Psychobiology Books

Biological Psychology (with CD-ROM)

James W. Kalat

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Dr. James W. Kalat's BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY is the best selling text in the market because of its extremely high level of scholarship, clear and occasionally humorous writing style, and precise examples integrated throughout the text. Throughout all nine editions, the goal has been to make biological psychology accessible to psychology students, not just to biology majors and pre-meds. The goal has also been to convey the excitement of the search for biological explanations of behavior. Kalat argues that biological psychology is "the most interesting topic in the world," and this text convinces many students. Try-it-yourself activities in the book and on-line help illustrate phenomena and procedures described in the text. Accuracy, currency and a clear presentation style have always been the trademark signature of this text and this Ninth Edition has taken these qualities to the next level. An extremely skilled teacher, Dr. Kalat has written a text that not only speaks to today's students but to their professors as well. Accuracy, currency and a clear presentation style have always been the trademark signature of this text and this Ninth Edition has taken these qualities to the next level.

The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought

Gary Marcus

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Human Genome Project has revealed that we possess a surprisingly small number of genes, especially in light of our fairly complex bodies. In The Birth of the Mind, NYU psychology professor Gary Marcus brings together current research on how our genetic code assembles that most mysterious physiological structure, the brain. Readers fascinated by the works of Steven Pinker and other mind theorists will be fascinated by Marcus' descriptions of strange--and sometimes disturbing--sensory experiments carried out on chimps, ferrets, and kittens that show how the brain organizes itself in the presence or absence of external stimuli. Further, Marcus writes that there's nothing particularly special about how the brain is built and maintained.

What's amazing is how little of the overall scheme for embryonic development is special to the brain. Although thousands of genes are involved in brain development, a large number of them are shared with (or have close counterparts in) genes that guide the development of the rest of the body.

With plenty of evidence supporting the notion of multi-function "housekeeping genes," Marcus concludes that our hopes for finding single genes responsible for various brain disorders are likely unfounded. The Birth of the Mind offers an engaging and often witty look at how our genetic code can be simple enough to make basic proteins and complicated enough to help us learn languages. --Therese Littleton

Basics of Biopsychology (MyPsychKit Series)

John Pinel

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Basics of Biopsychology clearly presents the fundamentals of the study of the biology of behavior and makes the topics personally and socially relevant to the student.

By emphasizing four interwoven themes (“Thinking Clearly,” “Clinical Implications,” “The Evolutionary Perspective,” and “Cognitive Neuroscience”) throughout the book, the major recent developments in the rapidly changing field of biopsychology come alive clearly and completely for students.

How Biopsychologists Think about Behavior, Anatomy of the Brain, Neural Activity and How to Study It, The Visual System, Mechanisms of Perception, The Sensorimotor System,

Development of the Nervous System, Brain Damage and Neuroplasticity, Learning, Memory, and Amnesia, Hunger, Eating, and Health, Hormones and Sex, Sleep, Dreaming, and Circadian Rhythms, Health Psychology, Lateralization, Language, and the Split Brain, and Behavioral Neuroscience of Psychiatric Disorders

biopsychology

Psychology

Robin M. Kowalski, Drew Westen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent for some 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I just recently bought this book for my intro to Pysch class. It is laid out well, is very readable, and has lots of graphics. Needless to say that makes it a true easily digestible introductory text with limited information on each topic. Buyers beware that friends of Jung will find no friends here. He is never to my knowledge mentioned in the text and is certainly not in any of the indexes. It is oriented to a "scientifically provable" approach to psychology and will be an excellent text for those who share this viewpoint.

Editorial Review:

Students often get lost in the details ... most will never take a second psychology course ... they often have trouble relating the material to their everyday lives...

The new Fourth Edition of Kowalski & Westen's Psychology addresses these teaching challenges. The student develops evaluative reasoning through self-discovery for a lifetime of learning. Students are drawn into the material in a way that in-trigues and stimulates so they begin to see psychology at work in their daily lives.

Like its predecessors, this new edition effectively captures the diversity and breadth of psychology. A complete overview of how human beings think, feel, and behave is included. Psychology is an evolving science, which continually addresses and re-addresses the relationship between psychological events and their neural underpinnings, between cognition and emotion, be-tween cultural processes and human evolution, between nature and nurture, and more.

The Woman That Never Evolved: With a New Preface and Bibliographical Updates, Revised Edition

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

What does it mean to be female? Sarah Blaffer Hrdy--a sociobiologist and a feminist--believes that evolutionary biology can provide some surprising answers. Surprising to those feminists who mistakenly think that biology can only work against women. And surprising to those biologists who incorrectly believe that natural selection operates only on males.

In The Woman That Never Evolved we are introduced to our nearest female relatives competitive, independent, sexually assertive primates who have every bit as much at stake in the evolutionary game as their male counterparts do. These females compete among themselves for rank and resources, but will bond together for mutual defense. They risk their lives to protect their young, yet consort with the very male who murdered their offspring when successful reproduction depends upon it. They tolerate other breeding females if food is plentiful, but chase them away when monogamy is the optimal strategy. When "promiscuity" is an advantage, female primates--like their human cousins--exhibit a sexual appetite that ensures a range of breeding partners. From case after case we are led to the conclusion that the sexually passive, noncompetitive, all-nurturing woman of prevailing myth never could have evolved within the primate order.

Yet males are almost universally dominant over females in primate species, and Homo sapiens is no exception. As we see from this book, women are in some ways the most oppressed of all female primates. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is convinced that to redress sexual inequality in human societies, we must first understand its evolutionary origins. We cannot travel back in time to meet our own remote ancestors, but we can study those surrogates we have--the other living primates. If women --and not biology--are to control their own destiny, they must understand the past and, as this book shows us, the biological legacy they have inherited.

The Biology of Love

Arthur Janov

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Another amazing book, but does it hold up? 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Speaking from someone who's done plenty of Primal Therapy, once again, Janov lays out, in glorious grandiosity, a beautiful and coherent theory of life, love, and neurosis. Janov's strength is in his ability to articulate with poetic brilliance the reasons, as he sees it, for all manner of psychological illnesses, and guess what? I think he's right. Everything he describes in his book I have either witnessed or experienced first hand during my own stint in Primal Therapy. There is one downfall, however, as I see it. Although this latest book definitely reflects a change with respect to how long it takes to really get down to those core feelings - I'm talking about the ones that really do change brain chemistry, and moves the biological system back toward "normalcy" - he doesn't go far enough in explaining how difficult and lengthy the process truly is. Let me tell you, it takes a very long time. It is not as easy as it reads in Janov's books, and I must add, that I am yet to see a Primal therapist that is still not, to some degree, a victim of his/her own repression. But the theory holds, and perhaps this is the most important thing to remember. Do just one month of Primal therapy, and I challenge you to ever go back into psychoanalysis again. It will seem like a complete waist of time, which in the end, as Janov explains in his book, it is. Even if Janov is 50% correct in his theory, he is still miles and miles ahead of the rest of the psychological community, which, as Janov explains, does nothing more than perpetuates the neurosis in its patients. Janov is nothing short of a revolutionary, no less important that Freud. That may be a dramatic statement, but this is a dramatic book. The only discrepancy I have found between Janov's theory in "The Biology Of Love" and the application of that theory is the time frame in which all those important childhood and birth feelings emerge. There also seems to be a change in the nature of repression itself, as Janov now describes it. Where once repression's existence was described as solely the result of an overload of pain from childhood, it is now described as a natural state which can be overwhelmed by too much pain, and which continues to exist even after that overload is "emptied," or re-lived. This book not only reflects the change in the climate of psychotherapy as a whole, but also reflects the change in Primal Therapy itself since its conception. As usual, it's a must read.

The TROUBLE WITH TESTOSTERONE: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament

Robert M. Sapolsky

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A great collection of essays by a brilliant writer 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Is it possible for a man who has won a MacArthur genius grant to be underappreciated? Reading this set of essays I have to wonder why Sapolsky is not as widely read and commented on as Dawkins, Sacks, Gleick and those other few at the absolute pinnacle of popular science writing.

The tales here cover his familiar subjects: the mind and emotions (one is tempted to say the soul), stress and our reactions, and how brain chemistry effects us every day. He also relates anecdotes from his baboon observations, and in the most touching essay talks about his father's life and death. The essays are gathered from several years and several magazines and each stands on its own...there is no particular theme beyond the aforementioned subject matter. The best is probably about how we sometimes take on the identity of another: illustrated by an anecdote where he watched Stephen Hawking give a lecture "through" the voice and body of a vigorous young graduate student, and Sapolsky's own odd reaction to his father's death. It is interesting, mildly disturbing and raises some ideas about individuality I certainly had never considered. In another essay, Sapolsky describes why so many illnesses have the same symptoms (its because it is our own immune systems that make us feel so crummy). Elsewhere he draws parallels betweens kids going off to college and male baboons switching tribes, and in yet another essay compares aging in baboons and humans.

So, should you read this book?
"Yes", if you have read other Sapolsky books and are looking for more.
"Yes", if you have heard about Sapolsky and want an introduction before diving into one of the larger works (though I still think 'A Primate's Memoir' is the best place to start).
"Yes", if you are interested in the brain and/or like good science writing.

Editorial Review:

As a professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," Robert Sapolsky carries impressive credentials. Best of all, he's a gifted writer who possesses a delightfully devilish sense of humor. In these essays, which range widely but mostly focus on the relationships between biology and human behavior, hard and intricate science is handled with a deft touch that makes it accessible to the general reader. In one memorable piece, Sapolsky compares the fascination with tabloid TV to behavior he's observed among wild African baboons. "Rubber necks," notes the professor, "seem to be a common feature of the primate order." In the title essay of The Trouble with Testosterone, Sapolsky ruminates on the links, real or perceived, between that hormone and aggression.

Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis

Ernest Lawrence Rossi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An excellent text the mind/body phenomena 5 out of 5 stars.
26 of 30 people found this review helpful.

In a word, excellent. A wonderful explanation of mind-body dynamics and the placebo effect. Some excellent hypnotic and mind-body healing techniques. Dr. Rossi is a true expert in his field. He fully justifies that reputation with this book.

Many good insights into mind-body healing 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 21 people found this review helpful.

The book explains in great detail the influence and the effect of mind over body from the perspective of neuro-biology. In simple terms, most healing performed with hypnosis are a result of mind influencing the blood-flow, which then creates corresponding changes in the body.

Rossi provides a some amazing case-histories where hypnosis has helped people deal with problems which were unresponsive to regular medical treatment.

Together with a number of healing techniques, the focus is on Ericksonian principle of utilization. In this respect he also points out the significance of "utradian rhythm" - the fact that throughout the day we all drift in and out of trance naturally, and that one could do hypnosis even more-effectively by doing it in accord with ultradian rhythm, at a time when the person feels naturally more relaxed and drifting into a trance state.

Current Directions in Biopsychology (Association for Psychological Science Readers)

Association for Psychological Science (APS), A. Courtney DeVries, Randy J. Nelson

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Study Guide for Bob Garretts Brain & Behavior: An Introduction to Biological Psychology, Second Edition: Prepared by Sheila Steiner

Bob Garrett

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Editorial Review:

The Study Guide for Bob Garrett’s Brain & Behavior: An Introduction to Biological Psychology, 2nd Edition enhances student learning by offering the additional review and practice necessary to succeed in a biopsychology class. Each chapter in this affordable, robust student study guide corresponds to the appropriate chapter in Brain & Behavior: An Introduction to Biological Psychology, Second Edition and contains the following:

• Chapter outlines 
• Learning objectives 
• Summary and guided reviews (incorporating key terms and concepts) 
• Short-answer and essay questions 
• Chapter posttest

In addition, visit www.sagepub.com/garrettbb2studyfor additional useful student resources.

Every student using the Second Edition of Brain & Behavior will benefit from this study guide chock-full of invaluable learning aids.