Bringing the science of psychology to life!
The 2nd Australasian edition of Psychology and Life emphasises the science of psychology, with a special focus on applying that science to students’ everyday lives. As a result, the features of Psychology and Life support a central theme: psychology as a science, with a focus on applying that science to real life experiences. Australasian research, examples and statistics help make the theory even more relevant for today’s students.
Psychology and Life 2e provides a rigorous, research-centred survey of the discipline while offering students special features and learning aids that will make the science of psychology relevant, spark their interest and excite their imaginations.
• Updated discussion on how children’s early attachment styles predict later behaviour and how parenting styles have an impact on children’s attachment relationships
• Expanded discussion on ‘storm and stress’ in adolescent development
• Updated discussion on intimacy, including new data on societal support of heterosexual and homosexual couples
• Expanded section on the evolutionary perspective of moral development
• Expanded discussion of gender and cultural perspectives on moral reasoning
Changes within each chapter:
Chapter 1
• Expanded section on women as pioneering researchers
• Updated discussion on psychology’s historical foundations with more information on Plato, Aristotle, John Locke and Immanuel Kant
• Expanded section on the cognitive perspective—with examples of Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget
• New section on cultural competency: Indigenous psychology and mental health
• Updated and expanded section on what psychologists do, with a greater focus on the Australian context
Chapter 2
• New research studies:
– ‘Relational uncertainty and message processing in marriage’ (Knobloch et al., 2007)
– ‘Memory for “mean” over “nice”: The influence of threat on children’s face memory’ (Kinzler & Shutts, 2008)
– ‘The face of success: Inferences from chief executive officers’ appearance predict company profits’ (Rule & Ambady, 2008)
• Discussion on the process of research expanded to include more information on peer review and the need to disseminate research results
• Updated research included on free will versus determinism
• Discussion of third variable added to section on correlational methods
• New discussion of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth and their research on the social intelligence of chacma baboons
• Updated information on human ethics and ethical issues in animal research
Chapter 3
• New research studies:
– ‘Brain imaging in schizophrenia’ (Michie, et al., 2008)
• Updated information on glial cells
• New research with EEGs explored
Chapter 4
• Expanded discussion on human evolution and genetics
• New information of the evolution of language, music and emotion
Chapter 5
• New research studies:
– ‘Domain specificity in the visual cortex’ (Downing et al., 2006)
– ‘Attention capture by faces’ (Langton et al., 2008)
• New discussion on agnosias and simultanagnosia
• New figure on nearsightedness and farsightedness
Chapter 6
• New research studies:
– ‘Dare to compare: Fact-based versus simulation-based comparison in daily life’ (Summerville & Roese, 2007)
– ‘Focused analgesia in waking and hypnosis: Effects on pain, memory, and somatosensory event-related potentials’ (De Pascalis et al., 2008)
– ‘Acute disinhibiting effects of alcohol as a factor in risky driving behavior’ (Fillmore et al., 2008)
• New research investigating the cortical thickness in brains as people grow older (Pagnoni & Cekic, 2007)
• Expanded section on unattended information and the cocktail party phenomenon
• Updated sections on moral reasoning, nightmares and night terrors
• Expanded section on the consequences of sleep deprivation
• Updates made to discussions of cannabinoids, OxyContin, depressants, alcohol, methamphetamine and MDMA
Chapter 7
• Updated research added to Critical thinking in your life: To smack or not to smack?
• New research study: ‘Flavor preferences produced by backward pairing with wheel running’ (Hughes & Boakes, 2008)
• Updated discussion on comparative cognition
• New information on how certain species of birds use cognitive maps
Chapter 8
• Updated research added to Psychology in your life: Why does Alzheimer’s disease affect memory?
• New research studies:
– ‘For whom the mind wanders, and when: An experience sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life’ (Kane et al., 2007)
– ‘Language contexts guides memory content’ (Marian & Kaushanskaya, 2007)
– ‘Do you remember proposing to the Pepsi machine? False recollections from a campus walk’ (Seamon et al., 2006)
– ‘Flashbulb memories are special after all; in phenomenology, not accuracy’ (Talarico & Rubin, 2003)
– ‘”With a little help from my friends . . .”: The role of co-witness relationship in susceptibility to misinformation’ (Hope et al., 2008)
– ‘The spatiotemporal dynamics of autobiographical memory: Neural correlates of recall, emotional intensity, and reliving’ (Daselaar et al., 2008)
• New research identifying the specific brain regions that are activated when new memories are formed (Hasson et al., 2008)
• Expanded section on using memory recognitions
• Expanded section on memory disorders
Chapter 9
• New research studies:
– ‘Lexical ambiguity in sentence comprehension’ (Mason & Just, 2007)
– ‘Framing, intentions, and trust-choice incompatibility’ (Keren, 2007)
• New research examining the extent to which members of other species are able to understand the relationship between where people focus their attention and what they can see (Okamoto-Barth et al, 2007)
• New research on linguistic relativity (Kousta et al., 2008)
• Updates made to section on belief-bias effect
• Updated discussion of heuristics and judgment
Chapter 10
• New research studies:
– ‘Emotional intelligence and individual performance: Evidence of direct and moderated effects’ (Rode et al., 2007)
– ‘Longitudinal genetic study of verbal and nonverbal IQ from early childhood to young adulthood’ (Hoekstra et al., 2007)
– ‘Becoming American: Stereotype threat effects in Afro-Caribbean immigrant groups’ (Deaux et al., 2007)
• Expanded section on using memory recognitions
Chapter 11
• New research studies:
– ‘Age and flexible thinking: An experimental demonstration of the beneficial effects of increased cognitively stimulating activity on fluid intelligence in healthy older adults’ (Tranter & Koutstaal, 2008)
– ‘A comparison of high- and low-distress marriages that end in divorce’ (Amato & Hohmann-Marriott, 2007)
– ‘Developmental trajectories of sex-typed behavior in boys and girls: A longitudinal general population study of children aged 2.5–8 years’ (Golombok et al., 2008)
– ‘Moral development in a violent society: Colombian children’s judgments in the context of survival and revenge’ (Posada & Wainryb, 2008)
• Reworked section on physical development in the womb
• Added information on how adolescents tend to engage in risky behaviour
• New research on infant cognition (Hamlin et al., 2008)
• New research determining what older adults might do to minimise declines with age (‘use it or lose it’) (Bielak et al., 2007)
Chapter 12
• New research studies:
– ‘Brains of anorexia nervosa patients process self-images differently from non-self-images: An fMRI study’ (Sachdev et al., 2008)
– ‘A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement’ (Walton & Cohen, 2007)
• Expanded discussion on drives and incentives
• New discussion on binge eating disorder
• New research on genetic factors causing eating disorders
• Updated discussion on gender and cultural difference in eating disorders
• New research on sexual practices of college students
• Updated research on brain differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals (Savic & Lindström, 2008)
Chapter 14
• New research studies:
– ‘Genetic and environmental influences on positive traits of the values in action classification, and biometric covariance with normal personality’ (Steger et al., 2007)
– ‘Verbal intelligence and self-regulatory competencies: Joint predictors of boys’ aggression’ (Ayduk et al., 2007)
– ‘Using past performance, proxy efficacy, and academic self-efficacy to predict college performance’ (Elias & MacDonald, 2007)
– ‘She works hard for the money: Valuing effort underlies gender differences in behavioral self-handicapping’ (McCrae et al., 2008)
• Extended section on evolutionary perspectives on trait dimensions, with updated research
• New discussion of Rotter’s expectancy theory
• Updated research on self-esteem
• New information on the MMPI-2-RF
Chapter 15
• New research studies:
– ‘Time course of selective attention in clinically depressed young adults: An eye tracking study’ (Kellough et al., 2008)
– ‘When does the gender difference in rumination begin? Gender and age differences in the use of rumination by adolescents’ (Jose & Brown, 2008)
– ‘fMRI in patients with motor conversion symptoms and controls with simulated weakness’ (Stone, et al., 2007)
– ‘Life events and high-trait reactivity together predict psychotic symptom increases in schizophrenia’ (Docherty et al., 2008)
• Section on the concept of insanity added
• Updated section on the biological causes of anxiety disorders
• Updated discussion of gender differences in depression
• Updated section on causes of dissociative disorders
• Gender differences in ADHD explored
Chapter 16
• New research studies:
– ‘Virtual reality exposure therapy and standard (in vivo) exposure therapy in the treatment of fear of flying’ (Rothbaum et al., 2006)
– ‘A randomized, controlled trial of group cognitive behavioral therapy for compulsive buying disorder: Posttreatment and 6-month follow-up results’ (Mueller et al., 2008)
• New section on diversity issues in psychotherapy
• New research on how exposure therapy has also been used to combat obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Additional updated research on cognitive behaviour therapy, including a study on how it was used to treat women with binge eating disorder (Cassin et al., 2008)
• New discussion on the debate on individuals who take antidepressant drugs and a greater risk for suicide
• Mention of a recent study that evaluated the effectiveness of a cingulotomy (Shields et al., 2008)
Chapter 17
• Two social psychology chapters merged into one chapter for the 2nd Australian edition
• New research studies:
– ‘Going for the gold: Models of agency in Japanese and American contexts’ (Markus et al., 2006)
– ‘Attributions, deception, and event-related potentials: An investigation of self-serving bias’ (Krusemark et al., 2008)
– ‘Asking questions changes behaviour: Mere measurement effects on frequency of blood donation’ (Godin et al., 2008)
– ‘Biased assimilation and attitude polarization in response to learning about biological explanations of homosexuality’ (Boysen & Vogel, 2007)
– ‘Kinship and altruism: A cross-cultural experimental study’ (Madsen et al., 2007)
• Expanded discussion on the long-term consequences of the Stanford Prison Experiment
• New research that examines the types of messages that work most effectively to bring about reductions in people’s energy consumption (Nolan et al., 2007)
• New section on suicide cults
• New research showing the elaboration likelihood model suggests that you’ll often need to expend some effort to avoid being persuaded (Burkley, 2008)
Chapter 18
• A completely new chapter on cross-cultural psychology
• Discussion of how culture influences behaviour
• Introduction to cross-cultural psychology and how it operates
How familiar are your students with the scientific process? How do you get students to understand that psychology is a rigorous science?
An important goal of Psychology and Life is to teach the scientific basis of psychological reasoning. Within each chapter we integrate directly into the text descriptions of classic and cutting-edge research studies that showcase the how and why behind key psychological research. These research studies are identified with a vertical maroon bracket and include:
• comparison of high and low distress marriages that end in divorce
• being happy and gullible—mood effects on scepticism and detection of deception
• infant cognition
• processing nouns and verbs in the left frontal cortex
• the specific brain regions that are activated when new memories are formed
• predictions of young Australian attitudes towards Aboriginal, Asian and Arab people
• the role that AIDS preventative behaviour skills have in predicting the current behaviour and intentions of gay Asian-Australians.
Do your students ask themselves: "Why am I here? When will I use this information?" How do you motivate them to see that psychology is a dynamic, relevant discipline?
1. Our local authors have been able to provide greater relevance to our students through the addition of local research, examples, pictures and statistics.
Such examples include:
• an additional chapter on Cross-Cultural Psychology that examines Cultural traditionalism, Cultural syndromes, What is Indigenous Psychology, Ethnocentrism, Multiculturalism and more (Chapter 18)
• a fully updated research chapter, including more Australian research examples, Australian research councils and Australian research ethical codes
• extensive coverage of Australian women in Psychology and Indigenous psychologists
• more local developmental content, including more emphasis on Australian adolescents
• greater coverage of psychological disorders, including Australian research into ADHD
• revised Australian statistics throughout the text.
2. Psychology in Your Life sections show students how psychological knowledge is directly relevant to the decisions they make every day by presenting and exploring questions posed by psychology students themselves.
New Psychology in Your Life topics include:
• In what ways do psychologists participate in the legal system? (Chapter 1)
• Psychology in movies and books (Chapter 4)
• Are you a morning type or an evening type? (Chapter 6)
• How can you become more creative? (Chapter 10)
• How does the presence of others influence your eating? (Chapter 12)
• Can you accurately predict your future emotions? (Chapter 13)
• In what ways are you like a chameleon? (Chapter 17)
• How do you define your culture? (Chapter 18)
How are your students’ critical thinking skills? Do you find yourself in the position of having to "unteach" some of the notions about psychology they may have acquired through the popular media?
Recognising that students quite often have acquired partial or even incorrect understandings of psychological concepts from the popular media, we have a feature called Critical Thinking in Your Life in which we seek to confront students directly with the experimental basis of critical conclusions to teach them how to interpret and evaluate what they hear in the media and become wiser consumers of the abundance of research studies and surveys cited.
New Critical Thinking in Your Life topics include:
• Why is skill with numbers important? (Chapter 2)
• The Cinderella effect (Chapter 4)
• Are drivers distracted when they use their mobile phones? (Chapter 5)
• How is personality conveyed in cyberspace? (Chapter 14)
• How do disorders enter the DSM? (Chapter 15)
• How do we best assist refugees? (Chapter 18)
We also reinforce critical thinking skills in several other ways:
• Critical Thinking questions in Stop and Review boxes
• Probing questions paired with photos and figures
• Essay questions at the end of each chapter.
How do you keep your brightest students motivated without leaving other students behind?
Psychology and Life has maintained a reputation for presenting the science of psychology in a way that is challenging yet accessible to a broad range of students. To enhance students’ experience with the book, we include several pedagogical features and have thoroughly integrated our innovative, interactive online technology.
• Stop and Review. This feature appears at the end of every major section and provides students with thought-provoking questions to test their mastery of material before moving on.
• Practice Test. Each chapter concludes with a practice test with multiple-choice questions based on material in both the main text and the boxes. In addition, we’ve provided sample essay questions that allow students to think more broadly about the content of each chapter. Answers can be found online at: www.pearson.com.au/9781442539815
• Video Integration. Now integrated throughout the text, the wildly successful video series, Discovering Psychology: Updated Edition, produced by WGBH Boston with funding by AnnenbergMedia. Most chapters of this textbook (excluding Chapters 4 and 18) end with a Discovering psychology viewing guide that contains program review questions drawing attention to key information presented in the video. The videos will be accessible to students through MyPsychLab.
• MYPSYCHLAB with E-Text. This interactive online learning tool is available and integrated with Bloom’s Taxonomy. What Is MyPsychLab? MyPsychLab is where you save time and improve results. It combines multimedia, video, simulations, animations and quizzes to make teaching and learning fun! Easy to use, MyPsychLab for introductory psychology meets the individual teaching and learning needs of every instructor and every student. Visit the site at www.pearsoned.com.au/mypsychlab.
Richard J. Gerrig is a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University. Before joining the Stony Brook faculty, Gerrig taught at Yale University, where he was awarded the Lex Hixon Prize for teaching excellence in the social sciences. Gerrig’s research on cognitive psychological aspects of language use has been widely published. One line of work examines the mental processes that underlie efficient communication. A second research program considers the cognitive and emotional changes readers experience when they are transported to the worlds of stories. His book Experiencing Narrative Worlds was published by Yale University Press. Gerrig is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. He is also an associate editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Gerrig is the proud father of Alexandra, who at age 18 provides substantial and valuable advice about many aspects of psychology and life. Life on Long Island is greatly enhanced by the guidance and support of Timothy Peterson.
Philip G. Zimbardo, Stanford University professor emeritus, has taught the introductory psychology course for 50 years and has been writing and coauthoring Psychology and Life, as well as the Faculty Guides and Student Workbooks, for the past 38 years. He has been called the 'Face and Voice of Psychology' because of his popular PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, which is used in many high school and university courses both nationally and internationally. Zimbardo also loves to conduct and publish research on a wide variety of subjects, as well as teaching and engaging in public and social service activities. He has published more than 350 professional and popular articles and chapters, and 50 books of all kinds. His recent trade book on the psychology of evil, The Lucifer Effect, relates his classic Stanford Prison Experiment to the abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison. It was a New York Times best seller and William James Prize book of the year. Zimbardo has also just published The Time Paradox, a summary of research and applications of the psychology of time perspective. He is currently exploring research and developing new educational materials on the topic of the psychology of ordinary heroes. Please see these websites for more information: www.zimbardo.com, www.prisonexp.org, www.lucifereffect.com, and www.everydayheroism.webnode.com. Zimbardo now teaches graduate courses at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology and also at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.
Andrew J. Campbell is a senior lecturer in psychology at The University of Sydney and a practising child, adolescent and family psychologist. He has been conducting research for more than a decade into the human development and the area of cyberpsychology, which looks at the use of the internet, computer games and multimedia in regards to its impact and influence on human behaviour.
Andrew is the Director of Prometheus (http://sydney.edu.au/health_sciences/prometheus/), a unique research group located within the Faculty of Health Sciences at The University of Sydney. Prometheus is dedicated to the research and application of technology towards the advancement of mental health treatments in such areas as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD), depression, anxiety, stress, self-esteem, resilience building and identity formation of children and adolescents. As a Psychology Board of Australia registered psychologist, Andrew operates a private practice in New South Wales located at the Brain and Mind Research Institute in Sydney.
Steven R. Cumming is currently Associate Dean and Director, Learning and Teaching in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney. He has worked as a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist in Tasmania and New South Wales, and still practices in the areas of anxiety disorders and relationship counselling. His research interests lie in the overlap between cognitive processes, brain function and emotional states, such as the impact of anxiety on memory. In his current role, Steven has extended his research into areas concerning learning and instructional styles, interprofessional learning and curriculum design.
His teaching interests are in introductory biological psychology, and advanced cognition and neuropsychology units, as well as specialist topics in counselling and assessment.
Fiona J. Wilkes has been working and researching in the field of psychology for the past 15 years. She currently teaches in the areas of sensation, perception, research methods and statistics as part of the undergraduate program in the School of Psychology at the University of Western Sydney.
Fiona's research interests are predominantly in the domain of chemosensory function and sensory assessment and analysis. Her focus is on the impact of childhood disease and illness on taste and smell functioning, and the management of ongoing health and quality of life concerns resulting from taste and smell dysfunction.