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Price: $124.95

Format:
Hardback 520 pp.
46 b/w photos, 11 tables, 98 figures, 7.25" x 9.25"

ISBN-10:
0195430212

ISBN-13:
9780195430219

Copyright Year:
2010

Imprint: OUP Canada

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A History of Psychology

Third Edition

John G. Benjafield

Engaging and accessible, this new edition of A History of Psychology chronicles the study of the human mind from ancient times to the present day. Providing a comprehensive introduction to the field, author John Benjafield covers the fascinating history of psychology while also exploring how thinkers and eras are linked to one another. Through precise and clear language, Benjafield chronicles the contributions of scores of psychological thinkers and psychologists-from Pythagoras, Lao-tzu, and Aristotle, to Darwin, Abraham Maslow, B.F. Skinner, and Herbert Simon. The third edition of this acclaimed text integrates the latest scholarship and delivers an up-to-date survey of the theorists whose ideas have shaped, and continue to shape, the study and practice of psychology.

Readership : Suitable for History of Psychology courses offered at the second-, third-, and fourth-year level in university-colleges and university psychology departments.

Reviews

  • "This text is well organized, lucidly written, and easy to follow. In short, the author creates an atmosphere of erudite discussion in psychology helpful for both students and academics alike."

    --Dieter Halbwidl, Concordia University

1. Psychology and History
Studying the History of Psychology
The New History of Psychology
Person or Zeitgeist?
Ixion's Wheel or Jacob's Ladder?
The New History of Science
Feminism and the Psychology of Women
Psychology as a Social Construction
Psychological Research as a Social Construction
Reconciling the 'Old' and 'New' Histories of Psychology
2. Touchstones: The Origins of Psychological Thought
Pythagoras (570-495 BCE)
Pythagorean Cosmology
The Pythagorean Opposites
Pythagorean Mathematics
Plato (427-347 BCE)
Pythagoras, Plato, and the Problem of the Irrational
The Forms
Lao-tsu (sixth century BCE)
The Tension between Confucianism and Taoism
What is Tao?
The Book of Changes
Aristotle (384-323 BCE)
Aristotle's Differences with Plato
The Nature of Human Action
Memory
The Scala Naturae
St Thomas Aquinas and the Medieval View of the Universe
3. Touchstones: From Descartes to Darwin
Réné Descartes (1596-1650)
The Body as a Machine
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
The Laws of Motion
Can Newton's Laws Be Generalized to Psychology?
The Nature of Colour
The British Empiricists: John Locke (1602-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753), and David Hume (1711-1776)
John Locke
George Berkeley
David Hume
James Mill (1773-1836) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
Universal Education
The Importance of Emotion
The Utopian Tradition in Psychology
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Kant's 'Second Copernican Revolution'
Can Psychology Be a Science like Other Sciences?
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
The Voyage of The Beagle
The Development of the Theory of Evolution
Darwin and Psychology
4. The Nineteenth-Century Transformation of Psychology
J.F. Herbart (1776-1841)
Herbart's Influence on Educational Psychology
G.T. Fechner (1801-1887)
Psychophysics
Experimental Aesthetics
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1884)
Helmholtz and the Nature of Perception
Ewald Hering (1834-1918)
Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847-1930)
The Localization-of-Function Controversy
The Study of Brain Injuries
Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Hereditary Genius
Eugenics
Statistics
Memory
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
Social Darwinism
5. Wundt and His Contemporaries
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
Investigations in the Laboratory
Psychophysical Parallelism
Cultural Psychology
Wundt's Influence
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
The Experimental Study of Learning and Remembering
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) and the Invention of 'Paired Associates'
Franz Brentano (1838-1917)
The Würzburg School
6. William James
The Principles of Psychology
Habit
The Methods and Snares of Psychology
The Stream of Thought
The Consciousness of Self
Attention and Memory
The Emotions
Will
Other Topics
7. Freud and Jung
The Unconscious
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Hysteria
The Project for a Scientific Psychology
The Interpretation of Dreams
The Development of the Personality
The Structure of the Personality
Religion and Culture
Freud's Death
Freud and America
Freud's Critics within Psychoanalysis
Freud and Women
Anna Freud (1895-1982)
Karen Horney (1885-1952) and the Psychology of Women
C.G. Jung (1875-1961)
Jung's Relationship with Freud
Analytical Psychology
8. Structure or Function?
Edward B. Titchener (1867-1927)
Structuralism
Titchener's Experimental Psychology
Titchener and the Imageless-Thought Controversy
Titchener and the Dimensions of Consciousness
Titchener's Influence
Functionalism
John Dewey (1859-1952)
Critique of the Reflex Arc Concept
Dewey's Influence on Educational Practice
James R. Angell (1869-1949)
Robert S. Woodworth (1869-1962)
The S-O-R Framework
Intelligence Testing
James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944)
Alfred Binet (1857-1911)
Intelligence Testing in the United States Army
What Is 'Intelligence', Anyway?
Psychology in Business
Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915)
Elton Mayo (1880-1949)
Comparative Psychology
Edward L. Thorndike (1874-1949)
Learning as the Formation of Connections
9. Behaviourism
Ivan P. Pavlov (1849-1936)
Conditioned Reflexes
Speech
Temperaments and Psychopathology
Vivisection and Anti-vivisectionism
Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857-1827)
John B. Watson (1878-1958)
Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It
Watson's Psychology
Emotional, Manual, and Verbal Habits
Watson and Rosalie Rayner
Watson's Second Career in Advertising
Karl S. Lashley (1890-1958)
Cortical Localization of Function
The Problem of Serial Order in Behaviour
B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)
The Nature of Behaviourism
Skinner's Radical Behaviourism
The Behavior of Organisms
A Case History of Scientific Method
The 'Baby Tender'
Teaching Machines
Skinner's Utopian and Dystopian Views
10. Gestalt Psychology and the Social Field
Max Wertheimer (1880-1943)
Phi Phenomenon
The Minimum Principle
Precursors of Gestalt Psychology
The Laws of Perceptual Organization
Productive Thinking
Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967)
The Mentality of Apes
The Concept of Isomorphism
Kurt Koffka (1886-1941)
Principles of Gestalt Psychology
The Growth of the Mind
Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) and the Emergence of Social Psychology
The Zeigarnik Effect
Group Dynamics
Fritz Heider (1896-1988)
Leon Festinger (1919-1989)
Cognitive Dissonance
Solomon Asch (1907-1996)
Forming Impressions of Personality
Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)
Studies of Obedience
The Small-World Phenomenon
Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965)
Organismic Theory
The Abstract Attitude
11. Research Methods
Philosophy of Science
Logical Positivism
Operationism
Where Did Psychologists Stand?
Criticisms of Operationism
Experimental Methods
Statistical Inference
R.A. Fisher (1890-1962)
Fisher's Approach to Designing Experiments
The Null Hypothesis
Correlational Methods
Charles Spearman (1863-1945)
Cyril Burt (1883-1971)
The Burt Scandal
Louis Leon Thurstone (1887-1955)
Lee J. Cronbach (1916-2001) and 'The Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology'
Qualitative Research Methods
12. Theories of Learning
Ernest R. Hilgard (1904- 2001)
E.R. Guthrie (1886-1959)
Contiguity
Repetition
Reward
One-Trial Learning
Clark L. Hull (1884-1952)
The Formal Structure of Hullian Theory
The Hypothetico-Deductive Method
Postulates
Kenneth W. Spence (1907-1967)
Charles E. Osgood (1916-1991)
The Semantic Differential
E.C. Tolman (1886-1959)
Purposive Behaviour
Cognitive Maps
The Place-versus-Response Controversy
The Verbal Learning Tradition
Functionalism and Verbal Learning
Acquisition
Serial Learning
The Fate of Verbal Learning
D.O. Hebb (1904-1985)
The Emergence of Neuroscience
The Organization of Behaviour
Motivation
Experiments in Sensory Deprivation
Albert Bandura (1925-)
Social Learning Theory
Behavior Modification
Reciprocal Determinism
13. The Developmental Point of View
G. Stanley Hall (1884-1924)
The Theory of Recapitulation
Hall's Life and Career
Hall's Recapitulationism
Questionnaires
Adolescence
James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934)
Psychology of Mental Development
Heinz Werner (1890-1964)
The Comparative Psychology of Mental Development
Uniformity versus Multiformity
Continuity versus Discontinuity
Unilinearity versus Multilinearity
Fixity versus Mobility
Microgenesis
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Bärbel Inhelder (1913-1997)
Genetic Epistemology
The Development of Intelligence
Piaget's Clinical Method
Stages in the Development of Intelligence
Piaget as a Structuralist
Can Development Ever End?
L.S. Vygotsky (1896-1934)
Thought and Language
The Zone of Proximal Development
Erik H. Erikson (1902-1994)
Lifespan Developmental Psychology
Epigenesis
The Eight Stages
Eleanor J. Gibson (1910-2002)
Perceptual Learning
The Visual Cliff
Eleanor Gibson on the Future of Psychology
14. Humanistic Psychology
Existentialism
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)
The Emergence of Humanistic Psychology
Charlotte Malachowski B?hler (1893-1974)
Rollo May (1909-1994)
Abraham H. Maslow (1908-1970)
The Hierarchy of Needs
The Self-actualizing Person
Peak Experiences
The Psychology of Science
Carl R. Rogers (1902-1987)
Client-Centred Therapy
Eugene T. Gendlin
Encounter Groups
What Happened to Humanistic Psychology?
George A. Kelly (1905-1967)
The Psychology of Personal Constructs
The Repertory Test
Research in Personal-Construct Theory
15. Cognitive Psychology
The Concept of 'Information'
Noam Chomsky (1928- )
Syntactic Structures
Cartesian Linguistics
George A. Miller (1920- )
The Magical Number Seven
Plans and the Structure of Behaviour
Subjective Behaviourism
Giving Psychology Away
Jerome S. Bruner (1915- )
The New Look in Perception
A Study of Thinking
Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969)
Ulric Neisser (1928-)
Cognitive Psychology
James J. Gibson (1904-1979)
Cognition and Reality
Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)
Spurious Correlation and the Nature of Causality
Computer Simulation
Criticisms of Computer Simulation
Amos Tversky (1937-1996) and Daniel Kahneman (1934- )
Heuristics and Biases
Do Statistics Courses Help?
16. The Future of Psychology
Does Psychology Have Paradigms?
Why Have So Many Psychologists Found the Paradigm Concept Congenial?
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Psychology, Modernism, and Postmodernism
Modernism
Postmodernism
The Differentiation of Psychology
The Future of the History of Psychology
Psychology as a Global Endeavour
Envoi

Test bank
PowerPoint slides
Student study guide

John G. Benjafield is Professor Emeritus from Brock University, where he taught cognition and the history of psychology for over thirty years. Benjafield received his Ph.D. in psychology from Brandeis University in Massachusetts, USA, and is currently a fellow of both the Canadian Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. His extensive curriculum vitae includes writing both Cognition and A History of Psychology for Oxford.

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Special Features

  • Accessible. Written in an engaging style, the text draws students into the study of the history of psychology and encourages them to reflect upon the discipline.
  • Current. Updated references in every chapter expose students to multiple viewpoints while providing a starting point for further research.
  • Canadian. Includes coverage of prominent Canadian psychologists and Canada's historical contributions to the discipline, ensuring student awareness of this country's role in the history of psychology.
  • Important historical connections. The chronological organization highlights links between psychological thinkers and psychologists, their works, and the social factors that influenced their ideas helping students understand how theories emerged and evolved.
  • Fascinating examples. Revised figures and tables provide students with over 100 interesting examples, including the Golden Section, the Scale of Nature, Pavlov's experimental apparatus, the visual cliff, Darwin's finches, and the latest data on the divisions of the American Psychological Association.
New to this Edition
  • NEW! Brand new introductory chapter on psychological history outlines some of the alternative ways one might approach the history of psychology and offers greater theoretical perspective when discussing the goals and methodology of the discipline.
  • NEW! Now in its own chapter, a discussion of the history of social psychology completes this well-rounded account of the history of psychology.
  • NEW! Enhanced art program-including 40 historical photographs-provides the visuals needed to keep students engaged and learning.