingly emphasized, over my years of teaching, that what seems true might not be true, and we need to try to determine whether or not it actually is. The principle of empirical research testing falsifiable hypotheses and explaining much (but never all) behavior—the idea of psychology as a science—was critical, and it helped me differentiate psychology from other disciplines. Another reason for emphasizing empiricism is that the Introduction to Psychology course represents many students’ only opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of scientific research.
Finally, the issue of focus came into play. Students want to learn but they don’t want to be overwhelmed. The length of existing psychology textbooks was creating a real and unnecessary impediment to student learning. I found myself condensing and abridging my coverage, but often without a clear rationale for choosing to cover one topic and omit another. My focus on action, coupled with a consistent focus on empiricism, helped in this regard—the two themes helped me identify the underlying principles of psychology and separate more essential topics from less essential ones.
But textbooks were too long—I wanted to write a shorter, more focused book. My focus on action and empiricism has produced a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading competitors. Students are thrilled about a shorter text, and instructors feel confident that they can cover the entire book in one semester.
Pedagogical Goals
This book is designed to facilitate student learning. It uses a wide variety of pedagogy to help instructors and students, including the following:
Chapter Openers to Stimulate Student Interest. I open each chapter by showcasing an interesting real-world example of people who are dealing with psychological questions and who use psychology to help them answer those questions. These chapter openers will draw your students into the chapter and create an interest in learning about the topic.
Psychology in Everyday Life. Each chapter contains one or two features designed to link the principles from the chapter to real-world applications in business, environment, health, law, education, and other relevant domains. For instance, the application in Chapter 6 “Growing and Developing Across the Lifespan”—“What Makes a Good Parent?”—applies the concepts of parenting styles in a mini-handbook about parenting, and the application in Chapter 3 “Brains, Bodies, and Behavior” is about the difficulties that left-handed people face performing everyday tasks in a right-handed world.
Research Foci to Reinforce the Importance of Empiricism. I attempt to emphasize empiricism throughout the text, but without making it a distraction from the main story line. Each chapter also presents two close-ups on research—well-articulated and specific examples of research within the content area, each including a summary of the hypotheses, methods, results, and interpretations. This feature provides a continuous thread that reminds students of the importance of empirical research. The research foci also emphasize the fact that findings are not always predictable ahead of time (dispelling the myth of hindsight bias) and help students understand how research really works.
Quiz Questions. A set of quiz questions is found at the end of every main chapter section. Students can use these to test their learning. Frequent testing is a key to student success and these quizzes help meet that objective.
Learning Objectives. Each main chapter section lays out the learning objetives for that section.
Marginal Glossary of Key Terms. Placing the key terms in the margins allows students to easily review them by skimming through the text.
Key Takeaways. Students can review the highlights of the chapters.
Exercises and Critical Thinking Activities. These are thought questions that can be used to stimulate discussion and help students form opinions about the chapter section content.
Contemporary Themes
Two topics that are of particular interest to contemporary psychologists involve the treatment of Nature and Nurture, and the role of Gender and Culture. These themes are introduced in Chapter 1 and revisited throughout the book.
Nature and Nurture. Although some competing texts have a separate chapter on the nature-nurture question, version 3 continues to weave this important topic throughout the text. Discussion about the role of nature and nurture appear in the following chapters:
Chapter 1
Introduction to the Gene and to Evolutionary Psychology
Plato vs. Aristotle
Research Focus: Do We Have Free Will?
Chapter 6
Epigenetics—Developing and Inheriting Traits without Changes in DNA
Chapter 9
Is Intelligence Inherited?
Sex Differences in Intelligence
Theories of Language Acquisition
Chapter 10
Nature versus Nurture in Sexual Orientation
Chapter 12
Is Personality more Nature or Nurture?
Using Twin Studies to Study Personality
Using Molecular Genetics to Understand Personality
Chapter 13
The Role of Genetics and Environment in Schizophrenia, Depression, and Anxiety
Research Focus: Discovering Common Genetic Determinants of Psychological Disorders
Similarity versus Difference. I frame issues of gender and culture in terms of the broader psychological principle of similarity versus difference, and these important topics are addressed in virtually every chapter of the text.
Gender Differences
Chapter 1
Gender Differences in Depression
Chapter 2
Gender Similarities in Response to Violent Video Games
Chapter 3
Gender Differences in Color Perception
Sex Differences and Sex Hormones Including Testosterone and Oxytocin
Chapter 4
Gender Differences in Sexual Interest
Chapter 5
Development of Sexual Knowledge
Primary and Secondary Sex Characteristics
Sex Hormones and Puberty
Gender Differences in Response to Puberty
Menarche and Menopause
Chapter 9
Gender Differences in Intelligence and Other Tasks
Gender Differences in STEM Degree Attainment
Chapter 10
Gender Differences in Sexual Interest
Gender Differences in Eating Disorders
Gender Differences in Responses to Stress
Gender Differences in Emotion Perception, Myers 470-71
Stress and Gender
Chapter 11
Accuracy of Stereotypes about Men and Women
Gender Differences in Conformity and Obedience
Gender Differences in Aggression and after Viewing Violent Video Games
Chapter 12
Heritability of Sexual Orientation
Chapter 13
Gender Differences in ADHD
Gender Differences in Depression
Gender Identity Disorder
Gender Differences in Externalizing and Internalizing Disorders (APD and BPD)
Gender Differences in Autism
Gender and Freudian Theory
Cross-cultural Differences
Chapter 1
Cross-cultural Psychology as a Vibrant Field within Psychology
Definition and Explanation of Culture
Individualism and Collectivism
Variation in Social Norms across Cultures
Culture as Part of the Highest Level of Explanation in Psychology
Chapter 2
Cross-Cultural Psychology as Statistical Generalization or Moderation
Chapter 3
The Role of Culture in Handedness
Chapter 4
How Culture Shapes Our Visual Perception
Chapter 5
Cultural Differences in Dreaming
Chapter 6
Differing Patterns of Development in Different Cultures
Similarities in Attachment Styles Across Cultures
Puberty and Menarche across Cultures
Morality and Culture
Perceptions of Menopause across Cultures
The Role of Culture in Aging
The Role of Culture in Dying and Bereavement
Chapter 9
Definitions of Intelligence across Cultures
Culture and Intelligence Testing
Culture and Color Perception Language
Chapter 10
Similarities and Differences in Emotions across Cultures
Cultural Differences in Attitudes toward Sexual Orientation
Chapter 11
Perceptions of Physical Attractiveness across Cultures
The Culture of Honor
Chapter 12
Variations in Personality across Cultures
Chapter 13
Culture and the Definition of Psychological Disorders
Variation in the prevalence of Psychological Disorders across Cultures
What’s New in Version 3.0?
The third version of Introduction to Psychology retains the chapter format from the prior versions. Instructors can seamlessly transition into the update. Chapters 5, 6, and 10 have been re-titled to better reflect their content in a contemporary way.
Updated references. I have scoured the literature for important updates to the field since the publication of Version 2. I have added new references and updated the text where changes in interpretation or understanding of important psychological concepts have been made since the last edition.
Updated key terms. I have carefully reviewed the key terms, asking which are the terms that we expect students to be familiar with. Many of the key terms used in competing texts are not central to the field, and yet students are required to study them as carefully as they study the more important ones. I believe that students can be expected to learn about five new key terms a day. Over a semester of 13 weeks that’s 13*7*5 = 455 key terms. This text comes in around that number.
Updated Art. The artwork in the third version has been expanded with new contemporary images in many chapters.
Quiz questions are now in the text with answers printed in the back of the book.
The supplements have also been updated. A new test bank and PowerPoint deck are available for instructors.
In addition to many minor ones, I have also made the following more central changes:
Chapter 1: Introducing Psychology
Psychology in Everyday Life: How to Effectively Learn and Remember has been updated and a new summary table has been added (Chapter 1).
I noted that the levels of explanation are similar to the levels proposed by the biopsychosocial model of mental illness as proposed by clinical psychologists.
I removed Free will vs Determinism as a major theme of psychology, although I kept a Research Focus on this topic in Chapter 1. This is an important theme, but not as central as the others. I added more about the basic theme of accuracy vs. inaccuracy throughout the text.
I have expanded the introductory discussion of cross-cultural psychology and provided more examples of the kinds of research questions that are studied by cross-cultural psychologists.
Chapter 2: Psychological Science
I expanded discussion of the difficulties of replication and the use of confidence intervals and Bayesian statistics to improve judgments about a finding’s reliability and strength.
I have provided new examples of naturalistic observation in Twitter communications.
Updated Psychology in the Public Interest: Critically Evaluating the Validity of Websites
In addition to the existing Critical Thinking Exercises on Correlation and causation, I have added new exercises on non-representative samples and small samples.
Chapter 3: Brains, bodies and behavior:
I have added new discussion and citations regarding the role of culture in brain plasticity.
New images of brainbow mapping of brains.
Chapter 5: Consciousness, Body Rhythms, and Mental States
New Psychology in Everyday Life—Opioid Addiction in the United States
Chapter 6: Growing and Developing Across the Life Span
New Research Focus: Beyond Nature and Nurture: Transmission via Epigenetics
Chapter 10: Emotions, Motivations, Stress and Health
I have provided a more nuanced description of the physiological responses to stress.
Expanded discussion of variation in, and influence of, sexual orientation
Chapter 11: Psychology in our Social Lives
New Research Focus: How Helping Others makes us Happy.
Chapter 12: Personality
Update on Big 5 Personality Traits findings and descriptions
Chapter 14: Treating Psychological Disorders
New chapter opener on Using Mindfulness to Reduce Depression and Anxiety
I hope you will agree that Introduction to Psychology provides a useful and productive synthesis between the goals of instructors and students. I have tried to focus on the forest rather than the trees and to bring psychology to life—in ways that really matter for students. At the same time, the book maintains content and conceptual rigor, with a strong focus on the fundamental principles of empiricism and the scientific method. I am grateful for being able to help so many instructors at so many universities communicate the world of psychology to their students.