Transformational Chairwork: Using Psychotherapeutic Dialogues in Clinical Practice is an exposition of the art and science of Chairwork. It is also a practical handbook for using the Chairwork method effectively with a wide range of clinical problems. Originally created by Dr. Jacob Moreno in the 1950s and then further developed by Dr. Fritz Perls in the 1960s, Chairwork has been embraced and re-envisioned by therapists from cognitive, behavioral, existential, Jungian, experiential, psychodynamic, and integrative perspectives. Transformational Chairwork builds on this rich and creative legacy and provides a model that is both integrative and trans-theoretical. The book familiarizes clinicians with essential dialogue strategies and empowers them to create therapeutic encounters and re-enactments. Chairwork interventions can be broadly organized along the lines of external and internal dialogues. The external dialogues can be used to help patients work though grief and loss, heal from interpersonal abuse and trauma, manage difficult relationships, and develop and strengthen their assertive voice. The internal dialogues in turn focus on resolving inner conflicts, combatting the negative impact of the inner critic and the experience of self-hatred, working with dreams and nightmares, and expanding the self through polarity work. Using both internal and external strategies, this book explores how Chairwork dialogues can be a powerful intervention when working with addictions, social oppression, medical issues, and psychosis. This is done through the use of compelling clinical examples and scripts that can be read, studied, and enacted. Chairwork's central emphasis is helping patients express each of their voices as distinctly and as forcefully as possible. The book concludes with a review of the deepening technique-the strategies that therapists can use to help facilitate clarity and existential ownership.

This book reports on the latest advances in understanding human cognition and its interplay with various cultural constructs, such as geographical, historical, sociological, and organizational cultures. It addresses researchers, scholars, and industry practitioners from diverse backgrounds, including sociology, linguistics, business, military science, psychology, human factors, neuroscience, and education. The book covers a wealth of topics, such as the analyses of historical events and intercultural competence, commercial applications of social-cultural science, the study of decision-making similarities (and differences) across cultures, Human, Social, Cultural Behavioral (HSCB) modeling and simulation technology, as well as social networks and studies on group communication. It also reports on real-world case studies relevant to cross-cultural decision making. The book aims at combining neurocognitive studies with studies from other relevant disciplines to develop a more holistic understanding of the decisions that people, groups, and societies make to improve the ability to forecast and plan for the future. The book is based on the AHFE 2016 International Conference on Cross-Cultural Decision Making (CCDM), held on July 27-31, 2016, in Walt Disney World (R), Florida, USA.

Is there a way out of anxiety, depression, overeating, fear, phobias, addiction, insomnia, trauma, and low self-esteem - without taking pills? Is there really an alternative to Prozac and anti-depressants? Can you really recapture the simple joy of living? The answer to all theses questions is Yes! This book will show you: How your subconscious mind has been programmed to make you feel the way you feel. How these programs can be rapidly changed through the right kind of hypnotherapy. How even your most difficult feelings and emotions can help you change your life for the better. How you can live a balanced, meaningful life and move forward in confidence and harmony with yourself and your world

The world's leading psychiatric authority on demonic possession delves into the hidden world of exorcisms and his own transformation from cynic to believer over the course of his twenty-five-year career. Successful New York psychiatrist Richard Gallagher was skeptical yet intrigued when a hard-nosed, no-nonsense Catholic priest asked him to examine a woman for a possible exorcism. Meeting her, Gallagher was astonished. The woman's behavior defied logic. In an instant, she could pinpoint a person's secret weaknesses. She knew how individuals she'd never known had died, including Gallagher's own mother, who passed away after a lengthy battle with ovarian cancer. She spoke fluently in multiple languages, including Latin-but only when she was in a trance. This was not psychosis, Gallagher concluded. It was, in his scientific estimation, what could only be describe as paranormal ability. The woman wasn't mentally disturbed-she was possessed. This remarkable case was the first of many that Gallagher would encounter. Sought after today by leaders of all faiths-ministers, priests, rabbis and imams, Gallagher has spent a quarter-century studying demonic activity and exorcisms throughout history and has witnessed more cases than any other psychiatrist in the world today. In this eerie and enthralling book, Gallagher chronicles his most famous cases for the first time, including: A professional who claimed her spiritualist mother had "assigned" her a spirit who "turned on her." A petite woman-"90 pounds soaking wet"-who threw a 200-pound Lutheran deacon across the room to the horror of onlookers in a church hall; And "Julia," the so-called Satanic queen and self-described witch, who exhibited "the most harrowing" case, a "once-in-a-century" possession. Going beyond horror movies and novels, Demonic Foes takes you deep into this hidden world, sharing in full details of these true-life tales of demonic possession.

The prefrontal cortex makes up almost a quarter of the human brain, and it expanded dramatically during primate evolution. The Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex presents a new theory about its fundamental function. In this important new book, the authors argue that primate-specific parts of the prefrontal cortex evolved to reduce errors in foraging choices, so that particular ancestors of modern humans could overcome periodic food shortages. These developments laid the foundation for working out problems in our imagination, which resulted in the insights that allow humans to avoid errors entirely, at least at times. In the book, the authors detail which parts of the prefrontal cortex evolved exclusively in primates, how its connections explain why the prefrontal cortex alone can perform its function, and why other parts of the brain cannot do what the prefrontal cortex does. Based on an analysis of its evolutionary history, the book uses evidence from lesion, imaging, and cell-recording experiments to argue that the primate prefrontal cortex generates goals from a current behavioural context and that it can do so on the basis of single events. As a result, the prefrontal cortex uses the attentive control of behaviour to augment an older general-purpose learning system, one that evolved very early in the history of animals. This older system learns slowly and cumulatively over many experiences based on reinforcement. The authors argue that a new learning system evolved in primates at a particular time and place in their history, that it did so to decrease the errors inherent in the older learning system, and that severe volatility of food resources provided the driving force for these developments. Written by two leading brain scientists, The Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex is an important contribution to our understanding of the evolution and functioning of the human brain.

This book addresses the richness and depth of our intimate relationships and especially those moments when we come to see ourselves and the other person in a new way. In such moments we realize that however much we are influenced by heredity and upbringing, we are also agents with the capacity for openness and transcendence.

Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work.

Psychology Research Methods: A Writing Intensive Approach provides instruction in critical concepts and processes in behavioral science research methods and skills in formulating and writing research papers. The book creates an experiential approach to learning, with chapters organized around the task of writing a complete APA-style research paper. The chapters consist of instructional text, excerpts from published research articles, and learning activities. The reading activities help students develop skills in reading scientific research, evaluating and analyzing scientific information, and assembling evidence to make a scientific argument. The writing activities help students to break down the process of writing a research paper into manageable and meaningful components. As students complete the chapter activities, they assemble their research paper. The book teaches research methods in a clinical context, inspired by the National Institute of Health's Science of Behavior Change Program. Students acquire knowledge about research methods as they read research articles about behavioral health disorders, including studies about their prevalence, causes, and treatment. Teaching research methods with a clinical focus helps students appreciate the value of psychological research. Psychology Research Methods: A Writing Intensive Approach provides instruction in critical concepts and processes in behavioral science research methods and skills in formulating and writing research papers. The book creates an experiential approach to learning, with chapters organized around the task of writing a complete APA-style research paper. The chapters consist of instructional text, excerpts from published research articles, and learning activities. The reading activities help students develop skills in reading scientific research, evaluating and analyzing scientific information, and assembling evidence to make a scientific argument. The writing activities help students to break down the process of writing a research paper into manageable and meaningful components. As students complete the chapter activities, they assemble their research paper. The book teaches research methods in a clinical context, inspired by the National Institute of Health's Science of Behavior Change Program. Students acquire knowledge about research methods as they read research articles about behavioral health disorders, including studies about their prevalence, causes, and treatment. Teaching research methods with a clinical focus helps students appreciate the value of psychological research. Psychology Research Methods: A Writing Intensive Approach provides instruction in critical concepts and processes in behavioral science research methods and skills in formulating and writing research papers. The book creates an experiential approach to learning, with chapters organized around the task of writing a complete APA-style research paper. The chapters consist of instructional text, excerpts from published research articles, and learning activities. The reading activities help students develop skills in reading scientific research, evaluating and analyzing scientific information, and assembling evidence to make a scientific argument. The writing activities help students to break down the process of writing a research paper into manageable and meaningful components. As students complete the chapter activities, they assemble their research paper. The book teaches research methods in a clinical context, inspired by the National Institute of Health's Science of Behavior Change Program. Students acquire knowledge about research methods as they read research articles about behavioral health disorders, including studies about their prevalence, causes, and treatment. Teaching research methods with a clinical focus helps students appreciate the value of psychological research.

Our ability to map and intervene in the structure of the human brain is proceeding at a very quick rate. Advances in psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery have given us fresh insights into the neurobiological basis of human thought and behavior. Technologies like MRI and PET scans can detect early signs of psychiatric disorders before they manifest symptoms. Electrical and magnetic stimulation of the brain can non-invasively relieve symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and other conditions resistant to treatment, while implanting neuro-electrodes can help patients with Parkinsons and other motor control-related diseases. New drugs can help regenerate neuronal connections otherwise disrupted by schizophrenia and similar diseases.
All these procedures and drugs alter the neural correlates of our mind and raise fascinating and important ethical questions about their benefits and harms. They are, in a sense, among the most profound bioethical questions we face, since these techniques can touch on the deepest aspects of the human mind: free will; personal identity; the self; and the soul. This is the first single-author book on what has come to be known as neuroethics. Walter Glannon uses a philosophical framework that is fully informed by cutting edge neuroscience as well as contemporary legal cases such as Terri Schiavo, to offer readers an introduction to this fascinating topic. He starts by describing the state of the art in neuroscientific research and treatment, and gives the reader an up-to-date picture of the brain. Glannon then looks at the ethical implications of various kinds of treatments, such as: whether or not brain imaging will end up changing our viewson free will and moral responsibility; whether patients should always be told that they are at future risk for neurological diseases; if erasing unconscious emotional memories implicated in depression can go too far; if forcing behavior-modifying drugs or surgery on violent offenders can ever be justified; the implications of drugs that enhance cognitive abilities; and how to define brain death and the criteria for the withdrawal of life-support. While not exhaustive, Glannons work addresses a wide range of fascinating issues and his pathbreaking work should appeal to philosophers, psychiatrists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, radiologists, psychologists, and bioethicists.

People sometimes remember events that never happened. These illusory or false memories have important practical implications in various aspects of everyday life, and also have significant theoretical implications for cognitive and neuropsychological models of memory. Cognitive psychologists and neuropsychologists have long been aware of false recognition, confabulation, and related kinds of memory distortions, but during the past several years research on these topics has increased rapidly. In recognition of this emerging domain of interest, this special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology is devoted to the cognitive neuropsychology of false memories. Edited by Daniel L. Schacter, the special issue features experimental and theoretical contributions from leading cognitive psychologists, neuropsychologists, and neurologists that explore such issues as false recognition after frontal lobe damage, the nature of confabulation, amnesia and false memories, physiological correlates of memory illusions, memory distortions in normal and abnormal aging, and computational models of true and false memories.

It is plausible that evolution could have created the human skeleton, but it is hard to believe that it created the human mind. Yet, in six or seven million years evolution came up with Homo sapiens, a creature unlike anything the world had ever known. The mental gap between man and ape is immense, and yet evolution bridged that gap in so short a space of time. Since the brain is the organ of the mind, it is natural to assume that during the evolution of our hominid ancestors there were changes in the brain that can account for this gap. This book is a search for those changes.
It is not enough to understand the universe, the world, or the animal kingdom: we need to understand ourselves. Humans are unlike any other animal in dominating the earth and adapting to any environment. This book searches for specializations in the human brain that make this possible. As well as considering the anatomical differences, it examines the contribution of different areas of the brain - reviewing studies in which functional brain imaging has been used to study the brain mechanisms that are involved in perception, manual skill, language, planning, reasoning, and social cognition. It considers a range of skills unique to us - for example our ability to learn a language and pass on cultural traditions in this way, and become aware of our own throughts through inner speech
Written in a lively style by a distinguished scientist who has made his own major contribution to our understanding of the mind, the book is a far-reaching and exciting quest to understand those things that make humans unique.

We effortlessly remember all sorts of events - from simple events like people walking to complex events like leaves blowing in the wind. We can also remember and describe these events, and in general, react appropriately to them, for example, in avoiding an approaching object. Our phenomenal ease interacting with events belies the complexity of the underlying processes we use to deal with them. Driven by an interest in these complex processes, research on even perception has been growing rapidly. Events are the basis of all experience, so understanding how humans perceive, represent, and act on them will have a significant impact on many areas of psychology. Unfortunately, much of the research on event perception - in visual perception, motor control, linguistics, and computer science - has progressed without much interaction. This book is the first to bring together computational, neurological, and psychological research on how humans detect, classify, remember, and act on events. It provides professional and student researchers with a comprehensive collection of the latest reserach in these diverse fields.

Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work.

Although best known for experimental methods, social psychology also has a strong tradition of measurement. This volume seeks to highlight this tradition by introducing readers to measurement strategies that help drive social psychological research and theory development. The books opens with an analysis of the measurement technique that dominates most of the social sciences, self-report. Chapter 1 presents a conceptual framework for interpreting the data generated from self-report, which it uses to provide practical advice on writing strong and structured self-report items. From there, attention is drawn to the many other innovative measurement and data-collection techniques that have helped expand the range of theories social psychologists test. Chapters 2 through 6 introduce techniques designed to measure the internal psychological states of individual respondents, with strategies that can stand alone or complement anything obtained via self-report. Included are chapters on implicit, elicitation, and diary approaches to collecting response data from participants, as well as neurological and psychobiological approaches to inferring underlying mechanisms. The remaining chapters introduce creative data-collection techniques, focusing particular attention on the rich forms of data humans often leave behind. Included are chapters on textual analysis, archival analysis, geocoding, and social media harvesting. The many methods covered in this book complement one another, such that the full volume provides researchers with a powerful toolset to help them better explore what is "social" about human behavior.

Necessary Knowledge takes on one of the big questions at the heart of the cognitive sciences - what knowledge do we possess at birth, and what do we learn along the way?
It is now widely accepted that evolution, individual development, and individual learning can no longer be studied in isolation from each-other - they are inextricably linked. Therefore any successful theory must integrate these elements, and somehow relate them to human culture. Clearly we learn from the world around us, but that learning is skewed towards specific things about the world. We do not just attend to and learn about every stimuli that confronts us - if we did, learning would be impossibly time-consuming and ineffective. Learning is constrained - we are primed to learn about certain aspects of the world and ignore others. So what are these constraints, and where do they come from? The theory expounded in this book is that we enter the world with small amounts of innate representational knowledge. It neither sides with those who believe in 'blank slate' theories, nor with those who believe all learning is innate. In fact, what is written on our 'slates' at birth is a certain type of knowledge about specific things in the world, the general configuration of the human face for instance, a knowledge that other people possess minds and motives.
Necessary Knowledge presents an important new theory, in a book that makes an accessible and thought provoking contribution to one of the enduring issues about human nature.

The phenomenon of hypnosis provides a rich paradigm for those seeking to understand the processes that underlie consciousness. Understanding hypnosis tells us about a basic human capacity for altered experiences that is often overlooked in contemporary western societies. Throughout the 200 year history of psychology, hypnosis has been a major topic of investigation by some of the leading experimenters and theorists of each generation. Today hypnosis is emerging again as a lively area of research within cognitive (systems level) neuroscience informing basic questions about the structure and biological basis of conscious states. This book describes the latest advances in understanding hypnosis and similar trance states by researchers within the neuroscience of consciousness. It contains many new and exciting contributions from up and coming researchers and provides a lively debate on methodological and theoretical issues central to the development of emerging research paradigms in the neuroscience of conscious states. The book introduces and describes many of the recent new tools that have become available to researchers in this field. Academics, researchers, and clinicians wanting to develop their knowledge of the latest findings, theories and methods in the scientific study of hypnosis and related states of consciousness will find this an up to date guide to this rapidly advancing field.

Are people rational? This question was central to Greek thought; and has been at the heart of psychology, philosophy, rational choice in social sciences, and probabilistic approaches to artificial intelligence. This book provides a radical re-appraisal of conventional wisdom in the psychology of reasoning.
For almost two and a half thousand years, the Western conception of what it is to be a human being has been dominated by the idea that the mind is the seat of reason - humans are, almost by definition, the rational animal. From Aristotle to the present day, rationality has been explained by comparison to systems of logic, which distinguish valid (i.e., rationally justified) from invalid arguments. Within psychology and cognitive science, such a logicist conception of the mind was adopted wholeheartedly from Piaget onwards. Simultaneous with the construction of the logicist program in cognition, other researchers found that people appeared surprisingly and systematically illogical in some experiments. Proposals within the logicist paradigm suggested that these were mere performance errors, although in some reasoning tasks only as few as 5% of people's reasoning was logically correct.
In this book a more radical suggestion for explaining these puzzling aspects of human reasoning is put forward: the Western conception of the mind as a logical system is flawed at the very outset. The human mind is primarily concerned with practical action in the face of a profoundly complex and uncertain world. Oaksford and Chater argue that cognition should be understood in terms of probability theory, the calculus of uncertain reasoning, rather than in terms of logic, the calculus of certainreasoning. Thus, the logical mind should be replaced by the probabilistic mind - people may possess not logical rationality, but Bayesian rationality.

Language development remains one of the most hotly debated topics in the cognitive sciences. In recent years we have seen contributions to the debate from researchers in psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, though there have been surprisingly few interdisciplinary attempts at unifying the various theories. In Language and the Learning Curve, a leading researcher in the field offers a radical new view of language development. Drawing on formal linguistic theory (the Minimalist Program, Dependency Grammars), cognitive psychology (skill learning) computational linguistics (Zipf curves), and Complexity Theory (networks), it takes the view that syntactic development is a simple process and that syntax can be learned just like any other cognitive or motor skill. In a thought provoking and accessible style, it develops a learning theory of the acquisition of syntax that builds on the contribution of the different source theories in a detailed and explicit manner. Each chapter starts by laying the relevant theoretical background, before examining empirical data on child language acquisition. The result is a bold new theory of the acquisition of syntax, unusual in its combination of Chomskian linguistics and learning theory. Language and the Learning Curve is an important new work that challenges many of our usual assumptions about syntactic development.

Language development remains one of the most hotly debated topics in the cognitive sciences. In recent years we have seen contributions to the debate from researchers in psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy, though there have been surprisingly few interdisciplinary attempts at unifying the various theories. In Language and the Learning Curve, a leading researcher in the field offers a radical new view of language development. Drawing on formal linguistic theory (the Minimalist Program, Dependency Grammars), cognitive psychology (Skill Learning) computational linguistics (Zipf curves), and Complexity Theory (networks), it takes the view that syntactic development is a simple process and that syntax can be learned just like any other cognitive or motor skill.
In a thought provoking and accessible style, it develops a learning theory of the acquisition of syntax that builds on the contribution of the different source theories in a detailed and explicit manner. Each chapter starts by laying the relevant theoretical background, before examining empirical data on child language acquisition. The result is a bold new theory of the acquisition of syntax, unusual in its combination of Chomskian linguistics and learning theory. Language and the Learning Curve is an important new work that challenges many of our usual assumptions about syntactic development.

To what extent can animal behaviour be described as rational? What does it even mean to describe behaviour as rational? This book focuses on one of the major debates in science today - how closely does mental processing in animals resemble mental processing in humans. It addresses the question of whether and to what extent non-human animals are rational, that is, whether any animal behaviour can be regarded as the result of a rational thought processes. It does this with attention to three key questions, which recur throughout the book and which have both empirical and philosophical aspects: What kinds of behavioural tasks can animals successfully perform? What if any mental processes must be postulated to explain their performance at these tasks? What properties must processes have to count as rational? The book is distinctive in pursuing these questions not only in relation to our closest relatives, the primates, whose intelligence usually gets the most attention, but also in relation to birds and dolphins, where striking results are also being obtained. Some chapters focus on a particular species. They describe some of the extraordinary and complex behaviour of these species - using tools in novel ways to solve foraging problems, for example, or behaving in novel ways to solve complex social problems - and ask whether such behaviour should be explained in rational or merely mechanistic terms. Other chapters address more theoretical issues and ask, for example, what it means for behaviour to be rational, and whether rationality can be understood in the absence of language. The book includes many of the world's leading figures doing empirical work on rationality in primates, dolphins, and birds, as well as distinguished philosophers of mind and science. The book includes an editors' introduction which summarises the philosophical and empirical work presented, and draws together the issues discussed by the contributors.

Our ability to 'think' is really one of our most puzzling characteristics. What it would be like to be unable to think? What would it be like to lack self-awareness? The complexity of this activity is striking. 'Thinking' involves the interaction of a range of mental processes--attention, emotion, memory, planning, self-consciousness, free will, and language. So where did these processes arise? What evolutionary advantages were bestowed upon those with an ability to deceive, to plan, to empathize, or to understand the intention of others? In this compelling new work, Peter Gardenfors embarks on an evolutionary detective story to try and solve one of the big mysteries surrounding human existence--how has the modern human being's way of thinking come into existence. He starts by taking in turn the more basic cognitive processes, such as attention and memory, then builds upon these to explore more complex behaviors, such as self-consciousness, mindreading, and imitation. Having done this, he examines the consequences of "putting thought into the world" -i.e., using external media like cave paintings, drawings, and writing. Immensely readable and humorous, the book will be valuable for students in psychology and biology, and accessible to readers of popular science.

How does our knowledge of the language on the one hand, and of the context on the other, permit us to understand what we are told, to resolve ambiguities, to grasp both explicit and implicit content, to appreciate metaphor and irony? These issues have been studied in two disciplines: linguistic pragmatics and psycholinguistics, with only limited interactions between the two. This volume lays down the basis for a new field: "Experimental Pragmatics." Contributions review pioneering work and present novel ways of articulating theories and experimental methods in the area.

There are myriad questions that emerge when one considers emotions and decision-making: What produces emotions? Why do we have emotions? How do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel like something? What is the relationship between emotion, reward value, and subjective feelings of pleasure? How is the value of 'good' represented in the brain? Will neuroeconomics replace classical microeconomics? How does the brain implement decision-making? Are gene-defined rewards and emotions in the interests of the genes? Does rational multistep planning enable us to go beyond selfish genes to plans in the interests of the individual? The Brain, Emotion, and Depression addresses these issues, providing a unified approach to emotion, reward value, economic value, decision-making, and their brain mechanisms. The evolutionary, adaptive value of the processes involved in emotion, the neural networks involved in emotion and decision making, and the issue of conscious emotional feelings are all considered. The book will be valuable for those in the fields of neuroscience, neurology, psychology, psychiatry, biology, animal behaviour, economics, and philosophy from the advanced undergraduate level upwards, and for all interested in emotion and decision-making.

For years now, learning has been at the heart of research within cognitive psychology. How do we acquire new knowledge and new skills? Are the principles underlying skill acquisition unique to learning, or similar to those underlying other behaviours? Is the mental system essentially modular, or is the mental system a simple product of experience, a product that, inevitably, reflects the shape of the external world with all of its specialisms and similarities? This new book takes the view that learning is a major influence on the nature of the processes and representations that fill our minds. Throughout, the authors review and consider the areas of skill acquisition and lexical representation to illustrate the effects that practice can have on cognitive processes. They also draw parallels between theories in physical and biological domains to propose not only a new theory of mental function but also demonstrate that the mind is essentially subject to the same natural laws as the physical world. In so doing Speelman and Kirsner present a new perspective on psychology - one that identifies universal principles underlying all behaviours and one which contrasts markedly from our current focus on highly specific behaviours. Accessibly written, Beyond the Learning Curve is a thought provoking and challenging new text for students and researchers in the cognitive sciences.