Review of How people change.

Reviews the book, How people change by Rebecca Curtis and George Stricker (see record 1991-98045-000). This book, subtitled "Inside and Outside Therapy," brings together knowledgeable and thoughtful people from the practitioner domains of clinical/counseling psychology and similarly scholarly individuals from other areas of psychology (such as industrial/organizational and social psychology). Reading this book called to mind a time when we used to consider psychology a single discipline with areas of specialization, not the fragmented puzzle whose pieces do not appear to fit together. The attempts to integrate the ideas related to behavior change are reminiscent of Dollard and Miller's attempts to blend Freudian theory with the data and methodology of learning theory; Rotter's (1954) attempt to incorporate concepts from both learning theory and Lewinian models of social interaction into a theory for clinical psychology. This book serves as evidence that reports of the demise of an integrated body of knowledge we call psychology have been greatly exaggerated. This work will appeal to the careful, thoughtful reader, one who is interested in extrapolating to the larger issues relevant to the issue of how human behavior changes. Curtis and Stricker, following the trail set by integrationists like C. R. Snyer and John Harvey, are to be commended for their work on this volume and for their own written contributions to it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Performance psychology in action: A casebook for working with athletes, performing artists, business leaders, and professionals in high-risk occupations.

Reviews the book, Performance psychology in action: A casebook for working with athletes, performing artists, business leaders, and professionals in high-risk occupations edited by Kate F. Hays (see record 2009-05799-000). Kate Hays has accomplished an admirable task in bringing together a collective of prominent performance practitioners to illustrate the diverse applications of performance psychology. Drawing on specific client examples from across a variety of performance domains, the authors use a case study approach to illustrate the process of helping clients work through a range of performance issues. In doing so, the book offers its readers the privileged opportunity of being a fly on the wall, placing them in the room with the performance practitioners and their clients. In addition, readers also benefit from the running commentary offered by each of the authors as they elaborate on their client assessments and chosen courses of action. In terms of scope, the book explores four performance domains: sports, performing arts, business, and high-risk occupations. The book is practical in nature, providing a snapshot of the practise of performance psychology. I would not, however, call this a “how-to” book. Rather, it is an illustration of how one can apply the principles of performance psychology when working with a varied clientele. Regarding its place in an academic setting, I would recommend that the book be used as a companion to texts that are more heavily weighted in theory and research. Paired with such texts, this book could serve to bridge the science–practise gap and also to demystify the intervention process for psychology students. Because the book presumes prior knowledge of therapeutic principles, it may be more suited to practitioners who are curious about performance psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Undergraduate writing in psychology: Learning to tell the scientific story.

Reviews the book, Undergraduate writing in psychology: Learning to tell the scientific story by R. Eric Landrum (see record 2008-03689-000). This review is written from the perspective of a student who enrolled in a course on academic writing and a professor who taught the course. From the student's perspective, Landrum covers all the bases, from the reason psychologists write scientifically to the proper way to write a notecard. However, she feels that the book is too basic, and that students will not feel that they learned anything new from it. From the professor's perspective, the book covers the basics of writing empirical papers and review papers in APA style. However, the book's difficulty level is very low, which may say a lot about the audience for psychology textbooks. The dilemma for Landrum is to decide which audience to write for: The best students don't need the book's basic points, and the worst students won't read it. Landrum's book may be the best of the APA Paper books: It's more original and more effective than its competitors. Storytelling is a good model for research articles, and Landrum nicely develops the model throughout the book. Despite its storytelling theme, however, the book recommends hiding the storyteller: students should sound objective, formal, and detached--in a word, boring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Blackwell handbook of early childhood development.

Reviews the book, The Blackwell handbook of early childhood development edited by Kathleen McCartney and Deborah Phillips (see record 2006-04286-000). This book can serve as a useful guide for advanced undergraduate students to approach child development research at a deeper level than that of a typical textbook. Although some chapters lack sufficient depth for the advanced psychology graduate student, a large portion of the handbook will provide the novice reader with the opportunity to get acquainted with current issues in the science of early child development, and may introduce the intermediate reader to useful background knowledge in unfamiliar fields of interest. The chapters in this handbook series as a whole also serve as a highly useful source of information for lecture preparations for faculty teaching outside their core area of concentration. Chapters are consistently brief, clear, and well written. Overall, this book offers a valuable intermediary reading option between the simplicity of a standard textbook and the detailed accounts of books on specific developmental spheres. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Directions in Soviet social psychology.

Reviews the book, Directions in Soviet social psychology, edited by Lloyd H. Strickland (1984). This book is about collectives: not just any organized group that might be so called in the Soviet Union, but groups that have attained (or are in the process of attaining) a genuine collectivity, internal cohesiveness, or solidarity. The editor has put together ten chapters, each by one or more of the Soviet Union's most prominent social psychologists. The contributions were written with a view to giving Western psychologists--in as nonpolemic a manner as possible--an understanding of the various problem areas in Soviet social psychology, of where they have come from historically, of what Soviet psychologists see as the major issues, of how they do research, and of some of their findings and conclusions. The contributions appear diverse. They deal with subjects as varied as the self-concept, communication, cognitive processes, person perception, self-discipline, management, and industrial psychology. Beneath the diversity, however, emerges a common preoccupation with the collective, its development and dynamics. This unity of underlying concern, in turn, lends the book a remarkable coherence. The book is, however, not without its difficulties. The main one is a certain opacity characteristic of English translations of Russian scientific works. The editor acknowledges and discusses this problem in an afterword. He has also provided the reader with an informative preface that explains how the book came about, and each chapter is headed by a brief but helpful introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Female authority: Empowering women through psychotherapy.

Reviews the book, Female authority: Empowering women through psychotherapy by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Florence Wiedemann (see record 1987-97756-000). Young-Eisendrath and Weidemann have presented a fascinating conceptualization of the psychological development of women in this society. Jungian psychology, Greek and Roman mythology, and a feminist social perspective serve as the basis upon which the authors build. This book is not written for the lay public or beginners in the field of psychology. The concepts are quite complex. The authors draw on material from a wide variety of resources and tie it together expertly. However, they do not explain each reference in detail. An unschooled reader would be likely to lose too much of the overall idea while studying the many details. For those with a basic body of knowledge of psychology and an interest in personality development, the reviewer strongly recommends this book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Psychology in Relation to Medicine (Second edition).

Reviews the book, Psychology in Relation to Medicine (Second edition) by R. M. Mowbray and T. Ferguson Rodger. Until the relationships between psychology and medicine become less ambiguous than they are at present, books such as this are both difficult to write and difficult to review. The relationships between these two professions may be viewed in many ways, but there are two broad views prevalent. The first view sees psychology as one of the basic sciences of medicine--a basic science that is particularly relevant in the training of psychiatrists. The other view sees psychology as a discipline that runs parallel to medicine. If one were to accept the first of these views, then presumably the medical student would be required to obtain a thorough grounding in psychology. If one takes the second view of the relationship between psychology and medicine, then the medical student requires probably only one course which will give him some familiarity with the work one of his close professional colleagues will be doing. The reviewer suggests that satisfactory books for medical students will only be written and can only be written when the relationships between psychology and medicine are more precisely delineated. Whatever these relationships may be, it is likely that the books written for medicine and accepted by the medical profession for their students will be more meaty than this one. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Psychology: Pythagoras to present.

Reviews the book, Psychology: Pythagoras to present by John C. Malone (see record 2009-06783-000). This book has a very ambitious agenda, announced in its title: to trace the history of psychology from Pythagoras to the present. The book is thus a good introduction to the standard history of psychology for those new to the discipline. Overall, the book provides an interesting overview of the standard history of psychology, with many nuances not found in basic history of psychology textbooks. It must be said, however, that the specialist will find that the book lacks fine-grained detail in some chapters. Although some key debates in the history of science are discussed in the opening chapter, the author could have draw more extensively on that literature. Despite this complaint, one of the strengths of the book is that Malone makes a serious effort to dispel misconceptions about founding figures in psychology. The strength of this book is clearly as a history written for young scholars entering the discipline today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Attentional processing: The brain's art of mindfulness.

Reviews the book, Attentional processing: The brain's art of mindfulness by David LaBerge (see record 1995-97550-000). David LaBerge has crafted a book on visual attention that will be accessible and interesting to a broad audience, from students doing their first project in cognitive psychology, to accomplished researchers in the field. The goal of the book is to present a coherent cognitive-neuroscience model of attention - a framework within which one can understand the rich database of findings pertaining to visual attention. In some respects, the book is also an overview and synthesis of LaBerge's own work on spatial attention. The first half of the book covers behavioural investigations; the second half covers cognitive-neuroscience investigations. When most books in psychology are tomes with each chapter written by a different author, it was rewarding to review a scientific book that one could conveniently carry in one's hand, written from cover to cover by one author. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Elicitation of knowledge transformational reports while children write narratives.

Examined transformational or recontextualizing operations underlying the problem solving of young writers. A stimulated-recall procedure, which enabled protocol analyses to be performed on participants' in situ comments, was employed with 53 12-yr-olds to examine their reports of their own writing processes. A narrative-writing task was used as a context for these children in which to comment on their writing as they wrote. The protocols of the sessions were recorded, transcribed, and evaluated for evidence of transformative problem-solving behaviors (largely as identified by C. Bereiter and M. Scardamalia, 1987), including: extended start-up time, time-monitoring, task completion time, note-making, oral reports of planning, audience awareness, and revision of story plans, and the use of a range of sources for story ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Action and insight.

Reviews the book, Action and insight by Paul L. Wachtel (see record 1988-97486-000). Action and insight is a compendium of Paul Wachtel's most important papers. Wachtel's capacity to move from personality theory to clinical theory to clinical technique, with each informing the others, is probably unequaled by any other contemporary psychologist. His reflections on personality are in noteworthy contrast to so much contemporary work in personality psychology. Wachtel begins the book with a series of chapters on theory, in which he challenges several aspects of psychodynamic thinking, and lays out his theory of "cyclical psychodynamics." Wachtel also challenges the "motivational omnipotence" of psychoanalytic theory, which underemphasizes cognitive and situational determinants of behavior. Wachtel's suggestions for clinical technique flow organically from his theoretical position. If the cornerstone of a theory of psychopathology is repression--not knowing--then the cornerstone of treatment must be insight--knowing. If, however, another cornerstone of the theory is anxiety, then action and insight become intertwined, and a more active intervention style may be necessary. Action and insight is a cogent, sophisticated, clearly written book that challenges clinicians from every point of view. This is integrative work at its best. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of A way of looking at things: Selected papers of Erik H. Erickson 1930-1980.

Reviews the book, A way of looking at things: Selected papers of Erik H. Erickson 1930-1980 edited by Stephen Schlein (1987). Schlein has done a commendable job of bringing together into one volume a rich body of Erik Erikson's less-known writings. The result is a very lengthy book that lends itself more to leisurely perusal than critical review. Schlein has arranged 47 papers, 12 of which appear in print for the first time, many more of which have been hidden away in obscure publications, into the eight thematic sections of which the book comprises. Everyone broadly interested in the history of psychoanalysis, the evolution of ego psychology, and the role played by Erik H. Erikson in each should enjoy reading this book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Applications of personal construct theory.

Reviews the book, Applications of personal construct theory edited by Jack Adams-Webber and James C. Mancuso (1983). Jack Adams-Webber and James Mancuso have edited a book well worth studying. Almost any psychologist will derive some benefit from the research methods used and the results reported. Most psychologists will also be encouraged to discover that there is renewed hope for a successful experimental approach to a number of research questions in personality and abnormal psychology. Applications of personal construct theory is a collection of papers presented at the Fourth International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology held at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, in the summer of 1981. For this volume the editors have chosen all five invited addresses and nineteen selected papers from the more than eighty items of the complete Congress programme. The selection that they have made is varied and contains some excellent chapters. The book's title is somewhat misleading, however, in that there are chapters dealing with theoretical questions and historical material, as well as those that can properly be regarded as applications of personal construct theory. Apart from its general interest, this book would be a possible text for a senior undergraduate course. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Progress in Self Psychology, Volume 2.

Similar to the 1st volume of Progress in Self Psychology, this 2nd volume is a collection of invited papers and papers from national conferences devoted to this area of psychoanalysis. According to Goldberg, these volumes are intended, perhaps temporarily, to serve as a substitute for a journal in self-psychology. Loosely divided into sections on theory, clinical problems, development, and applied psychoanalysis, the collection serves as a sampler of contemporary issues, but does not provide a unified structure for theory and practice that some readers may expect of want from a cutting-edge book. The one issue that rings clearly throughout the book is how self psychology compares and contrasts to classical psychoanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Critical psychology: An introduction.

Reviews the book, Critical psychology: An introduction edited by Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky (see record 1997-08663-000). The subtitle of this book implies that it is written for readers unfamiliar with critical approaches to psychology, but it should attract the attention of the already-critical professional as well as the beginner. The student making a first acquaintance with critical psychology will find this book to be a valuable primer, one that synthesizes a large amount of information while avoiding much of the jargon that often weighs down critical methodologies. The book consists of 19 chapters, organized into four sections. Section one, "Critical Overview," gives a general overview of critical methodologies. Section two, "Critical Arenas," is a collection of critiques of established fields in psychology. A third section on "Critical Theories" suggests experimental and novel ways to study psychology, such as hermeneutics, discourse analysis, and feminist research. In the final section, "Critical Reflections," one can perhaps best see the editors' commitment to keeping critical psychology an open system. The editors' decision to end the volume with a reflexive, critical examination of itself, rather than a simple summary, is a large part of what holds this book together. Even if one admires the editors' ability to unite so many different perspectives under the common banner of critical psychology, they have not done so in a manner that treats all psychologies equally. Yet, despite this minor blemish, the book remains a solid piece of work, one that is often inspiring. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Treating Attachment Pathology.

Reviews the book, Treating Attachment Pathology by Jon Mills (see record 2005-04683-000). Many books written on attachment pathology focus on the assessment and treatment of children, and provide very little information on attachment difficulties found in adults and adolescents. This book addresses this neglected area by exploring attachment disorders and psychopathology in adults. As such, Mills' work is a welcome addition to the literature. It goes beyond simply linking adult psychopathology to early attachment difficulties. Mills' work provides a theoretical framework for understanding attachment from a psychodynamic/psychoanalytic perspective and then uses this theoretical framework to discuss the aetiology and treatment of adult disorders. Mills aims to make Treating Attachment Pathology accessible to the expert and novice alike. He does this by extensively reviewing the literature for the expert and by making the literature accessible to the novice by providing case examples. Mills himself, however, acknowledges that at times the literature and language is "dense and esoteric." To counteract this Mills makes extensive use of case examples and thereby makes complex and theoretically dense concepts accessible. This is one of the real strengths of Mills' book and it is done with great skill. Although Mills is working from a psychoanalytic/psychodynamic perspective, this book offers much to clinicians from all perspectives. Mills' frank discussion of his own mistakes, and his invitations to critique his therapeutic decisions and techniques, provide a fresh and welcome addition to the literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Educational psychology: Reflection for action (Canadian edition).

Reviews the book, Educational psychology: Reflection for action (Canadian edition) (2008). Targeted toward aspiring teachers, this book provides an overview of the content knowledge germane to school-age education in Canada and attempts to foster the types of procedural skills and dispositions necessary to gather and evaluate evidence about one’s own classroom practises and about the diverse array of Canadian students in those classrooms. The book is well written, in language that is clear and accessible to preservice teachers at the undergraduate level. For a more advanced audience, the book also provides an excellent model of how to integrate goals of content, procedural, and disposition acquisition. To these ends, each chapter includes pedagogical features that help readers activate and connect their prior knowledge, skills, and attitudes with those of more expert teachers operating in real classrooms (e.g., samples of classroom life to ground understanding in experience, models of expert analyses following knowledge acquisition, well-timed invitations to engage in reflection during learning). Particular attention is paid to the ecologically valid activity of reasoning about what students know on the basis of what they say and do. In addition to lists of key concepts, end-of-chapter exercises, and a glossary, a number of supplements and additional resources for instructors and students also are mentioned. A parallel e-version of the text, complete with interactive features, is available online at no extra cost. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer psychology: An introduction.

Reviews the book, Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer psychology: An introduction by Victoria Clarke et al., (see record 2010-08660-000). The goal of this book is to introduce readers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) psychology, which encompasses many different aspects of the lives of LGBTQ people, including prejudice and discrimination, parenting and families, coming out, and identity development. While no small undertaking, disseminating this knowledge is crucial in order for the field of psychology to be a true “psychology of people” that examines the experiences of all people and is open to diverse ways of living. The authors succeeded in including nearly every major topic in LGBTQ psychology while continually inviting the reader to engage critically. The book is not only well written but designed in a way that makes it an easy read. Along with the usual chapter summaries and questions for discussion, pedagological features include key researcher and key study boxes that enable familiarity with cutting-edge thinking in the field. Being that they represent different interests and areas of expertise, the authors deliver varied perspectives and approaches. One of the greatest strengths of this book is its applicability to a wide audience, from students to practicing psychologists and researchers. As a whole, this book provides realistic ways of creating change, fosters understanding, and challenges the reader to be wary of the ways in which traditional norms can be harmful to LGBTQ people. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)