experimental-psychology

My Learning and Behaviour class used this book because budget cuts took away the real animals. I honestly believe the experience of using sniffy was the worst I had through my entire time in college. Note: If you do not have the exact programs on the back of the book it will take a little more effeort to make it work. Also, if you have Microsoft Works instead of Microsoft Word, the graphs are nearly impossible to create.
The professor had us do every single exercise in the book and they take a lot longer than you would think. My class started taking turn doing the exercises and photocopying them for each other because we were all spending at least eight hours a week just on the exercises, that does not include book work and other material for the class. When the prof found out he was mad but he wasn't spending hours on this each week and come to find out he had never tried the program before giving it to us, we were his lab rats! If you are an instructor, please do the exercises yourself first and make sure the program is worth using in your class. If you use the accelerated time the exercises are pretty pointless, you might as well just read the book because you are not actually watching sniffy. It is my opinion that having a virtual rat was a good idea but does not pan out as well as thought. I still believe that you would learn more from real rats.

This is a great way to learn about classical and operant conditioning, especially for the student of psychology. The textbook does put things at a very basic level, which may annoy some who already know the basics of conditioning. However, don't be discouraged. The major strength is the software that enables you to do simulated conditioning. Working with both the textbook and software is an excellent way to learn about conditioning. All the courses that I have done covering conditioning have been theoretical and I enjoyed being able to apply the knowledge.

Historically interesting--the famous word association test is mentioned here--but Jung is at his worst when trying to squeeze psyche into a causal framework. Early in his career, however, that was how it was done, and he broke out of it later while Freud did not.

I wrote my honors thesis on the structure and function of dream sleep. I have read a lot of books about this subject and Flanagan is not on my list of recommended titles for other people interested in dream study (Read J.Allan Hobson if you want to know what's up). Flanagan's book is watered down, repetitive and not origional in thought. He could have condensed it into a nice 10 page essay and maybe then I wouldn't have been so irritated and bored with it.

Seems to be written by people who wish to attain some sort of status on intellect, possibly because they don't measure up entirely to the standard of intelligence. The writing is dull at best. Easily a third of indirect and nonessential material could have been shortened, or thrown out entirely. How sad that people will pay out good money for shoddy material.

This text was used in my introductory statistics class and we felt it was the most confusing, poorly written, error-ridden text we have ever seen. There is nothing so frustrating as spending two hours completing sample questions only to find that the answers in the back were incorrect. It was a waste of time. There is little to no practical aspects of the text, and it is written for an audience I trust is out of contact with reality.

This textbook covers a lot of material, but in an unsystematic way: the definitions are not worded in a predictable and consistent manner, the more important issues are not given priority over the less important ones, but everything is simply thrown together into an indigestible and boring glob.

A difficult to read text. I have used it as a text for a statistics course I taught (it was not my choice). There are few illustrations, the text is not clearly written, and despite this being the 6th edition, there are still numerous errors in the solutions given for the problems at the end of each chapter. Further, no use of current statistical software is mentioned. Many students have been frustrated by this text -- there are better options out there.