Customer Reviews

Psychology: Principles in Practice

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I was just assigned this book for my psychology class and managed to read/skim through it. Maybe I'm just angry because I had the opportunity to take a college-level class in cognitive theory over the summer and was thus exposed to much more interesting reading material, but this book is a real piece of work... even compared to most high school textbooks I've had. For starters, the pictures are much larger than the words. As much as a good illustration can help one grasp a difficult concept, the ones in this book show pretty much NOTHING. Then, there's the whole tone of the material, which really aggrivates me. It seems very condescending, with words like "placebo" that almost any high school senior would know phoneticized (pluh-SEE-boh). In additoin, it appears as though more effort has been placed towards catering to special lobby groups than towards creating a memorable book that will sucessfully teach psychology and impart a love for the field. "Race relations" are referred to a lot, as are "animal rights." As liberal as I am (anti-war, quasi-socialist, for legal recognition of gay unions, pro-environmentalist to a certain degree), I really get irked when these petty, almost-nonissues that (stupidly) took up much of the Left's focus twenty years ago are brought back to life in the form of instructional materials. They water down the actual material to a point where it almost becomes propoganda. In an effort to make the text "non-biased," it has in effect become MORE biased... just in the "right" direction.

If you are a teacher and reading this, please do me (and pretty much every other student out there) a favor and DO NOT use this textbook in your classroom. I don't know if there are other books that do the same thing better or what your options are, but I would certainly not recommend this one. Perhaps you could let your students read some actual research journals or college textbooks; if you give them the benefit of the doubt and overestimate rather than underestimate their intellectual abilities, I bet you'll be surprised at the results. The goal of a class like this should be to make young people passionate about something; obviously, the textbook you see here does nothing of the sort.

I have this book, we used it in my high school psychology class. It is an informative and good book for beginners, and for first exposing one to the feild of psychology. It is just that, a "high school book." SO dont expect a bunch of information and guidence, but a sort of introduction to psychology.