Logic
A Concise Introduction to Logic is an introduction to formal logic suitable for undergraduates taking a general education course in logic or critical thinking, and is accessible and useful to any interested in gaining a basic understanding of logic. This text takes the unique approach of teaching logic through intellectual history; the author uses examples from important and celebrated arguments in philosophy to illustrate logical principles. The text also includes a basic introduction to findings of advanced logic. As indicators of where the student could go next with logic, the book closes with an overview of advanced topics, such as the axiomatic method, set theory, Peano arithmetic, and modal logic. Throughout, the text uses brief, concise chapters that readers will find easy to read and to review.
Craig DeLancey
Open SUNY Textbooks
Textbook
Psychology
Have you ever wondered whether the violence you see on television affects your behavior? Are you more likely to behave aggressively in real life after watching people behave violently in dramatic situations on the screen? Or, could seeing fictional violence actually get aggression out of your system, causing you to be more peaceful? How are children influenced by the media they are exposed to? A psychologist interested in the relationship between behavior and exposure to violent images might ask these very questions.
Susan Harvey
DELTA COLLEGE ELEARNING OFFICE
Imagine all of your thoughts as if they were physical entities, swirling rapidly inside your mind. How is it possible that the brain is able to move from one thought to the next in an organized, orderly fashion? The brain is endlessly perceiving, processing, planning, organizing, and remembering—it is always active. Yet, you don’t notice most of your brain’s activity as you move throughout your daily routine. This is only one facet of the complex processes involved in cognition. Simply put, cognition is thinking, and it encompasses the processes associated with perception, knowledge, problem solving, judgment, language, and memory. Scientists who study cognition are searching for ways to understand how we integrate, organize, and utilize our conscious cognitive experiences without being aware of all of the unconscious work that our brains are doing
College of the Canyons
Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World
The laboratory experiment is traditionally considered the “gold standard” in psychology research. This is because only laboratory experiments can clearly separate cause from effect and therefore establish causality. Despite this unique strength, it is also clear that a scientific field that is mainly based on controlled laboratory studies ends up lopsided. Specifically, it accumulates a lot of knowledge on what can happen—under carefully isolated and controlled circumstances—but it has little to say about what actually does happen under the circumstances that people actually encounter in their daily lives.
Matthias R. Mehl
Noba
Welcome to the study of human growth and development, commonly referred to as the “womb to tomb” course because it is the story of our journeys from conception to death. Human development is the study of how we change over time. Think about how you were 5, 10, or even 15 years ago. In what ways have you changed? In what ways 7 | Development a l Psychology - College of the Canyons have you remained the same? You have probably changed physically; perhaps you've grown taller and become heavier. But you may have also experienced changes in the way you think and solve problems. Cognitive change is noticeable when we compare how 6 year olds, 16 year olds, and 46 year olds think and reason, for example. Their thoughts about others and the world are probably quite different. Consider friendship for instance. The 6 year old may think that a friend is someone whom you can play and have fun with. A 16 year old may seek friends who can help them gain status or popularity. And the 46 year old may have acquaintances, but rely more on family members to do things with and confide in.
Neil Walker , Fredrick Bobola
forallX: an Introduction to Formal Logic
Formal Logic
Logic is the business of evaluating arguments, sorting good ones from bad ones. In everyday language, we sometimes use the word ‘argument’ to refer to belligerent shouting matches. If you and a friend have an argument in this sense, things are not going well between the two of you. In logic, we are not interested in the teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling kind of argument. A logical argument is structured to give someone a reason to believe some conclusion.
P.D. Magnus
University at Albany, State University of New York
General Psychology
The NOBA Project is a growing collection of expert-authored, open-licensed modules in psychology, funded by the Diener Education Fund. From these open modules, Tori Kearns and Deborah Lee created an arranged open textbook for her introductory psychology class. This textbook was created under a Round One ALG Textbook Transformation Grant.
Tori Kearns
Deborah Lee
University System of Georgia
Textbooks
This module provides an introduction and overview of the historical development of the science and practice of psychology in America. Ever-increasing specialization within the field often makes it difficult to discern the common roots from which the field of psychology has evolved. By exploring this shared past, students will be better able to understand how psychology has developed into the discipline we know today.
independent
Functional Assessment
Education
Instruction in Functional Assessment introduces learners to functional assessment (FA), which includes a variety of assessment approaches (indirect, observational, and experimental) for identifying the cause of an individual’s challenging behavior for the purpose of designing effective treatments. FA is mandated by federal law and is a recognized empirically based approach to treatment of individuals with challenging behaviors (e.g., disruptive, self-injurious, and aggressive behaviors). Instruction in FA is essential for students who will one day enter professions as educators, psychologists, social workers, counselors, or mental health professionals. The purpose of this textbook is to provide instruction in FA skills for pre-professionals in the fields of education and psychology. This supplemental resource provides the context, background, and knowledge to facilitate students’ acquisition of the methods, decision-making, and skills involved in conducting FA. Each chapter begins with focus questions designed to promote reflective thinking and ends with discussion questions. To promote application of FA in diverse situations and teach important lessons, case studies of individuals with challenging behaviors, interactive activities, and opportunities for practice are embedded in the chapters. Moreover, the text includes the ingredients to facilitate students’ role play and rehearsal of appropriate FA skills while working in cooperative groups and using performance-based training.
Marcie Desrochers
Moira Fallon
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. The word “psychology” comes from the Greek words “psyche,” meaning life, and “logos,” meaning explanation. Psychology is a popular major for students, a popular topic in the public media, and a part of our everyday lives. Television shows such as Dr. Phil feature psychologists who provide personal advice to those with personal or family difficulties. Crime dramas such as CSI, Lie to Me, and others feature the work of forensic psychologists who use psychological principles to help solve crimes. And many people have direct knowledge about psychology because they have visited psychologists, for instance, school counselors, family therapists, and religious, marriage, or bereavement counselors.
http://www.openwa.org
Introduction to Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind (mental processes) and behavior. The word “psychology” comes from the Greek words “psyche,” meaning life, and “logos,” meaning explanation. Because we are frequently exposed to the work of psychologists in our everyday lives, we all have an idea about what psychology is and what psychologists do.
Charles Stangor
College of Lake County Faculty
When you teach Introduction to Psychology, do you find it difficult — much harder than teaching classes in statistics or research methods? Do you easily give a lecture on the sympathetic nervous system, a lecture on Piaget, and a lecture on social cognition, but struggle with linking these topics together for the student? Do you feel like you are presenting a laundry list of research findings rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge? Have you wondered how to ensure your course is relevant to your students? Introduction to Psychology utilizes the dual theme of behavior and empiricism to make psychology relevant to intro students.
University of Minnesota
Learning Statistics with R: A tutorial for psychology students and other beginners
Learning Statistics
Learning Statistics with R covers the contents of an introductory statistics class, as typically taught to undergraduate psychology students, focusing on the use of the R statistical software. The book discusses how to get started in R as well as giving an introduction to data manipulation and writing scripts. From a statistical perspective, the book discusses descriptive statistics and graphing first, followed by chapters on probability theory, sampling and estimation, and null hypothesis testing. After introducing the theory, the book covers the analysis of contingency tables, t-tests, ANOVAs and regression. Bayesian statistics are covered at the end of the book.
Danielle Navarro
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks
LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT: A Psychological Perspective
LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT, Psychological Perspective
Developmental Psychology, also known as Human Development or Lifespan Development, is the scientific study of ways in which people change, as well as stay the same, from conception to death. You will no doubt discover in the course of studying that the field examines change across a broad range of topics. These include physical and other psychophysiological processes, cognition, language, and psychosocial development, including the impact of family and peers. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence and more recently, aging and the entire life span. Previously, the message was once you are 25, your development is essentially completed. Our academic knowledge of the lifespan has changed and although there is still less research on adulthood than on childhood, adulthood is gaining increasing attention. This is particularly true now that the large cohort known as the baby boomers are beginning to enter late adulthood.
Martha Lally, Suzanne Valentine-French
Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology
Phenomenology
Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism. The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to 'rehabilitate' the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the 'lived' body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body’s power to act and exist.
Tom Sparrow
Open Humanities Press, London
Social psychology
Have you ever had trouble teaching the various topics of social psychology and fitting them together to form a coherent field? Unnamed Author felt like he was presenting a laundry list of ideas, research studies, and phenomena, rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge. He wondered how his students could be expected to remember and understand the many phenomena that social psychologists study? How could they tell what was most important? It was then that he realized a fresh approach to a Social Psychology textbook was needed to structure and integrate student learning; thus, Principles of Social Psychology was born. This textbook is based on a critical thinking approach, and its aim is to get students thinking actively and conceptually – with a greater focus on the forest than the trees. Yes, there are right and wrong answers, but the answers are not the only thing.
Independent
Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International Edition
Social
psychology
Principles of Social Psychology-1st International Edition was adapted by Rajiv Jhangiani and Hammond Tarry from Charles Stagnor’s textbook Principles of Social Psychology. For information about what was changed in this adaptation, refer to the Copyright statement at the bottom of the home page. The adaptation is a part of the B.C. Open Textbook project. In October 2012, the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 highest-enrolled first and second year subject areas in the province’s public post-secondary system. Open Textbooks are open educational resources (OER); they are instructional resources created and shared in ways so that more people have access to them. That’s a different model than traditionally copyrighted materials. OER are defined as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others” (Hewlett Foundation). Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats.
Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani
Dr. Hammond Tarry
Charles University
Psychology, Research Methods
The research methods course is among the most frequently required in the psychology major—and with good reason. Consider that a cross-cultural psychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist meeting at a professional conference might know next to nothing about the phenomena and theories that are portant in each other’s work. Yet they would certainly both know about the difference between an experiment and a correlational study, the function of independent and dependent variables, the importance of reliability and validity in psychological measurement, and the need for replication in psychological research. In other words, psychologists’ research methods are at the very core of their discipline. At the same time, most students majoring in psychology do not go on to graduate school. And among those who do, only a fraction become cross-cultural psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, or researchers of any sort. The rest pursue careers in clinical practice, social services, and a wide variety of fields that may be completely unrelated to psychology
Paul C. Price
https:lardbucket.org
Social Psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how we feel about, think about, and behave toward the people around us and how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors are influenced by those people. As this definition suggests, the subject matter of social psychology is very broad and can be found in just about everything that we do every day. Social psychologists study why we are often helpful to other people and why we may at other times be unfriendly or aggressive. Social psychologists study both the benefits of having good relationships with other people and the costs of being lonely. Social psychologists study what factors lead people to purchase one product rather than another, how men and women behave differently in social settings, how juries work together to make important group decisions, and what makes some people more likely to recycle and engage in other environmentally friendly behaviors than others
Success
College Success has a student-friendly format arranged to help you develop the essential skills and provide the information you need to succeed in college. This is not a textbook full of theory and extensive detail that merely discusses student success; rather, this is a how-to manual for succeeding in college. The book provides realistic, practical guidance ranging from study skills to personal health, from test taking to managing time and money. Furthermore, College Success is accessible—information is presented concisely and as simply as possible. College Success has the following features to help you achieve your goals: Each chapter asks you to evaluate yourself because success starts with recognizing your strengths and weaknesses, your hopes and desires, and your own personal, individual realities. You’ll develop your own goals based on these self-assessments, determining what success in college really means for you as an individual
Bruce Beiderwell
-http://lardbucket.org/
Supporting Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities & Mental Illness
Intellectual Disabilities
Mental Illness
Research leading to the creation of this book was funded by Alberta Health Services and Alberta Human Services as part of the Collaborative Research Grant Initiative: Mental Wellness in Seniors and Persons with Disabilities and by the Athabasca University Academic Research Fund. We are grateful to these funders and to the dually diagnosed individuals and their caregivers who participated in our study. Our research participants asked for a resource that summarizes essential background information and key points. Thank you for your encouragement as we extended the original project. Throughout our process of writing this book, individuals from the fields of nursing, psychiatric nursing, disability studies, counselling, developmental service work, and behavioural analysis graciously donated their time to review drafts and offer suggestions. We express our sincere thanks to the following individuals: Gail Ancill, Deputy Registrar, College of Registered Psychiatric Nurses of British Columbia, Port Moody, British Columbia; Tracey Eklund and Robert Lockhart, Faculty, Psychiatric Nursing, Grant MacEwan University, Ponoka Campus, Ponoka Alberta; Karen Heslop, Chair, Disability Studies Leadership and Community, Grant MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta; Barbara Lowe, Executive Director, College of Registered Psychiatric Nurses of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta; Terry Lowey, Program Coordinator, Developmental Services Worker Program, Confederation College, Thunder Bay, Ontario; Dr. Yona Lunsky, Clinician Scientist, Dual Diagnosis Services, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario; Dr. Deena Martin, Director of Alberta Counselling Programs, City University of Seattle, Edmonton, Alberta; Colleen Orrick, Developmental Services Worker Program, Loyalist College, Belleville, Ontario; Carol Prechotko, Counselling and Student Disability Services, Cambrian College of Applied Arts and Technology, Sudbury, Ontario; Chris Thomson, Director, Excel Academy, Edmonton, Alberta; and Dr. Jason Vladescu, Center for Autism and Applied Behavior Analysis, Caldwell University, Caldwell, New Jersey. Without your insight, wisdom, and support, this book might not have been possible.
Sherri Melrose, PH.D.
BCCampus Vancouver