Our lives are composed of millions of choices, ranging from trivial to life-changing and momentous. Luckily, our brains have evolved a number of mental shortcuts, biases, and tricks that allow us to quickly negotiate this endless array of decisions. We don’t want to rationally deliberate every choice we make, and thanks to these cognitive rules of thumb, we don’t need to.Yet these hard-wired shortcuts, mental wonders though they may be, can also be perilous. They can disto...

The true story of the most controversial psychological research of the modern era.In the summer of 1961, a group of men and women volunteered for a memory experiment to be conducted by young, dynamic psychologist Stanley Milgram. None could have imagined that, once seated in the lab, they would be placed in front of a box known as a shock machine and asked to administer a series of electric shocks to a man they’d just met. And no one could have foreseen how the repercussio...

The power of thought? How is it possible? Every thought contains within it the power of thought - your thoughts, too. You only need to know how to recognise, strengthen and apply the power of thought. The secret of telepathy. The laws of the transfer of thought. The 7 lessons. Imagine welcoming a visitor, who has arrived only because you have personally chosen and invited them to visit you by the sole power of your thoughts. Numerous opportunities with friends or strangers, anywhere you li...

Music's ability to express and arouse emotions is a mystery that has fascinated both experts and laymen at least since ancient Greece. The predecessor to this book 'Music and Emotion' (OUP, 2001) was critically and commercially successful and stimulated much further work in this area. In the years since publication of that book, empirical research in this area has blossomed, and the successor to 'Music and Emotion' reflects the considerable activity in this area. The Handbook of Music and ...

The explosive story of the discovery and development of psychiatric medications, as well as the science and the people behind their invention, told by a riveting writer and psychologist who shares her own experience with the highs and lows of psychiatric drugs.Although one in five Americans now takes at least one psychotropic drug, the fact remains that nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, not even their creators understand exactly how o...

We grow up thinking there are five senses, but we forget about the ten neglected senses of the body that both enable and limit our experience. Embodied explores the psychology of physical sensation in ten chapters: balance, movement, pressure (acting in gravity), breathing, fatigue, pain, itch, temperature, appetite, and expulsion (the senses of physical matter leaving the body). For each sense, two people are interviewed who live with extreme experiences of the sense being invest...

Answer all your sweet-making questions in one handy book, with The Little Book of Questions on Boiled Sweets. This book will guide you through the sweet-making process, including a brief history of the sweet treats, what equipment you'll need and essential confectionery techniques. It also contains a wide variety of recipes to try, from traditional old-time recipes to creative modern twists. For sweet-making novices, and even those with a little experience, The Little Book of Questions on ...

Motor control is a relatively young field of research exploring how the nervous system produces purposeful, coordinated movements in its interaction with the body and the environment through conscious and unsconscious thought. Many books purporting to cover motor control have veered off course to examine biomechanics and physiology rather than actual control, leaving a gap in the literature. This book covers all the major perspectives in motor control, with a balanced approach. There are c...

Originally published in 1998, the aim of the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology was to compile a volume that would facilitate the development of the evolutionary approach to human behavior by communicating some of the major ideas, issues, and applications of the Theory of Evolution at the time.Part I introduces readers to those aspects of evolutionary theorizing that had been particularly important during the previous decade, and were believed would continue to be importa...

Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the adaptive problems early humans faced in ancestral human environments, the nature of the psychological mechanisms natural selection shaped to deal with those ancient problems, and the ability of the resulting evolved psychological mechanisms to deal with the problems people face in the modern world. Evolutionary psychology is currently advancing our understanding of altruism, moral behavior, family violence, sexual aggression, warfare, aesthetic...

Nonlinear Psychophysical Dynamics utilizes new results in systems theory as a foundation for representing sensory channels as a form of recursive loop processes. It demonstrates that a range of phenomena, previously treated as diverse or anomalous, are more readily seen as related and as the natural consequence of self-regulation and nonlinearity. Some cases with appropriate data analysis are reviewed.

First published in 1985. The purpose of this book reflects the 1983 Piaget Society decision to contribute some ideas to a critical problem in psychology: how the structure and function of intelligence and affectivity are developmentally related. Although this is a fundamental question in psychology, it has largely been ignored at different periods in its history. With the maturing of the cognitive sciences in the past quarter of a century, there today is a recrudescence of interest in the ...