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'Playing with Fire' is a biography of psychologist Hans J. Eysenck's career. It looks to describe the contradictions in Eysenck's public and professional image and explain how one fed the other. It documents his boyhood in Berlin and the origins of his key ideas about personality, learning and the biogenetics of behaviour.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans were fascinated with fraud. P. T. Barnum artfully exploited the American yen for deception, and even Mark Twain championed it, arguing that lying was virtuous insofar as it provided the glue for all interpersonal intercourse. But deception was not used solely to delight, and many fell prey to the schemes of con men and the wiles of spirit mediums. As a result, a number of experimental psychologists set themselves the task of identifying and eliminating the illusions engendered by modern, commercial life. By the 1920s, however, many of these same psychologists had come to depend on deliberate misdirection and deceitful stimul...
Why do ordinary people turn to psychology in the hopes of making themselves healthier, wealthier, and happier? Governed by Affect offers a multi-sited history of psychology and its role in American public life. Focusing on a series of transformations since the 1970s, the book examines the rise of psychology as a health science and the discipline's growing entanglements with public policy inspired new theories of inattentive and unconscious affect, which have come to structure health care, education, the economy, and how we understand ourselves.
Why are there so many psychologists in America today? Psychologists on the March seeks to answer this question through historical analysis of the middle years of this century. The book argues that the Second World War exerted a profound influence on the shape and structure of the field, transforming it from a small academic subject into an enormous mental health profession. It provides a case study of the interaction of scientific expertise and professional practice in the construction of a modern discipline.
The science and practice of psychology has evolved around the world on different trajectories and timelines, yet with a convergence on the recognition of the need for a human science that can confront the challenges facing the world today. Few would argue that the standard narrative of the history of psychology has emphasized European and American traditions over others, but in today's global culture, there is a greater need in psychology for international understanding. This volume describes the historical development of psychology in countries throughout the world. Contributors provide narratives that examine the political and socioeconomic forces that have shaped their nations' psychologies. Each unique story adds another element to our understanding of the history of psychology. The chapters in this volume remind us that there are unique contexts and circumstances that influence the ways in which the science and practice of psychology are assimilated into our daily lives. Making these contexts and circumstances explicit through historical research and writing provides some promise of greater international insight, as well as a better understanding of the human condition.
This study details the history of cancer and emotions in twentieth-century Germany and thus follows the cancer-associated transformations of emotional regimes, emotional politics, and emotional experiences through five different political systems.
In late nineteenth-century Sweden, paths to modernity created socio-cultural conditions conducive to the dissemination of the language of nerves. This book shows how neurosis became an extremely contagious diagnosis, and how our modern language of discontent, stress and malaise has a history that goes back to the birth of modern neuroses in the 1880s. Hysteria, neurasthenia, psychoneurosis and other neuroses spread from middle-class women to all segments of the Swedish population, and by the mid-1950s nobody was safe from the medico-cultural virus of neurosis. While offering the first historical analysis of the ways in which neuroses became a national malady in Sweden, this book illustrates and analyses general aspects of social and cultural history during the Age of Nervousness.
The surprising history of the scientific method—from an evolutionary account of thinking to a simple set of steps—and the rise of psychology in the nineteenth century. The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once taught as a ...