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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Philosophy & theory of psychology > Behavioural theory (Behaviourism)
A short, stimulating book on the relevance of biological evolution to the study of behaviour. Goldsmith argues that anyone studying the social behaviour of humans must take into consideration both proximate cause - the physiology, biochemistry, and social mechanisms of behaviour, and the ultimate cause - how the behaviour came to exist in evolutionary time. Many of the confusing and misunderstood elements of sociobiology are clearly explained for the general reader.
This book was first published in 1988. B. F. Skinner was arguably the most important and influential psychologist of the last century. Yet in his long and distinguished career he consistently declined to be engaged by his critics. In his ninth decade, he elected to confront them all: cognitivists, ethologists, brain scientists, biologists, linguists, and philosophers - close to one hundred and fifty scientists and scholars from the entire spectrum of behavior-related disciplines around the world. Skinner's views on consciousness, language, problem solving, evolution, biology, brain function, computers, theory and explanation, presented in six seminal papers, are analyzed, criticized and explained in the 'open peer commentary' format of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences journal. The result is a remarkably lucid and revealing historical record of Skinnerian thinking and its impact on psychology and its allied disciplines. General readers, students, professionals and historians will find this unique intellectual exchange an invaluable resource.
What is the relation between gestures and speech? In terms of symbolic forms, of course, the spontaneous and unwitting gestures we make while talking differ sharply from spoken language itself. Whereas spoken language is linear, segmented, standardized, and arbitrary, gestures are global, synthetic, idiosyncratic, and imagistic. In Hand and Mind, David McNeill presents a bold theory of the essential unity of speech and the gestures that accompany it. This long-awaited, provocative study argues that the unity of gestures and language far exceeds the surface level of speech noted by previous researchers and in fact also includes the semantic and pragmatic levels of language. In effect, the whole concept of language must be altered to take into account the nonsegmented, instantaneous, and holistic images conveyed by gestures. McNeill and his colleagues carefully devised a standard methodology for examining the speech and gesture behavior of individuals engaged in narrative discourse. A research subject is shown a cartoon like the 1950 Canary Row--a classic Sylvester and Tweedy Bird caper that features Sylvester climbing up a downspout, swallowing a bowling ball and slamming into a brick wall. After watching the cartoon, the subject is videotaped recounting the story from memory to a listener who has not seen the cartoon. Painstaking analysis of the videotapes revealed that although the research subjects--children as well as adults, some neurologically impaired--represented a wide variety of linguistic groupings, the gestures of people speaking English and a half dozen other languages manifest the same principles. Relying on data from more than ten years of research, McNeill shows thatgestures do not simply form a part of what is said and meant but have an impact on thought itself. He persuasively argues that because gestures directly transfer mental images to visible forms, conveying ideas that language cannot always express, we must examine language and gesture together to unveil the operations of the mind.
This is a comprehensive account of the behaviour and social organisation of humans and other animals. The development and evolution of all types of behaviour are reviewed using up-to-date examples. There is a full survey of all the classic behavioural research including the latest information available. The concepts of aggression and altruism are explained. there are detailed accounts of social organisation in insect and ape communities. Finally, the book discusses human behaviour and social organisation: the development of individuals within society and the biological and cultural bases of human social behaviour are examined.
This well-written and lively account of the principles of how motivational systems operate includes discussions of both theories and empirical results from individual systems. It reviews current experimental evidence on hunger, thirst, sex and other areas and argues that common factors must be emphasised as much as differences between the systems. The book summarises the theoretical principles that emerge: it shows where motivation theory and learning theory should come together, rather than diverge. Models with general predictive power are elaborated and related to the goal directed aspect of motivation. The book deals with motivation at all levels from the physiological to that of mathematical modelling and explains complex ideas lucidly. It complements other books in the Problems in the Behavioural Sciences Series including Hunger (le Magnen), Thirst (Rolls & Rolls) and Contemporary Animal Learning Theory (Dickson).
From birth, the urge to eat is the most common everyday experience. Eating to be nourished is the most basic behaviour of human life, and is one of the main functions in all living organisms. Clear answers to a number of important questions have only recently begun to emerge. Why are animals hungry? How are they driven to seek and eat selected foods? How do they become satiated so that they ingest the exact amount of food they need for growth and to maintain stable body weight in adulthood? This book is the first synthesis, by one hand, of the new knowledge on feeding behaviour. It describes the roles of body depletion and repletion of energy and of specific nutrients, of the orosensory qualities of food and of the brain in integrating and interpreting internal and external signals. This volume complements that of B.J. & E.T. Rolls, Thirst, in the same series.
Agnes Arber's international reputation is due in part to her exceptional ability to interpret the German tradition of scholarship for the English-speaking world. The Mind and the Eye is an erudite book, revealing its author's familiarity with philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas to Kant and Hegel; but it is not dull, because the quiet enthusiasm of the author shines through. In this book she turns from the work of a specialist in one science to those wider questions which any scientist must ask at intervals. What, in short, is the relationship between the eye that sees and the mind that weighs and pronounces? An important feature of this Cambridge Science Classics reissue is the introduction provided by Professor P. R. Bell, who as a Cambridge botany student at the time that Agnes Arber was writing The Natural Philosopby of Plant Form, is uniquely able to set The Mind and the Eye in the context of contemporary biological research.
The explosive bestseller that revolutionized our understanding of the addictive process. With a new introduction addressing the backlash to the co-dependency movement.
Award-winning science writer Steven Mithen explores how an understanding of our ancestors and their development can illuminate our brains and behaviour today How do our minds work? When did language and religious beliefs first emerge? Why was there a cultural explosion of art and creativity with the arrival of modern humans? This ground-breaking book brings the insight of archaeology to our understanding of the development and history of the human mind, combining them with ideas from evolutionary psychology in a brilliant and provocative synthesis.
This volume surveys the way that understanding of the minds of animals and ideas about the relationship between animal and human behaviour developed from around 1870 to 1930. In describing the research and theories which contributed to these developments, this book looks at the people who undertook such studies and the reasons why they did so. Its main purpose is to examine the different ways in which the outcome of this work affected their ideas about the human mind and exerted such a formative influence on psychology in general. This book will be used by first and second year undergraduates studying psychology, and will also appeal to students of the history of science and philosophy. In addition, the lucid, non-technical style of this book will provide an excellent introduction to the general reader who would like to know more about this interesting subject.
A mood is defined as the prevailing psychological state (habitual or relatively temporary). It is further defined as a feeling, state or prolonged emotion that influences the whole of one's psychic life. It can relate to passion or feeling; humour; as, a melancholy mood; a suppliant mood. Mood can and does affect perceived health, personal confidence, one's perceptions of the world around us and our actions based on those perceptions. Moods can and do change often although mood swings of a sharp nature may be a symptom of underlying disease. Moods may signify happiness, anger, tension, or anxiety. Chronic periods of any mood state may be an indicator of a disorder as well. This new book gathers important research from throughout the world in this rapidly changing field.
This text was published in 1982, when sociobiology was experiencing the rapid expansion typical of a new subject. It did not do so without its critics, who pointed to the logical flaws and empirical problems present in many functional arguments. The authors of this book were invited to identify areas within sociobiology which provided particular problems or which had previously been ignored and needed to be developed. These contributions cover a wide array of areas within the field. In many cases they pointed the way to future improvements in practice as well as theory and the book should continue to be of fundamental interest to those involved in any way with the behavioural sciences, population biology, ecology and evolutionary studies.
Thirst is a subjective sensation, triggered by a lack of water and accompanied by the desire to drink. As a powerful and compelling sensation, it is perhaps only exceeded by the hunger for air and by pain, and is central to any concern with the overall mechanisms of homeostasis. Drinking is essential to the survival of most terrestrial vertebrates, and provides a useful model system with which to analyse the control of a complex type of behaviour. Furthermore, drinking requires integrated behavioural responses to physiological stimuli and environmental demands, and therefore offers a good example for the analysis of the biological mechanisms underlying behaviour. First published in 1982, this book describes the control of thirst and water intake, and the physiology and psychology of drinking. Although this book is intended primarily for students of psychology, physiology and medicine, it should be of interest to all those concerned with the scientific study of thirst and with the physiological and neural bases of behaviour.
This 1980 book provides a general but comprehensive study of the way in which animals learn and in particular, learn about the relationship between events in their environment. The study of animal learning and conditioning can be approached from two very different perspectives. The psychologist can focus directly on behaviour, relying on the conditioning experiment in his attempt to formulate behavioural laws and principles which will transcend the confines of the laboratory. The learning theorist however, is concerned not with behavioural change per se but rather with the way in which animals acquire knowledge through experience: the types of relationship to which they are sensitive, their representation of their knowledge about these and the mechanisms that control these representations. Dr Dickinson provides an integrated survey of the experimental and theoretical work which was being carried out as he wrote. The book will continue to interest scholars of animal learning theory.
A new, counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behavior New social movements, technologies, and public-health initiatives often struggle to take off, yet many diseases disperse rapidly without issue. Can the lessons learned from the viral diffusion of diseases be used to improve the spread of beneficial behaviors and innovations? In How Behavior Spreads, Damon Centola presents over a decade of original research examining how changes in societal behavior--in voting, health, technology, and finance-occur and the ways social networks can be used to influence how they propagate. Centola's startling findings show that the same conditions accelerating the viral expansion of an epidemic unexpectedly inhibit the spread of behaviors. While it is commonly believed that "weak ties"-long-distance connections linking acquaintances-lead to the quicker spread of behaviors, in fact the exact opposite holds true. Centola demonstrates how the most well-known, intuitive ideas about social networks have caused past diffusion efforts to fail, and how such efforts might succeed in the future. Pioneering the use of Web-based methods to understand how changes in people's social networks alter their behaviors, Centola illustrates the ways in which these insights can be applied to solve countless problems of organizational change, cultural evolution, and social innovation. His findings offer important lessons for public health workers, entrepreneurs, and activists looking to harness networks for social change. Practical and informative, How Behavior Spreads is a must-read for anyone interested in how the theory of social networks can transform our world.
First published in 1976, this volume is a collection of essays by some of the most prominent and active ethologists. It is organized into four sections: motivation and perception, function and evolution, development, and human social relationships. The first three sections reflect the four questions which are basic to ethology: what were the immediate causes of a behaviour pattern; what is its biological function; how did it evolve; and how did it develop in the individual? The last section involves questions of all four types. The sections are introduced and linked by editorials and the book concludes with an important statement on asking the right questions. The essays are forward looking and identify areas of importance for the study of behaviour. The volume is a source of formative ideas for students, their teachers and research workers in a wide variety of disciplines in the biological psychological and social sciences.
Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences is the classic text on multiple regression. It is noted for its non-mathematical, applied, and data-analytic approach intended to teach the reader "how to do it." Students and researchers profit from its verbal-conceptual exposition and frequent use of concrete examples. The applied emphasis provides clear illustrations of the principles and provides worked examples of the types of applications that are possible. Researchers learn how to specify regression models that directly address their research questions of interest. Early in the text an overview of the fundamental ideas of multiple regression and a review of bivariate correlation and regression and other elementary statistical concepts provide a strong foundation for a solid understanding of the rest of the text. The third edition reflects both the current and developing state-of-the-art practices in the field: *An increased emphasis on graphics provides greater understanding of data. *An increased emphasis on the use of confidence intervals and effect size measures provides more information about the size and precision of relationships. *An accompanying CD contains data for most of the numerical examples along with the computer code for SPSS, SAS, and SYSTAT. These computer scripts can serve as templates for the analysis of the student's own data. *Five entirely new chapters are included: Assumptions of the regression model and remedies when they are not met (Ch. 4), detection and treatment of the potential problems of outliers and multicollinearity (Ch. 10), alternative regression models that may be used when the dependent variable is binary, ordered category, or count in form, including logistic, ordinal logistic, Poisson regression, and the generalized linear model (Ch. 13), multilevel models for data collected in groups or other clusters (Ch. 14), and the analysis of longitudinal data (Ch. 15). *Extensively revi
Few diseases have exercised the Western imagination as chronically as hysteria--from the wandering womb of ancient Greek medicine, to the demonically possessed witch of the Renaissance; from the "vaporous" salong women of Enlightenment Paris, through to the celebrated patients of Sigmund Freud, with their extravagant, erotically charged symptoms. In this fascnating and authoritative book, Mark Micale surveys the range of past and present readings of hysteria by intellectual historians; historians of science and medicine; scholars in gender studies, art history, and literature; and psychoanalysts, psychiatriasts, clinical psychologists, and neurologists. In so doing, he explores numerous questions raised by this evergrowing body of literature: Why, in recent years, has the history of hysterical disorders carried such resonance for commentators in the sciences and humanities? What can we learn form the textual traditions of hysteria about writing the history of disease in general? What is the broader cultural meaning of the new hysteria studies? In the second half of the book, Micale discusses the many historical "cultures of hysteria." He reconstructs in detail the past usages of the hysteria concept as a powerful, descriptive trope in various nonmedical domains, including poetry, fiction, theater, social thought, political criticism, and the arts His book is a pioneering attempt to write the historical phenomenology of disease in an age preoccupied with health, and a prescriptive remedy for writing histories of disease in the future. Mark S. Micale is Assistant Professor of History at Yale. He is the editor of Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger (Princeton). Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The scope of someone's consent is the range of actions that they permit by giving consent. The Scope of Consent investigates the under-explored question of which normative principle governs the scope of consent. To answer this question, the book's investigation involves taking a stance on what constitutes consent. By appealing to the idea that someone can justify their behaviour by appealing to another person's consent, Dougherty defends the view that consent consists in behaviour that expresses a consent-giver's will for how a consent-receiver behaves. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that the scope of consent is determined by certain evidence that bears on the appropriate interpretation of the consent.
How do social structures and group behaviors arise from the interaction of individuals? "Growing Artificial Societies" approaches this question with cutting-edge computer simulation techniques. Fundamental collective behaviors such as group formation, cultural transmission, combat, and trade are seen to "emerge" from the interaction of individual agents following a few simple rules. In their program, named Sugarscape, Epstein and Axtell begin the development of a "bottom up" social science that is capturing the attention of researchers and commentators alike. The study is part of the 2050 Project, a joint venture of the Santa Fe Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution. The project is an international effort to identify conditions for a sustainable global system in the next century and to design policies to help achieve such a system. "Copublished with the Brookings Institution"
An all-star lineup of scientists takes you to the front lines of brain research… Are we born to be shy? Why do we remember some events so clearly and others not at all? Are creativity and depression somehow linked? Do our dreams really have deeper meanings? Now in paperback, here is a wonderfully accessible introduction to the most important recent findings about how our health, behavior, feelings, and identities are influenced by what goes on inside our brains. In this timely book, eight pioneering researchers offer lively and stimulating discussions on the most exciting discoveries as well as a new way of understanding our emotions, moods, memories, and dreams. Inside, you’ll find:
. . . and much, much more. Whether discussing the brain-body connection, the sources of emotion, or the ethereal world of dreams, States of Mind enables you to share in the very latest explorations into the nature and function of the human mind.
This important contribution to choice theory examines two theories of motivation and two kinds of explanation of behavior that they support. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Barry Schwartz, Steven Robbins, and new coauthor Edward Wasserman offer students an engaging introduction to the basic principles of Pavlovian conditioning, operant conditioning, and comparative cognition. The text s critical approach exposes students to the unresolved problems and controversies surrounding behavior theory and encourages them to interpret the material and make connections between theories and real-life situations. With several hundred new references, a new emphasis on comparative cognition, and expanded treatment of neuroscience and the neural basis of learning, the Fifth Edition sets the standard in its coverage of contemporary theory and research."
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government enlisted the aid of a select group of psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists to blueprint enemy behavior. Not only did these academics bring sophisticated concepts to what became a project of demonizing communist societies, but they influenced decision-making in the map rooms, prison camps, and battlefields of the Korean War and in Vietnam. With verve and insight, Ron Robin tells the intriguing story of the rise of behavioral scientists in government and how their potentially dangerous, "American" assumptions about human behavior would shape U.S. views of domestic disturbances and insurgencies in Third World countries for decades to come. Based at government-funded think tanks, the experts devised provocative solutions for key Cold War dilemmas, including psychological warfare projects, negotiation strategies during the Korean armistice, and morale studies in the Vietnam era. Robin examines factors that shaped the scientists' thinking and explores their psycho-cultural and rational choice explanations for enemy behavior. He reveals how the academics' intolerance for complexity ultimately reduced the nation's adversaries to borderline psychotics, ignored revolutionary social shifts in post-World War II Asia, and promoted the notion of a maniacal threat facing the United States. Putting the issue of scientific validity aside, Robin presents the first extensive analysis of the intellectual underpinnings of Cold War behavioral sciences in a book that will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the era and its legacy. |
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