5 Psychology eBooks

From Stress to Strength: Increasing Optimism, Gratitude, and Resiliency by Jolynn Gardner
Tom Burns - Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction
J. Allan Hobson - Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction
Taming Toxic People: The Science of Identifying and Dealing with Psychopaths at Work by David Gillespie
Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press) by M. Chirimuuta

*From Stress to Strength: Increasing Optimism, Gratitude, and Resiliency by Jolynn Gardner

English | 2014 | ISBN: 1631890883 | 158 pages | PDF | 1,5 MB
From Stress to Strength offers readers a practical discussion of stress and how to cope with it. Filled with insights, suggestions, and strategies, the book addresses the perception and experience of stress, acute and chronic effects, and ways of managing it.
From Stress to Strength begins with an overview of stress and why it is so important to combat it. Early chapters detail the process model of stress, physical responses to stress, and their consequences academically, behaviorally, and socially.
The focus then shifts to coping with stress cognitively and physically through techniques such as positive self-talk, breathing and visualization exercises, and healthy lifestyle choices.
Readers will learn about major causes of stress, as well as distress-prone and distress-resistant behavior patterns. Throughout the text there is a strong emphasis on the importance of optimism, gratitude, altruism, and resiliency.
The tone of the text is conversational, and the suggestions and strategies are practical and easily implemented.

*Tom Burns - Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction

Published: 2006-11-06 | ISBN: 0192807277 | PDF | 160 pages | 1.72 MB
Psychiatry is increasingly a part of everyday life. The growing number of patients being diagnosed with depression, ADD, alcoholism, and other illnesses mean that few people are not touched by it. This book provides a valuable and comprehensible introduction to the subject. It starts with the history of its development as a scientific field, including the identification of major mental illnesses, the rise and fall of the asylum system, and the flourishing of psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies. More than any other branch of medicine, psychiatry has been attacked and criticized. There is a long list of perceived horrors-patient abuse, bizarre medical experiments, mind-control by evil governments, coercion by maniacal hypnotists. Modern psychiatry brings with it new controversies, such as the perceived over-prescription of antidepressants and behavior modifiers for children and teens, or unchecked marketing power of drug companies. This book does not draw conclusions on these issues, but rather provides the reader with a clear understanding of what psychiatry is, and what it does, so that they can draw their own. It is a great reference for anyone with an interest in mental illness and its treatment, students of psychiatry, medicine, psychology, and history of science, and health professionals.

*J. Allan Hobson - Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction

Published: 2011-06-04 | ISBN: 0192802151 | PDF | 168 pages | 2.06 MB
What is dreaming, and what causes it? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? Replacing dream mystique with modern dream science, J. Allan Hobson provides a new and increasingly complete picture of how dreaming is created by the brain. Focusing on dreaming to explain the mechanisms of sleep, this book explores how the new science of dreaming is affecting theories in psychoanalysis, and how it is helping our understanding of the causes of mental illness.
J. Allan Hobson investigates his own dreams to illustrate and explain some of the fascinating discoveries of modern sleep science, while challenging some of the traditionally accepted theories about the meaning of dreams. He reveals how dreaming maintains and develops the mind, why we go crazy in our dreams in order to avoid doing so when we are awake, and why sleep is not just good for health but essential for life.

*Taming Toxic People: The Science of Identifying and Dealing with Psychopaths at Work by David Gillespie

English | July 25, 2017 | ASIN: B0711T2XNK | EPUB | 244 pages | 0.5 MB
"I didn't know how to deal with the poisonous and toxic people in my life or why they behaved the way they did, so I went looking for an answer. This book is what I found."
Bestselling author David Gillespie turns his attention to a phenomenon that damages businesses, seeds mental disease and discomfort and can bring civilisations to the brink of implosion - the psychopath.
Psychopaths are often thought of as killers and criminals, but actually five to ten per cent of people are probably psychopathic without ever indulging in a single criminal act. These everyday psychopaths may be charming in the early stages of relationships or employment but, Gillespie argues, their presence in your life is at best disruptive, and at worst highly dangerous: they will leave you feeling cheated and humiliated, dominating and manipulating you to the point where you question your sanity. Worse, he cautions, at a societal level their tendency to gravitate towards positions of power can be disastrous.
Taming Toxic People is a practical guide to restraining that difficult person in your life, be it your boss, your spouse or a parent. But it is also a serious and meticulously researched warning: if we value a free and well-functioning society, we need to rebuild the sense of community that has historically kept the everyday psychopath in check, and we must understand and act to manage the psychopathic behaviour in our midst.

*Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press) by M. Chirimuuta

2015 | ISBN: 0262029081, 0262534576 | English | 264 pages | PDF | 19 MB
Is color real or illusory, mind independent or mind dependent? Does seeing in color give us a true picture of external reality? The metaphysical debate over color has gone on at least since the seventeenth century. In this book, M. Chirimuuta draws on contemporary perceptual science to address these questions. Her account integrates historical philosophical debates, contemporary work in the philosophy of color, and recent findings in neuroscience and vision science to propose a novel theory of the relationship between color and physical reality.
Chirimuuta offers an overview of philosophy's approach to the problem of color, finds the origins of much of the familiar conception of color in Aristotelian theories of perception, and describes the assumptions that have shaped contemporary philosophy of color. She then reviews recent work in perceptual science that challenges philosophers' accounts of color experience. Finally, she offers a pragmatic alternative whereby perceptual states are understood primarily as action-guiding interactions between a perceiver and the environment. The fact that perceptual states are shaped in idiosyncratic ways by the needs and interests of the perceiver does not render the states illusory. Colors are perceiver-dependent properties, and yet our awareness of them does not mislead us about the world. Colors force us to reconsider what we mean by accurately presenting external reality, and, as this book demonstrates, thinking about color has important consequences for the philosophy of perception and, more generally, for the philosophy of mind.