Psychology for Beginners

Psychology for Beginners traces the science of mind from its early concern with the soul to a broad modern study of consciousness, behavior, and human individuality. It surveys the field's many branches—animal, educational, individual, social, abnormal, dream, subconscious, Oriental, supernormal, religious, political, and business psychology—while contrasting introspection, experiment, and behaviorism in a lively, accessible way. Along the way, it presents the mind as a unique inner world shaped by sensation, memory, emotion, imagination, self-awareness, and will, and asks how closely brain and mind are linked. The book then guides readers through the machinery of experience: the senses, nerve currents, perception, instinct, and emotion; the growth of spatial and temporal judgment; attention, discrimination, association, and imagination; and the mysteries of illusion, hallucination, and dream. It explores memory as both practical skill and philosophical puzzle, then turns to reasoning as humanity's highest intellectual power, before closing with speech and the origins of language. Clear, ambitious, and wide-ranging, it offers a compact tour of psychology's most intriguing frontiers. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.