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This book explores the concept of psychophysics and details the development of the ideas which made the mathematisation of desire possible. The experience of desire accompanies us all throughout life, but dealing with it as psychologists and scientists is far from easy. Psychophysics was conceived to help map, mathematically, these unknowable feelings of desire. As such, this book will help to provide an accessible account of psychophysics while telling the story of its creation, which was, in essence, the birth of scientific psychology and contemporary cognitive neuroscience, alongside many of the technologies which characterize the contemporary world. It is a strange and intriguing story, which begins with the German physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its story will help the reader gain fresh insight into how scientists came to be able to map and quantify complex and private emotional states.
What is modern psychology and how did it get here? How and why did psychology come to be the world's most popular science? A Conceptual History of Psychology charts the development of psychology from its foundations in ancient philosophy to the dynamic scientific field it is today. Emphasizing psychology's diverse global heritage, the book explains how, across centuries, human beings came to use reason, empiricism, and science to explore each other's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The book skilfully interweaves conceptual and historical issues to illustrate the contemporary relevance of history to the discipline. It shows how changing historical and cultural contexts have shaped the way in which modern psychology conceptualizes individuals, brains, personality, gender, cognition, consciousness, health, childhood, and relationships. This comprehensive textbook: - Helps students understand psychology through its origins, evolution and cultural contexts - Moves beyond a 'great persons and events' narrative to emphasize the development of the theoretical and practical concepts that comprise psychology - Highlights the work of minority and non-Western figures whose influential work is often overlooked in traditional accounts, providing a fuller picture of the field's development - Includes a range of engaging and innovative learning features to help students build and deepen a critical understanding of the subject - Draws on examples from contemporary politics, society and culture that bring key debates and historical milestones to life - Meets the requirements for the Conceptual and Historical Issues component of BPS-accredited Psychology degrees. This textbook will provide students with invaluable insight into the past, present and future of this exciting and vitally important field. Read more from Brian Hughes on his blog at thesciencebit.net
Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Measurement in the Human Sciences explores the assessment and measurement of nonphysical attributes that define human beings: abilities, personalities, attitudes, dispositions, and values. The proposition that human attributes are measurable remains controversial, as do the ideas and innovations of the six historical figures—Gustav Fechner, Francis Galton, Alfred Binet, Charles Spearman, Louis Thurstone, and S. S. Stevens—at the heart of this book. Across 10 rich, elaborative chapters, readers are introduced to the origins of educational and psychological scaling, mental testing, classical test theory, factor analysis, and diagnostic classification and to controversies spanning the quantity objection, the role of measurement in promoting eugenics, theories of intelligence, the measurement of attitudes, and beyond. Graduate students, researchers, and professionals in educational measurement and psychometrics will emerge with a deeper appreciation for both the challenges and the affordances of measurement in quantitative research.
With an emphasis on developments taking place in Germany during the nineteenth century, this book provides in-depth examinations of the key contributions made by the pioneers of scientific psychology. Their works brought measurement and mathematics into the study of the mind. Through unique analysis of measurement theory by Whewell, mathematical developments by Gauss, and theories of mental processes developed by Herbart, Weber, Fechner, Helmholtz, Müller, Delboeuf and others, this volume maps the beliefs, discoveries, and interactions that constitute the very origins of psychophysics and its offspring Experimental Psychology. Murray and Link expertly combine nuanced understanding of linguistic and historic factors to identify theoretical approaches to relating physicalintensities and psychological magnitudes. With an eye to interactions and influences on future work in the field, the volume illustrates the important legacy that mathematical developments in the nineteenth century have for twentieth and twenty-first century psychologists. This detailed and engaging account fills a deep gap in the history of psychology. The Creation of Scientific Psychology will appeal to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of history of psychology, psychophysics, scientific, and mathematical psychology.
"A comprehensive, thought-provoking new textbook covering the conceptual issues and theoretical developments in psychology while effortlessly bringing to life key historical milestones"--
Psychophysics is a lively account by one of experimental psychology's seminal figures of his lifelong scientific quest for general laws governing human behavior. It is a landmark work that captures the fundamental themes of Stevens's experimental research and his vision of what psycho-physics and psychology are and can be. The context of this modern classic is detailed by Lawrence Marks's pungent and highly revealing introduction. The search for a general psychophysical law—a mathematical equation relating sensation to stimulus—pervades this work, first published in 1975. Stevens covers methods of measuring human psychophysical behavior: magnitude estimation, magnitude production, and cross-modality matching are used to examine sensory mechanisms, perceptual processes, and social consensus. The wisdom in this volume lies in its exposition of an approach that can apply generally to the study of human behavior
This book chronicles the conceptual and methodological facets of psychiatry and medical psychology throughout history. There are no recent books covering so wide a time span. Many of the facets covered are pertinent to issues in general medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences today. The divergent emphases and interpretations among some of the contributors point to the necessity for further exploration and analysis.
For students of the history of psychology, this textbook connects the big ideas and key thinkers of psychology and philosophy in a cohesive theoretical narrative. Students are led to understand the relations between different schools of thought, and to connect the various thinkers, theories and facts in psychology's history.
This third edition of a classic text which was first published in 1976 is the only comprehensive, up-to-date presentation of psychophysics currently available. It has been used by undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars throughout the world and is consistently thought of as the best single source for learning the basic principles of psychophysics. The coverage of the field is comprehensive, including topics ranging from the classical methods of threshold measurement, to the modern methods of detection theory, to psychophysical scaling of sensation magnitude. The approach is one in which methods, theories, and applications are described for each experimental procedure. New features found in this third edition include: * methodological and theoretical contributions made in the field during this time period, * descriptions of adaptive procedures for measuring thresholds, context effects in scaling, theory of quantal fluctuations, multidimensional scaling, nonmetric scaling of sensory differences, and the relationship between the size of the DL and the slope of the sensation magnitude function, * new methods for measuring the observer's sensitivity of criterion and an expanded discussion of category scaling including the range frequency model and verbally labeled categories, and * methods used to control the observer's nonlinear use of numbers in magnitude estimation such as line-length scaling, magnitude matching, master scaling, and category-ratio scaling.