New Books in Psychology

Having emotions is part of being human. And yet, at times we may find emotions overwhelming, or find ourselves acting in ways that are out of alignment with our values, especially when we are emotionally triggered. It is important for all of us to learn to respond effectively to emotions and choose their actions in accordance with our values. Emotional Efficacy Therapy (EET) is a powerful and effe...

As any new parent knows, there is an abundance of often-conflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and strangers on the internet. From the earliest days, parents get the message that they must make certain choices around feeding, sleep, and schedule or all will be lost. There's a rule—or three—for everything. But the benefits of these choices can be overstated, and the trade-o...

Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grisel, in her new book Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Doubleday, 2019), uses her personal story to illuminate the ways in which the brain, in collusion with social and biological...

In his landmark new book, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (Avery Publishing Group, 2019), Dr. Steven C. Hayes, the originator and pioneering researcher into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) lays out the psychological flexibility skills that make it one of the most powerful approaches research has yet to offer. These skills have been shown to help even where other approach...

At the start of the 19th century, the field we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. How did psychology come to define itself as a separate area of inquiry, and how did it come to be a science? In Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan 2019), Chiara Russo Krauss considers the conceptual f...

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased...

In her book, The Mindful Twenty-Something (New Harbinger, 2016), Holly Rogers presents a unique, evidence based approach to help you make important life decisions with clarity and confidence.  As cofounder of the extremely popular Koru Mindfulness program developed at Duke University, her work with students serves as inspiration for this book. As a twenty-something, you may feel like you are being...

Relationships are hard, and it’s often because we defend ourselves against the very intimacy we seek by getting locked into problematic patterns of compulsive caretaking. Such was the topic of Mark Borg, Grant Brenner, and Daniel Berry’s first book, Irrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy. These authors explain how to break out of such problematic patterns in t...

Psychedelics are not terribly new. And the drug mescaline is certainly not new. Mike Jay's new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019), tells two trippy stories: one that is about Indigenous use and another about Western society's adoption of the drug in culture and medicine. He discusses perceptions of mescaline in science, culture, and the psyched...

Are we in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance? If so, what can we learn about the present moment through the history of psychedelic experiments in the past? Matt Oram discusses contemporary debates about LSD and MDMA and brings much-needed context with his new book, The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Oram talks about the role...

Sometimes people are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of what they believe. And sometimes they are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of how they believe – broadly, their ways of thinking, inquiring, handling evidence, and managing information. We sometimes criticize others for being careless, dogmatic, gullible, and so on. These evaluations often have the form of apprais...

Is love between man and woman the source of wisdom and the cornerstone of moral life? Naftali Rothenberg says it is, based on the works and life of the first century Jewish scholar and sage, Rabbi Akiva. In Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy of Love (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Rothenberg explores the philosophy of love through the thought and life of Rabbi Akiva whose life was transformed by the love of his...

ABC News anchor Dan Harris used to think that meditation was for people who collect crystals, play Ultimate Frisbee, and use the word “namaste” without irony. After he had a panic attack on live television, he went on a strange and circuitous journey that ultimately led him to become one of meditation’s most vocal public proponents. Harris found that meditation made him more focused and less yanke...

Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceuticals, and psychiatry. He talks about the role of pharmacies and drug experiments in prison settings, and he underlines the ways that institutions themselves can be addicted to drugs. These are just a fe...

How does perception result in thoughts about items in the world (such as dogs or flowers) and in conscious states of many kinds (such as experiences of seeing red)? How does perception provide evidence for our beliefs (such as the belief that there is a red rose in front of you)? In The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2018), Susanna Schellenberg...

Nowadays it seems that even high-performing kids are acutely stressed and lacking motivation. Many feel that they have no control over their own lives. Some stumble in high school, or hit college and unravel. As parents, we can only drive our kids so far; at some point, they will have to take the wheel and map out their own path. The Self-Driven Child (Penguin, 2019) written by Dr. William Stixrud...

A pivotal development in the history of psychology was the invention of family systems theory by psychiatrist Murray Bowen. He was among the first to observe families in a naturalistic setting, and his observations informed his ideas about families as ‘systems’ that functioned as ‘emotional units.’ Michael E. Kerr served as Dr. Bowen’s right-hand-man for many years, and he recently published a boo...

Given our modern scientific view of the world, how is freedom of the will possible?  That is the classical problem of free will.  Strategies for addressing this problem include the flat denial of free will, as well as various attempts to render free will consistent with a physically deterministic world.  Among these latter, there’s a tendency to redefine free will in a way that dissolves the appar...

Adolescence is a unique developmental period of life, during which we face the challenges and pressures of moving from childhood into independent adulthood. Evolutionarily, adolescence is a time of risk-taking and growing independence, and one of the important developmental tasks is to learn to respond to thoughts and emotions in a helpful way, in order to live a full and meaningful life. In this...

American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2019), Morgan Marietta and David Barker attribute such division to the natural human tendency towards having different versions of reality. They introduce the concept of...

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo—is joined by co-host and recent Geneseo Graduate Haley Wigsten to interview Derek Gaunt (he/his)expert trainer and coach at the Black Swan Group--on his thrilling new book Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiato...

In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry information about the world and that are used by the system to guide its behavior. Naturalistic theories of representation provide explanations of what information, or content, these internal states carry, and how they come to have the contents that they do. I...

Donnel Stern has been a key figure in the advancement of interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis since his initial writings on unformulated experience in the 1980s, in which he offered a fresh perspective on what constitutes the unconscious. Since then, he has consistently been on the cutting edge of theoretical developments in the unconscious and dissociation, and he continues such innovation...

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a cutting-edge and evidence-based form of cognitive behavioral therapy. ACT concepts and principles help us heal from pain, make life affirming choices, and build happiness. ACT has been shown to help individuals with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, relationship problems, and general stress improve their happiness and general well-being. In this episod...

Whether graduating from college, starting a career, trying to gain financial independence, or creating meaningful relationships—entering into the world of grownups can be more than a little overwhelming. And while there are plenty of fun books out there for young adults offering advice on how to fix a leaky faucet or find the right apartment, none really delve into the deeply emotional aspects of...