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 or no prior understanding of psychology, appreaciate that commonly used psychologcal terms, to explain human behaviour are not without foundation, but are often based on a rigourous emprical scientific process.
In order to assist student understanding of human behaviour, each chapter begins with a real-world example of people dealing with behavioural questions, with reference to who can use psychology to help them answer those questions. Furthermore, chapter openings are designed to generate an interest in the topic, thus drawing curious students in and hence beging 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.
While this book covers many psychological topics, empiricism has been emphazised throughout this book, but without making it a distraction from the main psychological themes. Each chapter presents close-ups on research, including well-articulated and specific examples of research within the psychological theme, 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 are not always predictable ahead of time, thus dispelling the myth of hindsight bias thus empowering student to understand and appreciate how research really works.
