Principles of Psychology – eBook

Organized around four well-known core principles, Principles of Psychology, (PDF) offers college students a framework to comprehend the science of behavior. Written in an informal style, the textbook is organized around the following four well-known principles that serve as touchstones for the arena of psychology:

• The mind is a process at work in a physical machine, the brain.
• We are consciously mindful of only a fraction of our mental activity.
• Experience physically changes the structure and function of the brain.
• We constantly alter our beliefs, behavior, and attitudes according to what we perceive about the people around us.

With these four principles as an outline for the textbook, Breedlove’s Principles of Psychology stresses that psychology is a science through discussion of the related big picture and proven concepts and innovative research-based investigations that examine psychological, behavioral, and neuroscience experiments. By presenting facts and data from other scientific disciplines, as well as real-world stories and vignettes, Marc Breedlove teaches the reader how to think scientifically and critically about the underlying mechanisms of behavior.

In-Text Features

Vignette: Each chapter starts with a story, an instance when behavior has a big influence on someone’s life. The chapter returns to the vignette numerous times as we cover findings that relate to that particular case.

Researchers at Work: In each chapter, important discoveries are described and illustrated to highlight the process of experimentation and hypothesis testing. Over the course of the ebook, the progression of experiments offers an increasingly sharper picture of the elements shaping behavior.

Skeptic at Large: Aimed to sharpen the student’s critical thinking skills, these boxes discover a widespread misconception and show how scientific research disproves it. The exploration of scientific experimentation also strengthens the Researchers at Work feature.

Psychology in Everyday Life: These are subjects where knowledge of psychology might be applicable to daily life, for example, whether people with schizophrenia are ferocious, how to stop smoking, the importance of “blind” auditions for musicians, or how conditioned taste aversion might make you stop eating sushi when you used to love it.

The Cutting Edge: Just before the end of every chapter, this feature explores an exciting report of the present research. Showing students these bold and vibrant experiments will stress that psychology research remains well and alive.

Think Like a Psychologist: Principles in Action: To close every chapter, each principle is linked back to the vignette to demonstrate to the student that when they observe an exciting behavior they can recall and implement the four principles. If they can do this, they will definitely be thinking like a psychologist.

NOTE: The product only includes the ebook, Principles of Psychology in PDF. No access codes are included.