Psychology: Core Concepts, 8th edition

• Integrated within the narrative, interactives and videos empower students to engage with concepts and take an active role in learning. REVEL's unique presentation of media as an intrinsic part of course content brings the hallmark features of Pearson's bestselling titles to life. REVEL's media interactives have been designed to be completed quickly, and its videos are brief, so students stay focused and on task.
• Located throughout REVEL, quizzing affords students opportunities to check their understanding at regular intervals before moving on.
• REVEL’s fully mobile learning experience enables students to read and interact with course material on the devices they use, anywhere and anytime. Responsive design allows students to access REVEL on their tablet devices and smart phones, with content displayed clearly in both portrait and landscape view.
• Highlighting, note taking, and a glossary let students read and study however they like. Educators can add notes for students, too, including reminders or study tips.

• REVEL’s assignment calendar allows educators to indicate precisely which readings must be completed on which dates. This clear, detailed schedule helps students stay on task by eliminating any ambiguity as to which material will be covered during each class. And when students know what is expected of them, they're better motivated to keep up.
• REVEL’s performance dashboard lets educators monitor class assignment completion as well as individual student achievement. It offers actionable information that helps educators intersect with their students in meaningful ways, such as points earned on quizzes and tests and time on task. Of particular note, the trending column reveals whether students' grades are improving or declining — which helps educators identify students who might need help to stay on track.

Hallmark features help students navigate course material

• Focuses on Student Learning. Strong pedagogical features guide students through each chapter. These include:
  • The Chapter Problem. A story, posing a problem to capture student interest, launches each chapter. Then, as the narrative unfolds, solutions to the problem are revealed, weaving the chapter together into the framework provided by the story.
  • Core Concepts. Each major section focuses on an essential idea called a Core Concept, which serves as the hub around which the ideas, terms, and research are organized. These Core Concepts provide a scaffolding that makes new material easier for students to remember.
  • Critical thinking. A strong emphasis on critical thinking is woven throughout every chapter. Critical-thinking guidelines are emphasized, and then modeled in the way contrasting theories are discussed, leading students through the critical-thinking process as they digest and analyze the material. In addition, every chapter closes with a section that models critical thinking on a "hot topic" in the field of psychology. Examples include the question of whether childhood vaccines are related to autism, extrasensory perception, recovered memories, lie detectors, and evidence-based practice in psychotherapy.
    • Critical Thinking applications at the end of each chapter help readers become better consumers of scientific information and build upon the critical-thinking skills introduced in the first chapter.
    • Do It Yourself learning applications offer simple demonstrations of psychological principles and allow students to actively apply psychological concepts alone or in groups, further enhancing their understanding.
• Explores Research. Psychology Matters exercises, within each chapter section, explore connections between psychology and everyday life. These exercises provide the big picture of psychology and promote critical thinking by helping readers evaluate many of the psychological ideas they will encounter in the popular press.
• Utilizes the DSM-5. The Eighth Edition reflects changes to the DSM-5, so students have access to the most up-to-date information on psychological disorders and treatments.
• Appeals to today’s students.
  • Intelligent, yet student-friendly. Psychology: Core Concepts hits the “sweet spot” between encyclopedic tomes and brief books. The authors thoroughly explain the essential ideas and cutting-edge concepts every psychology student should know in an engaging, learner-centered voice — without talking down to the reader. Also mindful of non-majors, they deliberately incorporate examples and references to popular culture as well as to other academic fields including music, art, literature, history, chemistry, and biology.
  • Culture and diversity. The authors consider the psychology of culture, gender, socioeconomic status, and other forms of diversity to be an essential element of the field’s knowledge. Accordingly, every chapter addresses these issues. Students will study stereotype threat, cultural differences in attachment and parenting style, perceptual differences between Americans and Asians, a West African perspective on mental illness, gender differences in sexuality, and differing cultural views on the need for achievement – just to name a few.
  • Philip Zimbardo. Reading his social psychology chapter is like taking a personal class from the best-known psychologist in America.

New and updated content in each chapter reflects the latest advances in science

Knowledge in psychology is exploding, and the authors have updated the book by adding hundreds of new references to make it meaningful and memorable. (Some old references have also been judiciously deleted.) Highlights of updated content include the following:

• NEW! Epigenetics, and how experiences change gene expression — including the effects of touch, exercise, nutrition, and toxins on stress, health, and development (Chapter 2).
• UPDATED! The “what” and “where” pathways in the brain (Chapter 3).
• EXPANDED! Coverage of token economies in all levels of education — from kindergarten to college — as well as home and clinical uses (Chapter 4).
• NEW! The neuroscience of PTSD and memory (Chapter 5).
• NEW! Carol Dweck’s work on fixed vs. growth mindsets (Chapter 6).
• NEW! The latest research on neural development in early life, including plasticity, pruning and possible connection to autism, and sensitive periods (Chapter 7).
• NEW! New Hollywood movies on Milgram’s research, Experimenter, 2015, and Zimbardo’s prison study, The Stanford Prison Experiment, 2015 (Chapter 11).

• Integrated within the narrative, interactives and videos empower students to engage with concepts and take an active role in learning. REVEL's unique presentation of media as an intrinsic part of course content brings the hallmark features of Pearson's bestselling titles to life. REVEL's media interactives have been designed to be completed quickly, and its videos are brief, so students stay focused and on task.
• Located throughout REVEL, quizzing affords students opportunities to check their understanding at regular intervals before moving on.
• REVEL’s fully mobile learning experience enables students to read and interact with course material on the devices they use, anywhere and anytime. Responsive design allows students to access REVEL on their tablet devices and smart phones, with content displayed clearly in both portrait and landscape view.
• Highlighting, note taking, and a glossary let students read and study however they like. Educators can add notes for students, too, including reminders or study tips.

• REVEL’s assignment calendar allows educators to indicate precisely which readings must be completed on which dates. This clear, detailed schedule helps students stay on task by eliminating any ambiguity as to which material will be covered during each class. And when students know what is expected of them, they're better motivated to keep up.
• REVEL’s performance dashboard lets educators monitor class assignment completion as well as individual student achievement. It offers actionable information that helps educators intersect with their students in meaningful ways, such as points earned on quizzes and tests and time on task. Of particular note, the trending column reveals whether students' grades are improving or declining — which helps educators identify students who might need help to stay on track.

Highlights of Chapter-by-Chapter Revisions

Chapter 1: Mind, Behavior, and Psychological Science

• The opportunities and ethical issues in using Social Media Websites (SMWs) for research.
• Applying Critical Thinking Guidelines to the issue of whether childhood vaccinations cause autism.
• UPDATED! Careers in psychology, including environmental psychology and geropsychology.

Chapter 2: Biopsychology, Neuroscience, and Human Nature

• Epigenetics, and how experiences change gene expression — including the effects of touch, exercise, nutrition, and toxins on stress, health, and development.
• New findings on plasticity, including the effects of porn on the brain.
• Traumatic brain injury and plasticity
• New research on the cerebellum’s important role in cerebral functions; facilitating emotional, sensory, and cognitive functioning; and possibly even in schizophrenia.
• The latest in brain implants.
• Critically thinking about mirror neurons.

Chapter 3: Sensation and Perception

• Understanding how Müller cells tunnel light through the layers of the retina.
• New research on pain.
• UPDATED! The psychology of hearing loss.
• UPDATED! The “what” and “where” pathways in the brain.
• Many new illustrations and illusions.

Chapter 4: Learning and Human Nurture

• Expanded coverage of classical conditioning in advertising — humor, product placement, celebrity endorsement, evaluative conditioning, and more.
• Classical conditioning techniques applied to wildlife management and conservation.
• EXPANDED! Coverage of token economies in all levels of education — from kindergarten to college — as well as home and clinical uses.
• UPDATED! Media and video-game violence.
• New information and examples of social learning in the animal world.
• Applications of social learning theory to solve social problems (family planning, HIV awareness, adult literacy, etc.)
• New findings examining how social interactions promote political actions.

Chapter 5: Memory

• A reworking of the chapter to emphasize the application of memory to study strategies and to students’ lives.
• The biological basis of transience — how remembering can actually cause forgetting.
• New research demonstrating that prospective memory accounts for half of memory loss, and offering strategies for overcoming this problem.
• The neuroscience of PTSD and memory.

Chapter 6: Thinking and Intelligence

• Use of analogies in engineering and marketing.
• New examples of functional fixedness, mental set, hindsight bias, and anchoring.
• Nobel-laureate Daniel Kahneman’s 2-stage theory of thinking.
• UPDATED! Creativity, including Shelley Carson’s work on the minds of highly creative people.
• New findings on intelligence, including changes in the Flynn Effect.
• The DSM-5 and Intellectual Disability.
• Theory of mind in animals.
• The effects of poverty and nutrition on neural development.
• Carol Dweck’s work on fixed vs. growth mindsets.
• The newest findings on stereotype threat and performance, including interventions.
• What the research reveals about brain training programs like Lumosity.

Chapter 7: Development Over the Lifespan

• The latest research on neural development in early life, including plasticity, pruning and possible connection to autism, and sensitive periods.
• Oxytocin in infant massage and optimal development.
• Effects of poverty and nutrition on development.
• UPDATED and EXPANDED! Coverage of ADHD, including a positive viewpoint.
• UPDATED! Research on body image and sexuality in adolescence.
• Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement, and its application to understanding immoral actions (including bullying and cyberbullying).
• Zimbardo’s work on the Demise of Guys – challenges young men are experiencing in the 21^st century.
• The sexualization of girls.

Chapter 8: States of Consciousness

• The newest research on patients’ awareness during coma and persistent vegetative states, and what family and medical professionals can do to help a person recover from this state.
• UPDATED! The default network in daydreaming.
• REVISED and UPDATED! Dreaming, including the latest research on dreaming and memory, as well as cultural perspectives on dreaming.
• The latest data on trends in drug use in teens and adults.
• Medical uses of marijuana.

Chapter 9: Motivation and Emotion

• How social and emotional learning enhances student achievement.
• The new psychology of pride.
• Emotional influences on memory.
• UPDATED! The biopsychology and evolutionary psychology of weight control and of sexuality.
• UPDATED! Facial expressions of emotion.
• UPDATED! Walter Mischel and his “marshmallow test.”

Chapter 10: Personality

• All major theories of personality, organized around a case study of Mary Calkins, pioneering female psychologist.
• Personality disorders introduced here (and revisited in the Disorders chapter).
• Understanding people who engage in unusual behavior, such as mass murder.
• Big Five traits related to US geography and Facebook user styles.
• Positivity as the core of personality and well-being.
• UPDATED! Presentation of the Myers-Briggs (MBTI).
• An existential approach to understanding personality, and logo therapy.
• UPDATED! Research on hardiness and grit.
• Time Perspectives as a personality style.
• How adverse economic conditions, like unemployment, impact personality functioning.
• The role of contextualism in understanding cultural shaping of personality.
• Uniqueness of individual personality — much like fingerprints and snowflakes.

Chapter 11: Social Psychology

• New Hollywood movies on Milgram’s research, Experimenter, 2015, and Zimbardo’s prison study, The Stanford Prison Experiment, 2015.
• Heroic defiance of evil situations, with powerful examples.
• Updated examples of Milgram’s obedience power effects and recent real-world instances.
• EXPANDED! Dehumanization and its role in recent genocides.
• Implicit racial bias in criminal sentencing.
• EXPANDED! Treatment of system power.
• EXPANDED and UPDATED! Coverage of bullying.
• EXPANDED and UPDATED! Treatment of terrorism.
• Social pain from various sources being comparable to physical pain.

Chapter 12: Psychological Disorders

• The NIMH and other powerful groups re-conceptualizing mental disorders (just as the new DSM-5 came out) along the lines suggested by brain research.
• Epigenetics playing a role in mental disorder.
• Hallucinations influenced by culture — the voices can be comforting for some.
• A biological marker for schizophrenia, at last?
• Autism as a possible failure to “prune” synapses in the first few years of life.

Chapter 13: Therapies for Psychological Disorders

• New, nontraditional therapies: teletherapy, exercise, and culturally adapted therapies.
• Reasons for the increased use of biomedical therapies.
• Ethical debate: Use of memory-numbing drugs for PTSD and for soldiers in combat.
• UPDATED! Evidence-based practice.
• UPDATED! Electro-convulsive therapy.

Chapter 14: Stress, Health, and Well-Being

• Social rejection (being shunned as “silent bullying”), with a personal account by Zimbardo.
• PTSD and the new research on neurobiological effects of blast exposure, as well as effective treatment with time perspective therapy.
• The negative effects of growing up in poverty on brain functioning.
• EXPANDED and UPDATED! Burnout and job stress.
• Frankel’s search for meaning in existence.
• The power of physical exercise in mental and physical health.
• The failure of national health promotion campaigns.
• Happiness research and personal applications.