As psychology educators, we often have our favorite topics or specialties that we love to teach, but also have areas where we find it more challenging to build student engagement or interest. If you are looking for some new ideas, the Books for Psychology Class blog can help you find new inspiration or a fresh approach for difficult to teach topics. To date, the blog has reviewed over 100 books and continues to add new reviews every few weeks. The blog is organized into 13 categories (Biological Psychology, Cognition/Learning, Consciousness, Development, Disorders/Treatment, Educational Psychology, Health Psychology, Motivation/Emotion, Positive Psychology, Research and Statistics, Sensation/Perception, Social Psychology/Personality, Testing and Individual Differences). Below we have highlighted a book review and corresponding class activities in each of the thirteen categories. Find your new favorite!
Biological Psychology
Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
Luke Dittrich spent six years researching perhaps the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience, Henry Gustav Molaison, better known as Patient H.M. during his lifetime. Henry is often cited as the key case study to help neuroscientists understand the role of the hippocampus in encoding short-term to long-term memories. Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets details this important case study of the individual whose anterograde amnesia provided insight into the biological bases of memory as well as early research into brain surgery.
Cognition/Learning
Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking
Will what you learn in college affect how you think about everyday life? Yes. The book Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking addresses how scientific and philosophical thought can be taught to affect reasoning in everyday life. The key is how events are framed and coded. The concepts in the book are important, teachable, and central.
Consciousness
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream is a compelling, if one-sided, examination of the history of the war on drugs. The book is controversial because of an earlier plagiarism incident involving the author, the topic of decriminalizing drugs, the graphic depictions of cartel violence, and the physical, psychological, and social abuse suffered by addicts. These factors may make the book unsuitable for some high school students but they provide a glimpse into a world not much discussed or written about. In an attempt to alleviate concerns about credibility, the author includes 73 pages of detailed source notes and an explanation of his research process. Hari’s book is the result of three years of research that took him on a thirty-thousand-mile search to trace the history of the war on drugs, which began over 100 years ago. Much of the book is based on historical and current accounts of individuals impacted on both sides of the war on drugs.
Development
Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
The author of Just Babies, Paul Bloom, studies the topics of pleasure, morality, and prejudice. In this book, Bloom examines the question of whether or not morality is the result of nature or nurture. His studies and the other research included in the book indicate that to some degree morality is not developed entirely by experience with the environment but that a significant part of morality is innate and the result of evolutionary processes. According to research referenced by Bloom, even very young babies demonstrate an innate morality based on compassion, fairness, and empathy. Although limited, evidence shows that babies have a rudimentary capacity for understanding morality in themselves and others. The book Just Babies details much of the research conducted at the Yale Infant Cognition Lab (the Baby Lab) and describes a variety of experiments to explore the understanding and behavior of morality in children.
Disorders/Treatment
Crazy in America: The Hidden Tragedy of Our Criminalized Mentally Ill
Shayne Eggan was a beautiful girl with a charismatic personality. She had a normal and happy life until her mid-teens when she began to express the belief that others could “read her mind.” Shayne was hospitalized for these delusions and eventually became a ward of the state because her parents could not pay for her continued hospitalization. She was determined to have paranoid schizophrenic tendencies which could cause her to become violent. During one such psychotic episode, the police were called, and she lunged at a police officer with a knife because she thought he was going to hurt her. She was arrested and thus began Shayne`s life in the criminal justice system. Once in prison, she could not abide by the strict rules of the institution, which would result in an extended sentence or time in solitary confinement, which often made her delusions worse. Crazy in America depicts the real life situations of people facing mental illness issues and trying to recover in a country in which far too few resources are available.
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery
Dr. Barbara Lipska dedicated her life to neuroscience and ended up raging a personal battle with her brain. As a neuroscientist, her specialty was schizophrenia, but soon, she experienced the very symptoms she studied. The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery follows her personal story of overcoming melanoma that metastasized to the brain. She reminds us that mental illness is a brain disease and provides a blend of brain awareness and personal anecdotes to educate the reader. It is her expertise, desire to help reduce stigma, and optimism that leaves a lasting mark on the reader.
Educational Psychology
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
Jonathon Kozol lays bare the many inequities in the American Public-School System. Kozol attempts to convey to the reader the dramatic dichotomies which exist even in public schools that are only a few miles apart. The belief that all Americans have the opportunity to a strong educational foundation is easily dispelled by Kozol`s behind the scenes look at schools in wealthy versus poor neighborhoods. An individual`s opportunity to receive a top-quality education is in large part determined by the net worth of their parents and the neighborhood in which the child was born. This can either create a life full of opportunities for the upper-class or doom the underprivileged child to a cycle of poverty. Kozol examines the differences in the physical space of a school building, teacher ability and retention rates, annual spending per child, academic programs offered to students including gifted and special education programs, extra-curricular programs, and class sizes. While the book was written in the 1980s, little has changed in the American public school system today.
Health Psychology
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World-and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
Factfulness is Hans Rosling’s last effort to dissolve misconceptions about the current state of the world using data to demonstrate how confirmation bias, expectations, media, and ethnocentrism can blind us to the realities of the world in which we live. He offers a 12-question quiz out of which most people get only a few correct. Rosling uses data to demonstrate how conditions around the world continue to improve and how we often fool ourselves into thinking that things are worse than they are.
Motivation/Emotion
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating
What is the key to communication? Alan Alda, author of the book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating believes it is empathy and recognizing what the other person is thinking. He is an actor, writer, and director. Some may know him from his role on the TV show M*A*S*H and various movie appearances. Others know him within the scientific community as host of the PBS show Scientific American Frontiers and founder of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Recently, he has also been thrust into the spotlight after sharing his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. His varied history within the fields of science and media provides him an interesting perspective when answering the question of how to enhance communication. He started with wanting to teach scientists how to communicate better but now wants to share what he learned with you so you can become a better communicator.
Positive Psychology
The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self- Not Just Your “Good” Self- Drives Success and Fulfillment
Positive psychology began in 1998 with Martin Seligman’s American Psychological Association Presidential address in which he proposed a refocusing of psychology away from illness and dysfunction and onto positive human traits and strengths such as optimism, social responsibility, compassion, courage, and gratitude. Positive psychology proponents Todd Kashdan and Ed Diener propose in The Upside of Your Darkside that psychology and mental health depend on balance and that negative emotions have an important and useful purpose. The authors argue that although mindfulness, compassion, happiness, and other positive emotions are keys to a productive and purposeful life, negative emotions despite how uncomfortable they may be are important tools for success and fulfillment.
Research and Statistics
The Worth Expert Guide to Scientific Literacy: Thinking Like a Psychological Scientist
What comes to mind when you think of science? Are you picturing a large textbook and scientists lecturing facts or are you picturing beakers, microscopes, and lab coats? Do you think of science as a body of knowledge, as a process, or both? According to the authors of The Worth Expert Guide to Scientific Literacy: Thinking Like a Psychological Scientist, “For scientific literacy is not just about what we know; it is about how we know it, and how we conduct our lives.” The focus of this text is on why scientific literacy is important and how to increase it through psychology. Teachers in psychology can enhance their students’ critical thinking and help their students go beyond what they know and start to question how they know it is true.
Sensation/Perception
GRUNT: The Curious Science of Humans at War
Mary Roach has added to her prodigious collection of publications with her latest venture into the world of military science. Roach approaches her first book on the military with a unique and humorous twist as she does with all of her projects. She delves into the jobs of those conducting scientific research for the military, some fighting dysentery, others investigating shark repellent and even a captain at the army medical research lab who has injected himself with snake venom to test the possibility of building immunity to it. Perhaps the most interesting is Ernest Crocker, who develops foul smelling odors to drive enemies from their hiding spaces. Roach puts a public face on the often-unsung heroes who work behind the scenes employing science to protect the lives of those on the front lines.
Social Psychology/Personality
You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice
Tom Vanderbilt explores why we like what we like. This seems fairly straight forward; we have an experience; we determine how we feel about that experience and then make a decision about that experience. We tend to believe that our preference leads us to a choice, but Vanderbilt sites economists who argue that this can also work in reverse and that our choices can lead to preferences. For example, once we have paid $200 for concert tickets, we are more likely to report liking that concert than if we saw the same concert for free. Effort justification is one component of liking; it occurs when the more effort we put into something is indicative of liking that experience more. Vanderbilt explores many more of the components that makeup liking and reveals that we often fool ourselves into believing that we have total control over what we like and that we are not influenced by outside sources such as the implicit or explicit opinions of others..
Testing and Individual Differences
Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process
Do birds have language or is the story of Alex & Me for the birds? The studies of Dr. Irene Pepperberg revolutionized the way we think of bird brains. She worked with an African Grey parrot named Alex for over three decades as she tested his verbal, mathematical, and cognitive abilities. The book starts with the public acknowledgment of his death in 2007. Then the story rewinds to Dr. Pepperberg as a child receiving her first bird as a present and winds through the trials and tribulations of her career as she explores animal thinking.
Intelligence: All That Matters
The fast-paced book Intelligence, from the All That Matters series, is an excellent resource relating to teaching intelligence and testing units as well as a review of research and statistics in psychology. The book begins with a study of the history of intelligence testing and includes sections on how modern intelligence tests work, why studying intelligence is important, the nature and nurture of intelligence, methods for increasing IQ, individual differences in intelligence, and a discussion of the controversies surrounding intelligence research. Author Stuart Ritchie makes a strong case for the importance of intelligence research and presents the facts supported by research that intelligence tests indicate intelligence has a high rate of heritability, is generally stable throughout an individual’s life, and is correlated to numerous other lifestyle factors such as health, wealth, and educational and career success. Ritchie also discusses how IQ tests are connected to socio-economic status.
