experimental-psychology

This book provides an excellent step-by-step approach to learning how to use SPSS to conduct statistical analyses. The book begins with a description of the Basics of SPSS: opening the program, opening files, printing, saving, etc. The authors then cover, through examples, the running of descriptive stastics, graphing, and inferential statistics, including t tests, one-way ANOVA, correlation, regression, and Chi-square. The book is filled with illustrations which the authors have designed utilizing the data sets that come with the SPSS package. The authors not only cover the procedures for running the statistical tests in SPSS, but they also discuss the research questions that may be addressed with each statistic, i.e. the "When?" and "Why?" questions

I was completing my dissertation in Clinical Psychology when I hit the wall. I am not fluent in the language of statistics and SPSS was much too complicated for me to understand immediately. I acquired this book from a friend and I can't tell you how much this book saved my life! It explained not only how to use the program in very easy steps, it explained WHY and HOW to pick your statistical procedures in language that was simple. Reading through the book and looking at the examples helped me understand how to pick the appropriate statistical procedures (and why), how to enter the data, how to pull down the appropriate tests, and how to look at the data calculations and make conclusions. THere are no wasted pages in this book (88 pages) and I swear it helped me get through my dissertation on my own (which I passed!). Don't hesitate to buy this book if you are working on your psychology or social science thesis or dissertation. It's a fantastic resource!

As a mathematics Ph.d student with some statistical knowledge and knowledge of how to work in a Windows environment I needed to know basics of SAS. Tried various other books and couldn't figure out how to start. This book is wonderful. In one day you can learn a lot. Can go home feeling great that you learnt something useful.

I have not read this book, but I caution other shoppers that I believe this is the study guide to the main text and not a paperback edition of the original. I'm not sure about this, but the price matches those on other web sites for the paperback edition of the study guide (which bears the same name). Be careful.

The book has a set of well-written essays that cover a range of topics. The essays also have good bibliographies. The book is dated 1995, but still seems completely relevant -- I just hope they do a year 2000 version. Highly recommended for people thinking about, or designing products, that are intended to increase student learning.

Truly a classic! Exposure to this book will help ground the experimental, quasi-experimental, or applied (Sidman's term is behavioral engineer) researcher. Useful in conducting and reading psychological research.

This book simply overflows with personality. Benjafield's guided tour through the methods of research is replete with examples that not only illuminate but also captivate. The book is an exemplary teaching/learning model, beginning with responses to some basic "why should I care?" sorts of questions and a list of psychology's top 100 concepts to pique your interest. From there, his clear and informative writing has you virtually arm-in-arm on an eager exploration through practical issues such as design, control and power, regression, sources of data, and "been there, done that" anecdotes from classical instances in the history of research methods. His pages are filled with critical thinking questions and intriguing examples and ideas, as well as abundant and informative graphics. Each chapter, or even particular sections of chapters, can be profitably used in isolation from the rest of the text, assigned in different sequence, or developed into the basis for a research project. Qualitative and quantitative methods are equally considered as parts of the whole in research, with essential statistical concepts explained in a manner that does not intimidate but rather provokes that "aha!" experience of understanding. Whether as a primary text in a conceptual course, a supplemental text, or a refreshingly insightful journey into pleasure, I most highly recommend this book.

The book explored time distortion phenomenon and provides lot of examples - some are interesting purely from investigative perspective as in being able to count in few minutes of hypnosis the number of cotton balls it would take to count in several hours of real time; others are very practical and useful as in accelerating learning or developing a skill - imagine in few hours of hypnosis you can develop an expertise it would take you years to develop in real time.
Even many new techniques from the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming such as Time-Lines provide very effective method for further exploring and enhancing effects of time distortion, this book is not only a classic, but also provides a great background in terms of research.

This is a book of psychophysics, the branch of psychology which deals with the relation between physical stimuli and sensory response, usually as determined by a person's report of what he has detected. Such reports sometimes provide evidence for physiological processors. Evidence for the existence of three color analyzers, which we now know to be cells in the eye with three kinds of pigments, was found in the nineteenth century in psychophysical exeriments.
The experiments analyzed in this book present people with sinusoidal gratings (which look like striped patterns with alternating, blurry, light and dark stripes) at near threshold values (close to the point where the stimulus is just barely detectable). This choice of subject matter was dictated by the fact that such experiments produce consistent results from which conclusions can be drawn about the nature of the analyzers at an early stage of visual processing.
Sinusoidal grating can differ in 17 dimensions, such as: spatial frequency or the width of the stripes; orientation or the angle of the strips; temporal dimensions which vary when the grating changes over tieme. For each dimension the author ends by summarizing whether there are one or multiple analyzers; how broad the bands of response of multiple analyzers are; and whether one can tell which analyzer is responding.
Physiological experiments on response of individual neurons in cats and monkeys to visual stimuli are also considered. The author concludes that the analyzers discovered by the psychophysical experiments on people reside in the primary visual area of the cortex.
The bulk of the book is about the logic and the mathematics necessary to draw such conclusions and should be of interest to people who want the study senses other than vision. There is a a chapter introducing the necessary mathematical techniques (Fourier analysis). Each of four psychophysical techniques is considered separately: adapatation, summation, uncertainty, and identification.
There are extensive references aranged by topic. However, although this paperback edition was published in 2001, the book has not been revised since its hardcover publication in 1989, so the references are not very recent.
The intended audience for this book is "a graduate student in vision or perception or an established researcher in another area of vision.. [or].. people working in the psychophysics of audiion, taste or smell" (p. viii). For these, and perhaps some others, it is an excellent book. Despite the rigors of the math and analysis, it is written very clearly.

What a wonderful book! William R. Uttal provides an excellent outline for a new behaviorism that is not only modern but also purely scientific. Cognitive psychology is nothing but theoretical pseudoscientific junk. The author proves that there is a real need for a scientific psychology, something that is based upon the scientific method. There to many theories of mind out there, none of which can be verified empirically and scientifically and the result is worthless garbage that helps no one. A psychophysical behaviorism is certainly the way to go, to bring science and not conjecture into modern psychology. Scientists can not observe cognitive process; such processes are not accessible. So why should we rely on introspection to lead us astray? I do disagree that neuroreductionistic methods are of no help. Science will eventually be able to identify neural processes involved with behavior, maybe not at this point in time but with new technology evolving scientists may be able to accurately pinpoint all neural mechanisms of behavior.