Chapter 1: The Science of Psychology Chapter 2: Studying Behaviour Scientifically Chapter 3: Genes, Environment and Behaviour Chapter 4: The Brain Behaviour Chapter 5: Sensation and Perception Chapter 6: States of Consciousness Chapter 7: Learning: The Role of Experience Chapter 8: Memory Chapter 9: Language and Thinking Chapter 10: Intelligence Chapter 11: Motivation and Emotion Chapter 12: Development Over The Life-Span Chapter 13: Personality Chapter 14: Health and Well-Being Chapter 15: Psychological Disorders Chapter 16: Treatment of Psychological Disorders Chapter 17: Social Thinking and Behaviour Chapter 18: Indigenous and Cross-Cultural Psychology
Michael W. Passer, Ph.D., coordinates the introductory psychology
program at the University of Washington, which enrolls about 2,500
students per year, and also is the faculty coordinator of training
for new teaching assistants (TAs). He received his bachelor’s
degree from the University of Rochester and his PhD in Psychology
from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a
specialization in social psychology. Dr. Passer has been a faculty
member at the University of Washington since 1977. A former
Danforth Foundation Fellow and University of Washington
Distinguished Teaching Award finalist, Dr. Passer has had a
career-long love of teaching. Each academic year he teaches
introductory psychology twice and a required pre-major course in
research methods. Dr. Passer developed and teaches a graduate
course on the Teaching of Psychology, which prepares students for
careers in the college classroom, and also has taught courses in
social psychology and attribution theory. He has published more
than 20 scientific articles and chapters, primarily in the areas of
attribution, stress, and anxiety, and has taught the introductory
psychology course for 20 years.
Ronald E. Smith, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Director of
Clinical Psychology Training at the University of Washington, where
he also has served as Area Head of the Social Psychology and
Personality area. He received his bachelor’s degree from Marquette
University and his PhD from Southern Illinois University, where he
had dual specializations in clinical and physiological psychology.
His major research interests are in anxiety, stress and coping, and
in performance enhancement research and intervention. Dr. Smith is
a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He received a
Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UCLA Neuropsychiatric
Institute for his contributions to the field of mental health. He
has published more than 160 scientific articles and book chapters
in his areas of interest and has authored or co-authored 23 books
on introductory psychology, human performance enhancement, and
personality, including Introduction to Personality: Toward an
Integration, with Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda (Wiley, 2004). An
award-winning teacher, he has more than 15 years of experience in
teaching the introductory psychology course. Brian interests are in
community, social and environmental psychology. He has worked with
CSIRO on natural resource management issues in the last decade. He
also has interests in Indigenous psychology.
Research Interests: Community psychology, Applied social
psychology, Indigenous issues, natural resource management, public
participation, risk analysis and rural community psychology.
My main field of research is Personality psychology. My research
involves extending and clarifying current developments in
personality psychology and critically assessing personality
theories. I like to contribute to the theoretical frameworks that
we use to develop accounts of personality through examining the
underlying assumptions and drawing attention to critical issues
relevant to all personality theories (e.g., the distinctions
between description and explanations, and relations and the terms
of relations). My research here also involves understanding what is
meant by 'self' and 'identity', personality responses to serious
health threats, the relation of personality to evolutionary
psychology, personality and culture, neuroscience and personality,
and the influence of attachment processes upon development. I also
enjoy looking at the history of personality research (and of
psychology generally).
My own approach to personality favours a psychodynamic perspective
and my central interests here include defense mechanisms
(especially repression) and unconscious mental processes. My
published research covers the neuroscientific debate surrounding
Freudian dream theory, defense mechanisms, and whether repression
can be a conscious process. The theory of Freudian repression has
been attacked variously in the scientific literature but I have
endeavoured to demonstrate that many critics of Freudian repression
actually have very little understanding of what Freud had to say on
the matter. In the last 15 years, understanding of how the brain
processes information has increased greatly as neuro-imaging
techniques have been coupled with paradigms drawn from experimental
psychology to investigate information processing in individuals
with typical and disturbed brain development. My research applies
the insights emerging from this research to understand how early
disturbances in brain development, resulting from injury,
genetically based developmental disorders, or atypical experiences
such as chronic stress may influence information processing.
I am interested in fundamental questions about human
neuropsychological development, for example, the plasticity of
different functional systems following early insult and/or atypical
environmental experiences, and also in the application of the
results of fundamental research to practical questions about how to
optimize the development of children at heightened risk as a result
of early insult and/or atypical environmental experiences.
My current research focuses on the associations between anxiety,
information processing and school learning. Many children
experience high levels of anxiety, sometimes for lengthy periods as
a result of divorce, illness in the family, teasing at school. Key
questions are how anxiety affects the fundamental information
processes, e.g. attention and memory, called on by school learning,
how school learning can be protected in children experiencing high
levels of anxiety, and whether interventions designed to manage the
experience of anxiety reverse the effects of anxiety on information
processing. I am interested in developmental, comparative and
evolutionary aspects of cognition. In our comparative lab group we
are investigating the performance of children and primates on
non-invasive behavioural tasks such as invisible displacement,
imitation recognition, mirror self-recognition, planning, and
means-ends reasoning. We conduct studies with chimpanzees,
orangutans, gorillas, gibbons, and spider monkeys at various zoos
in Australia, the USA and Indonesia. Young children are tested here
in the Early Cognitive Development Centre in the School of
Psychology. Our sense of vision is fundamental to our ability to
interact with the world. Additionally, a great deal of our
understanding of how the brain functions is based on our knowledge
of how it processes visual information. The aim of my research is
to further our understanding of the workings of the human visual
system, with an emphasis on how various visual pathways interact at
different levels in the brain. While I am interested in all aspects
of visual processing, my research to date has mainly focused on
motion, stereopsis and face processing I joined the School in 2010
after 2.5 years working as a post-doctoral researcher in the
Discipline of Paediatrics at the University of Adelaide. I
currently teach into developmental psychology topics, cognitive
neuroscience, sleep, memory and general psychology topics at an
undergraduate level. I supervise Honours, Masters and PhD students
in the School and across institutions. My research currently
focuses on the importance of sleep for memory and cognitive
performance, child mental health, critical periods of cognitive
development, and the neural basis of cognitive functions.
Together with Drs Hannah Keage and Owen Churches, I coordinate the
new Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory which houses EEG and
transcranial doppler facilities. I also collaborate with
researchers at the Childrens Research Centre, University of
Adelaide, at which I am an Affiliate Lecturer, and the Department
of Neurology at the University of Rome (La Sapienza), Italy Andrew
is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and a
clinical psychologist. He supervises Honours and higher degree
students.
Research interests: Infant, child and adolescent mental
health,Developmental Psychopathology, Attachment theory,
Evolutionary psychology,Psychoanalysis
Joel Pearson studies the mechanisms and application of mental
imagery, decision-making, memory, visual perception, learning,
attention and awareness by using behavioural, human brain imaging
and transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques Scientifically I
am interested in understanding human intelligence and cognition. I
tackle this central question from both psychological and biological
perspectives (particularly using pharmacological methods). A
significant part of this approach is to better understand the
cognitive effects of a wide range of pharmacologically active
substances ranging from illicit drugs to herbal and nutrient
medicines.
From a practical perspective I am interested in improving emotional
competencies in organizations and in educational settings,
particularly primary and secondary schools Thea is an Assistant
Professor in Psychology at the Centre for Applied Psychology. She
is a cognitive psychologist whose primary area of research area is
memory. Her PhD was on verbal overshadowing, an area of applied
memory research relating to eyewitness testimony. Her expertise and
interests include memory, eyewitness testimony and physiological
psychology. Before studying psychology, she completed a Bachelor of
Arts in Computing Studies and worked as a computer programmer and
IT consultant for 10 years.
Research Areas: The adaptive functions of positive, social emotions
(e.g., pride, gratitude); Discrete emotions’ effects on stereotypes
and prejudice; Impression formation in teams or groups
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