New Books in Psychology

“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” Most famously in a series of experimental works on electricity, but also in a series of public lectures that generated very strong, furious responses, du Bois-Reymond galvanized (ha! see what I did there?...

Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sold more than six million copies worldwide, is seen as a popular handbook on how to relate to others and how to overcome the narcissism ingrained in every human being. In his book The Lives of Erich Fromm:...

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America  (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Marga Vicedo explores the emergence of the sci...

Free will is essential to our understanding of human nature. We are masters of our own fate. We chart our own course. We take our own road. In short, we decide what we are going to do. There seems little doubt that free will is a reality. But how, psychologically and physiologically, does it work? How does free will arise out of what is essentially a biological machine? How do we decide? That’s th...

Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t have, at least not to the same level of sophistication: pervasive collaboration, language, mind-reading and what Tadeusz Zawidzki, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, call...

On the day you were born, you arrived with your own unique biology and into your own unique social and cultural context. It would have been impossible to predict on that day how your life would unfold, or exactly the person you would become in the future. Why? Because there are so many complex and interrelated factors in the development of each and every human being. In his new book, The Human Spa...

Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States and beyond. The each revision of the DSM directly influences people’s lives, guides treatment, and has important legal and economic consequences.  In her book, The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’...

The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the nature of tensed language. In Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time (Brill, 2012), Carlos Montemayor, assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, focuses...

Get more exercise, clean out the garage, quit smoking, put down the pint of ice cream… Most of us have behaviors wewant to change, projects we keep putting off, and bad habits we should stop. We know what we want to do, but the challenge is actually doing it. Fortunately for those of us who want to make some changes in our lives, psychology research can provide some helpful guidance. A few years a...

In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. If Cal won, it almost certainly would be ranked No. 1 in the country. Instead, Simons agonized as Cal’s quarterback struggled through the final play. Cal lost. Simons suffered a miserable train ride home...

It is common today to treat depression and other mental disorders as concrete illnesses – akin to having pneumonia or the flu. In fact, being prescribed a pill after complaining to your family doctor about feeling depressed is a common occurrence. But are mental disorders really illnesses the way that a sinus infection is? Gary Greenberg, in his fascinating new book The Book of Woe: The DSM and th...

Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of separation, and brought them in to participate in a research study. And so began the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. At the time, psychology leaned heavily toward the nurture side of the nature-n...

Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical part of the “American Experience?” In his fascinating book Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America (Nebraska University Press, 2013), Lawrence R. Samuel examines the arrival, remarkable grow...

If you have studied neuroscience, memory, or even basic psychology, it is likely that you have heard of the famous amnesic patient Henry Molaison, or “H.M.” as he was known during his lifetime. In 1953, Henry underwent an experimental brain surgery in hopes of finding a cure for his severe epilepsy. As a result, he developed a severe case of amnesia. Unable to encode new memories into long-term st...

It’s not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations – logic, in some sense, ‘works’. For linguists, this represents a potentially interesting avenue of approach to the much-debated question of innateness. Is there knowledge about logic that is present in humans prior to any experience? And if so, what does it consist of? In The Emergence of Meaning (Cambridge University...

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying...

Human behavior is notoriously complex and difficult to predict. For decades, social psychologists have been exploring situational variables and how they impact our behavior. We might like to think that we behave consistently in various contexts, but that turns out not to be the case. In his book, Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World (Riverhead Books, 2011) social psyc...

Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics and neuroscience. Network models of various aspects of language have often been criticised as theoretically simplistic, custom-made to solve a single problem (such as past tense marking), and/or abandoni...

For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while awake. Some have thought consciousness can’t be explained scientifically, and others have argued that it will always remain a mystery. But most consider some sort of explanation in physical, specifically...

In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the following big idea: we shouldn’t force children to learn, rather we should allow them to play and learn by themselves. This, of course, is a radical proposal. But Peter points out that the play-and-learn-along-th...

The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics. He says that telling the story of the last few decades is a task for someone else. The task he’s taken on here is to describe the progress made in t...

In these days of increasing automation, the prospect of obsolescence is an alarming one for those of us who make a living by stringing words together instead of doing something demonstrably useful. From this perspective, it’s tempting to think of “computers”, “language” and “creativity” as the constituents of a literary behemoth that writes that brilliant novel, and a million others besides, only...

Many parents are interested in learning about how their children develop, and pretty much all parents want to do a good job with their kids. So, often they turn to parenting books. Unfortunately, many books for parents do not present the developmental research accurately, probably because the authors of those books are trying to find a way to sell more books. Parents can be left feeling confused a...

What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about the emotional states of entire cultures or groups of peoples, and if so, how should that level be reconciled with that of the emotional experience of the individual? Are there categories of emotions that are shared across cultures? E...

The ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simulating the thought processes of suspects in order to solve mysterious crimes. But folk psychology is not restricted to genius detectives. We all use it: to predict what a friend will feel when we cancel...