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This book provides a clinical tool for recognizing, and understanding, human adaptive responses to stress and the anxiety it causes. For use in the here-and-now, the recognition algorithm systematically delineates the observable hierarchy of psychological adaptive mechanisms, known in psychoanalytic theory as ego defenses, established in previous longitudinal research. Based in a theoretical model, it teaches practical, systematic recognition of these mechanisms which are not only helpful to know when seeing a patient but also when observing human behavior in everyday life.
This comprehensive, twelve volume reference work reflects the interdisciplinary influences on evolutionary psychology and serves as a major resource for its history, scientific contributors and theories. It draws on biology, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology, economics, computer science and paleoarchaeology to provide a multifaceted picture of behavioral adaptation in humans and how it adds to our academic and clinical understanding. Edited by a noted figure in evolutionary psychology, with many seminal and renowned contributors, this encyclopedia offers the full breadth of an area that is the forefront of behavioral thinking and investigation.
Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was—that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology—the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire—and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided. Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "discoveries," including "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence. Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.
The idea that the human mind-that faculty of the intellect which we use to define and discern the truth-might also be used to deceive itself is not new. The classic orator Demosthenes warned of this possibility in 349 B.C. when he wrote that "Nothing is more easy than to deceive one's self; what a man wishes he generally believes to be true." 1 Even Jean Jacques Rousseau, who suggested the possibility of man as "noble savage," alerts us to this paradox, when he writes "Jamais fa nature ne nous trompe; c'est toujours nous qui nous trompons" ("Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves). 2 But it was Sigmund Freud who placed this idea firmly into the field of psychopathology and then, later, into a general psychological theory. According to Freud, understanding the function of a defense mechanism means not only fathoming the origin of pathological symptoms but also comprehending a model of the mind that includes both conscious and unconscious mental processes. From this initial focus on the general process of defense, Freud and his followers went on to identify various forms this process might take, with the result that today we have a list of 3 more than 37 defense mechanisms described in the literature.
Between 1939 and 1942, one of America's leading universities recruited 268 of its healthiest and most promising undergraduates to participate in a revolutionary new study of the human life cycle. The originators of the program, which came to be known as the Grant Study, felt that medical research was too heavily weighted in the direction of disease, and their intent was to chart the ways in which a group of promising individuals coped with their lives over the course of many years. Nearly forty years later, George E. Vaillant, director of the Study, took the measure of the Grant Study men. The result was the compelling, provocative classic, Adaptation to Life, which poses fundamental questions about the individual differences in confronting life's stresses. Why do some of us cope so well with the portion life offers us, while others, who have had similar advantages (or disadvantages), cope badly or not at all? Are there ways we can effectively alter those patterns of behavior that make us unhappy, unhealthy, and unwise? George Vaillant discusses these and other questions in terms of a clearly defined scheme of "adaptive mechanisms" that are rated mature, neurotic, immature, or psychotic, and illustrates, with case histories, each method of coping.
Although researchers have long been aware that the species-typical architecture of the human mind is the product of our evolutionary history, it has only been in the last three decades that advances in such fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and paleoanthropology have made the fact of our evolution illuminating. Converging findings from a variety of disciplines are leading to the emergence of a fundamentally new view of the human mind, and with it a new framework for the behavioral and social sciences. First, with the advent of the cognitive revolution, human nature can finally be defined precisely as the set of universal, species-typical information-processing programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability. Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors - problems such as mate selection, language acquisition, co-operation, and sexual infidelity. Consequently, the traditional view of the mind as a general-purpose computer, tabula rasa, or passive recipient of culture is being replaced by the view that the mind resembles an intricate network of functionally specialized computers, each of which imposes contentful structure on human mental organization and culture. The Adapted Mind explores this new approach - evolutionary psychology - and its implications for a new view of culture.
Stress and Health: Biological and Psychological Interactions is a brief and accessible examination of psychological stress and its psychophysiological relationships with cognition, emotions, brain functions, and the peripheral mechanisms by which the body is regulated. Updated throughout, the Third Edition covers two new and significant areas of emerging research: how our early life experiences alter key stress responsive systems at the level of gene expression; and what large, normal, and small stress responses may mean for our overall health and well-being.
This book examines the adaptive aspects of shyness. It addresses shyness as a ubiquitous phenomenon that reflects a preoccupation of the self in response to social interaction, resulting in social inhibition, social anxiety, and social withdrawal. The volume reviews the ways in which shyness has traditionally been conceptualized and describes the movement away from considering it as a disorder in need of treatment. In addition, it examines the often overlooked history and current evidence across evolution, animal species, and human culture, demonstrating the adaptive aspects of shyness from six perspectives: developmental, biological, social, cultural, comparative, and evolutionary. Topics featured in this book include: The study of behavioral inhibition and shyness across four academic generations. The development of adaptive subtypes of shyness. Shy children’s adaptation to academic challenges. Adaptiveness of introverts in the workplace. The role of cultural norms and values in shaping shyness. Perspectives of shyness as adaptive from Indigenous Peoples of North America. The role that personality differences play on ecology and evolution. Adaptive Shyness is a must-have resource for researchers and professors, clinicians and related professionals as well as graduate students in developmental psychology, pediatrics, and social work as well as related disciplines, including social/personality, evolutionary, biological, and clinical child psychology, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.
This Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive overview of individual differences within the domain of personality, with major sub-topics including assessment and research design, taxonomy, biological factors, evolutionary evidence, motivation, cognition and emotion, as well as gender differences, cultural considerations, and personality disorders. It is an up-to-date reference for this increasingly important area and a key resource for those who study intelligence, personality, motivation, aptitude and their variations within members of a group.
The Adaptive Decision Maker argues that people use a variety of strategies to make judgments and choices. The authors introduce a model that shows how decision makers balance effort and accuracy considerations and predicts which strategy a person will use in a given situation. A series of experiments testing the model are presented, and the authors analyse how the model can lead to improved decisions and opportunities for further research.