experimental-psychology

Smith and Davis present a concise discussion of the major facets to research in the field of Psychology. It guides the readers through all stages of the experimental design, from conception through implementation and interpretation. The authors succeed where others fail in conveying their ideas in an untechnical yet methodologically sound manner. It is a more than adequate preparation for undergraduate psychology students.

this book is better than the previous book for the course... this one explains things in better detail as if you are just learning the stuff rather than to assume you already know what the authors are talking about

My background in statistics was not very helpful to understand this awfully soporific, pedantic book : it inflicts on you hundreds of references pages after pages. Not a single chapter is ended with exercises. To my misfortune I had it as a mandatory textbook in an Information System course at NJIT -- imposed by an unscrupulous "distinguished professor", whose background is sociology, as a favor to the authors, apparently.

This is one of the most comprehensive and clearly written textbooks for graduate level behavior science methods I have come across. I learned from this book myself and, now as a professor, I will be using it in my graduate class.

This is the one that you'll keep after the class is over. You'll come across some odd methodological issue 5 years after you buy the book and it'll be in there, explained perfectly. The section on interpretation of interactions is particularly great. You can't learn more about power and meta-analysis more efficiently than by reading the relevant chapters in here. The ethics chapter is more entertaining than anything like it in any other text. I've been teaching from this book for 9 years and still get students calling saying thanks for making them buy it.

Actually, the reviewer below seems to be misinformed about the reviewer below him/her being misinformed, unless he/she has access to some credible but obscure source (which should certainly be named if it exists, since the closest thing I've been able to find to a refutation of the contra Bridey Murphy argument is some X Files slash fiction.
Sure, the paper that came up with the damaging claims against the case was a rival of the paper that popularized it: does that prove that they were wrong? Remember Occam's Razor.

No matter what you have read about this story and choose to believe, as the saying goes, "the proof is in the pudding." I would like to point out that Morey Bernstein never once in his life said that this story was proof of reincarnation. Not even close. He said that it definitely warrants further invesigation into the phenomenon. At the time the book came out, the western world was against any idea of reincarnation as it flew in the face of western thinking (Although, lets take a look: hundreds of millions of people take reincarnation as a fact of life as part of their religion). The discreditors of the story never once found any way to show the story was a fraud. In fact, the discreditor happened to be a Chicago TABLOID!!! The women allegedly named Bridey Murphy who lived across the street upon further investigation turned out to be the mother of the TABLOID's owner. The person below me mentioned occum's razor (the simplest solution tend to be correct) Think about that. In fact, when a more credible Chicago paper picked up the TABLOID's story, it had to cut out a whole bunch of arguments because they were just way too outrageous. ex: When Ruth Simmons was a girl she had a park accross the street which she played in many times. This explains why she would have said she lived in "the meadow."
Now that is just ridiculous, especially when a hand-drawn 1800's map of the city Cork, the area in which Bridey lived according to Ruth's sessions was called "The meadow." Now Ruth, living in America her whole life, and having never even heard of the town called Cork, recalls an area of only a couple square miles in the 1800's in Ireland. None of this was made up. Everything Ruth said under hypnosis has been verified to be real and not a hoax. am i saying that reincarnation exists? After reading the book, i believe. But please, read the book and don't read anything trying to close your mind to one of the most amazing cases of age-regression hypnosis ever told.

Like the reviewer below, you've perhaps heard that the Bridey Murphy saga has "all been explained" in mundane terms. As Carnac the Magnificent might've said to Ed McMahon: "WRONG, reincarnation breath." The "next-door-neighbor-named-Bridey" explanation itself has been thoroughly discredited for 40 years (although the debunkers won't concede this), and this book remains as one of the classics that anyone with an interest in reincarnation must read. It's from 1956 and is by no means as compelling as one of Ian Stevenson's exhaustive studies, but it is a serious case that was well-handled by the standards of the time and has a number of inexplicable features. In any event, don't be put off by the misinformation that the case has been explained away. There have indeed been a number of high-profile cases that have proved to have mundane explanations, but this isn't one of them. (As an aside, I was amused a couple of years ago when a debunker website made a snide comment about Morey Bernstein, assuming he must've died 25 years ago. This brought a quick response from Bernstein, who was very much alive and quite feisty.)

This is a classic how-to book on how to use cult mind control in the classroom to indoctrinate your children into views which are contrary to what you are teaching them at home. Written by the developers of the method, it focus on psychological techniques to be used at the hands of amateurs to lead your children subtly into the values chosen by the educational establishment. These techniques even now are being implemented in some classrooms. You are being compelled by law to place your children in government indoctrination centers where these techniques are being used to undermine your children's belief in God and in the unalienable rights which our founders recognized in the Declaration of Independence. Incidentally, such indoctrination also serves government minions well, as they teach our children to acquiesce as our freedoms are taken from us. Read it and weep! Read it to be informed. Do not expect to experience pleasure from the reading; instead, stay close to the bathroom. But if you want to know what the enemy is doing to your children, this is a must-read. You will come away with intimate knowledge of why the leading cause of death in our young people is suicide, why Columbine happened (these techniques were being used there) and why we got to the point where election fraud in Florida became thinkable.

This is a great, objective book that helped provide some of the best conversations I and my staff and groups have ever had. For those who aren't afraid to share their true selves and emotions and who are looking for some unique ways to open up groups--this is the book for you.

In this book , Simon et al offer over 70 different activities and written exercises designed to help people learn about values and explore their own values. Although it is ostensibly targeted to school-teachers, the strategies are useful for all ages. One very interesting aspect is that the book refrains from endorsing any particular values. Instead, the concept they have is that we need to treat students more as autonomous valuing beings that already have a fairly well defined system of values. A student's problem is not that he has no ideas about what is good/bad right/wrong. Rather he does know these things but is usually confused about his own beliefs. The activities are thought provoking and diverse.

Despite the hip, appealing jacket and auspicious credentials of the author, this book disappoints. It feels like an academic toss-off, designed for the layperson with a fleeting interest, who will leaf through it like a magazine. To swim through the author's disjointed and often autobiographical slough to arrive at the occasional chunks of interesting stuff is simply not worthwhile. On page 9, the author describes his attitude toward his doctoral thesis (...I stayed up, slept late, frequented cafes in the long afternoons, wrote and unpublished novel and an unperformable play, watched far too many old movies, and diligently avoided my supervisor...) Replace 'supervisor' with 'lit agent', and we may have discovered Newton's approach to book writing as well.

It's a wonder that a writer could take such a fascinating subject matter and make it so annoying.

An interesting read that poses some crucial questions about language, trust, and human identity. What separates us from animals, and from each other as humans? Perhaps it's much less, and much more, than we think. These case histories describe children's abilities to survive in the wild as well as their various attempts at re-entering human society - attempts invariably fraught with sadness, triumph, mystery, or even all three.

There are many myths about abandoned children who become heroes, like Moses and Oedipus. These had the good fortune to be found by humans and raised by humans. But there are other myths, some as modern as Tarzan, about abandoned children who are taken up by animals. Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves, and Semiramis, who founded Babylon, was raised by birds. Such stories seem to be of intense interest to humans, and when a real "wild child" is produced, it can cause curiosity, sympathy, and sensation. The stories of six such wild children are recounted in _Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children_ (Thomas Dunne Books) by Michael Newton. The individual stories, full of contradiction and wonder, are all intriguing, and the responses to the children and their fate have something to tell us not so much about feral children, but about ourselves. These poor children lacked human contact when they should have been learning how to talk, eat, and behave; the result of such deprivation brings up profound questions about what language means, and what it is to be human.

Peter, the "Wild Boy" came naked out of the forests of Hanover, and became an attraction at the court of George I. He lived on for sixty years, described in 1751 as "more of the Ouran Outang species than of the human." He could say only three words, "Peter" and "King George." Memmie le Blanc was lured out of a tree in France in Champagne in 1731 when she was about ten; she seems to have been a Native American dropped for some reason by the slave trade. She could run and swim well, used a club to kill prey, and lived on roots and raw meat. She eventually learned some French, and made artificial flowers for her living. Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron was captured in the woods and lost twice over the years before being finally taken in 1800. His development is among the best documented, as a young doctor set out to make the wild boy social. Victor learned to say the French word for milk. Kamala was about eight years old, suckled by wolves in the Indian jungle, until she was captured in 1920. She lived nine further years, and learned a few words. The famous Kaspar Hauser had a strange tale of being kept prisoner in a cellar for sixteen years. He is the one feral child here that might be fraudulent. The most modern example, the sad Genie who was tied to a chair in Los Angeles until she was about thirteen, acquired lots of words but no grammar. What was going on in the minds of these children?

Probably no one knows with any confidence, but that does not stop curiosity or speculation. One of Genie's caretakers found her "unsocialized, primitive, hardly human." By the time we get to her case, we can see that the same thing was said of all these wild children, and that their suffering struck cords in those around them. But like Victor, Hauser, and Le Blanc, Genie was rescued, received intense caring attention, became a celebrity, and then was consigned to oblivion. The pattern happened over and over to the wild children who lived long enough, and seems to indicate that bringing such creatures happily into human society is almost impossible. Those who thought about these children, and they thought long and hard, were eager to examine humanity uncorrupted, as completely blank slates, but no one came close enough to understanding the children to make them social. We fantasize that we can reclaim such lost humans, or that they have the intellectual power to reclaim themselves; look at Mowgli or Tarzan. It must not be forgotten that these poor children survived under appalling conditions, and that can inspire some admiration. But humans need each other, and Newton's serious and earnest book is best at showing this simple truth in a new way.

Its a fairly decent review of behavior analysis applied to theclassroom. I'd give it a higher score if it didn't cost $.. for a 300page cheaply made paperback. There is not much new in this book that hasn't been published elsewhere. Also, there isn't a lot of practical information for a teacher working for a school district. It's a typical undergrad college text. The book doesn't go far enough. For example, there is a section on group contingencies in the classroom, but no mention of "Learnball". Not much on discrete trial training either. Direct Instruction is mentioned, but the instructional strategy behind programs such as Reading Mastery and Connecting Math Concepts isn't discussed. There is a lot of excellent information in the book, its just that for cost I expected a lot more.

I noticed a significant drop in price for this textbook. Therefore I'd like to revise my rating up to four stars. Schloss and Smith do provide a fine review of ABA in the classroom. Its a good solid elementary text. True some topics are not covered, but perhaps there will be a more advanced text in the future.

If you have to buy this as part of a class, ask the professor to choose another book. This book is full of typographical errors (a problem when learning and using formulas), and also computational errors (in both this book and the accompanying study guide). The language is also either confusing or oversimplified, depending on which chapter you are reading.

It gives only the VERY, VERY basest of knowledge regarding statistics; it serves best as a rarely referred to supplement to other stats books.

How did I get through Yale without this easy to read guide? Instead of lists of tables that blur into numerical randomness, this book turns areas under the curve into crisp visual images!

At this point in time I am reading "Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology" for a class that I am currently attending. My class is wonderful, but this book is very dry. I understand that the subject of cognitive psychology involves a lot of research and data and all this information is important to the study of this subject, but this book is very dry and personally boring. The whole book is a review of past research and analyzations of the subject and the author gives no thought of his own to the subject. If I wanted to know every little detail of every cognitive experiment I would look that exact experiment up. There is no basis of the book and it does not help me in the least little bit in my studies. The content is very dry and not attention holding. I would definately look into something else as far as books go if I wanted something interesting!!!

As an undergraduate TA, I became familiar with this book when my supervising professor chose it for her undergraduate learning and cognition course. The text presents detailed coverage of the topics in an accessible style. I disagree with the previous reviewer about the value of the discussion of previous experiments. By providing a discussion of selected experiments rather than an exhaustive survey of the empirical literature, the intricacies of problem solving activity in cognitive psychology are highlighted. The text uses a thematic approach throughout, and incorporates real world examples, case studies, and useful examples of experiments on specific topics. I found myself wishing that this text had been used in the cognition course that I had previously taken.

I used this book as part of a literature review on errors from a cognitive aspect. This book was very useful as it provides a comprehensive review of experimental errors by several researchers.