An Introduction to Psychology is a 14 Chapter book, that's been constructed to enable undergraduate students, organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual and practical level. This book will also help students to appreciate that psychology matters, more than they appreciate, while helping students with litte lor no prior understanding of psychology, appreaciate that commonly used psychologcal terms, to explain human behaviour are not without foundation, but actually based on an emprical scientific process.
In order to assist student understanding of human behaviour, the learning process, in each chapter begins with a real-world example of people dealing with behavioural questions, and who can use psychology to help them answer those questions. Furthermore, chapter openings are designed to generating an interest in the topic, thus drawing them in and start the learning process accordingly.
In order to sustain student interest, each chapter contains features that are designed to link the principles from each chapter to real-world applications in business, environment, health, law, learning, and other relevant domains. For instance, the application in Chapter 6 Growing and Developing -- What Makes a Good Parent? --applies the concepts of parenting styles in a mini handbook about parenting, and the application in Chapter 3 Brains, Bodies, and Behaviour is about the difficulties that left-handed people face performing everyday tasks in a right-handed world.
Empiricism has been emphazised throughout this book, but without making it a distraction from the main story line. Each chapter presents two close-ups on research--well-articulated and specific examples of research within the content area, each including a summary of the hypotheses, methods, results, and interpretations. This feature provides a continuous thread that reminds students of the importance of empirical research. The research foci also emphasize the fact that findings arelĂ,