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Individual Differences and Personality provides a student-friendly introduction to both classic and cutting-edge research into personality, mood, motivation and intelligence, and their applications in psychology and in fields such as health, education and sporting achievement.Including a new chapter on'toxic'personality traits, and an additional chapter on applications in real-life settings, this fourth edition has been thoroughly updated and uniquely covers the necessary psychometric methodology needed to understand modern theories. It also develops deep processing and effective learning by encouraging a critical evaluation of both older and modern theories and methodologies, including the Dark Triad, emotional intelligence and psychopathy. Gardner's and hierarchical theories of intelligence, and modern theories of mood and motivation are discussed and evaluated, and the processes which cause people to differ in personality and intelligence are explored in detail. Six chapters provide a non-mathematical grounding in psychometric principles, such as factor analysis, reliability, validity, bias, test-construction and test-use.With self-assessment questions, further reading and a companion website including student and instructor resources, this is the ideal resource for anyone taking modules on personality and individual differences.

Synaesthesia is a fascinating cognitive phenomenon where one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. For example, synaesthetes might perceive colours when listening to music, or tastes in the mouth when reading words. This book provides an insight into the idiosyncratic nature of synaesthesia by exploring its relationships with other dimensions of individual differences. Many characteristics of linguistic-colour synaesthetes are covered including personality, temperament, intelligence, creativity, emotionality, attention, memory, imagination, colour perception, body lateralization and gender. Aleksandra Maria Rogowska proposes that linguistic-colour synaesthesia can be considered as an abstract form of a continuous variable in the broader context of cross- and intra-modal associations. There has been a resurgence of interest in synaesthesia and this book will appeal to students and scientists of psychology, cognitive science and social science, and to those who are fascinated by unusual states of mind.

The Neuropsychology of Individual Differences: A Developmental Per­ spective was designed to sliIVey the complexities and subtleties of neu­ rologically based differences in human beings. By conceptualizing and presenting subject matter in a developmental sequence, we hoped to emphasize the inseparable union between the science of neuropsychology and the study of human behavior. Following a brief introductory chapter, the volume opens with chap­ ters concerning critical preliminary questions, such as establishing a foundation and rationale for a neuropsychological basis for individual differences and consideration of important methodological issues. It pro­ ceeds with discussions of the role of neuropsychology in the individual's efforts to organize the world via such basic means as perception and temperament. Three chapters follow that discuss individual differences in higher cortical functions: cognitive ability, language, and learning. Neuropsychological differences between the sexes and in the expression of psychopathological and neurological conditions comprise the topics for the next three chapters. The final topical chapter provides a discussion of rehabilitation of neurological disorders in children, and the volume concludes with a synthesis of all contributions.

This revision guide provides concise coverage of the central topics within Personality, Individual Difference and Intelligence Psychology, presented within a framework designed to help you focus on assessment and exams. The guide is organised to cater for QAA and BPS recommendations for course content. Sample questions, assessment advice and exam tips drive the organisation within chapters so you are able to grasp and marshal your thoughts towards revision of the main topics. Features focused on critical thinking, practical applications and key research will offer additional pointers for you in your revision process and exam preparation.A companion website provides supporting resources for self testing, exam practice, answers to questions in the book, and links to further resources.

This book presents an introduction to the study of relationships among per­ sonality, social skills, and psychopathology. Although research findings dur­ ing the last decade have made it clear that the relationships among these variables are almost always complex and mUltiply determined, many clini­ cians and theoreticians have not incorporated such complexities into their models of human behavior and therapeutic intervention. This discrepancy between clinical theory and research-based findings has been of special con­ cern to us because we have been both empirically oriented academic re­ searchers and practicing clinicians. It is our belief that clinical theory relat­ ed to personality, social skills, and psychopathology can be enriched by re­ search findings from a wide range of fields-from human genetics, tempera­ ment, and personality to family systems, affect, psychophysiology, and learning. This book is divided into an introductory chapter and three sections. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the issues in the field, compares models, and provides suggestions for further integration and ar­ ticulation of concepts related to personality, social skills, and psycho­ pathology. The book's first section presents state-of-the-art general models of interactions among personality, social skills, and psychopathology. Con­ nolly opens this section with a chapter that reviews longitudinal findings in­ dicating that personality traits predict the onset of psychopathology and marital distress. The etiology of these and related findings is the subject of other chapters in this section.

In Rationality and the Reflective Mind, Keith Stanovich attempts to resolve the Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science--the debate about how much irrationality to ascribe to human cognition. He shows how the insights of dual-process theory and evolutionary psychology can be combined to explain why humans are sometimes irrational even though they possess remarkably adaptive cognitive machinery. Stanovich argues that to fully characterize differences in rational thinking, we need to replace dual-process theories with tripartite models of cognition. Using a unique individual differences approach, he shows that the traditional second system (System 2) of dual-process theory must be further divided into the reflective mind and the algorithmic mind. Distinguishing them will allow us to better appreciate the significant differences in their key functions: The key function of the reflective mind is to detect the need to interrupt autonomous processing and to begin simulation activities, whereas that of the algorithmic mind is to sustain the processing of decoupled secondary representations in cognitive simulation. Stanovich then uses this algorithmic/reflective distinction to develop a taxonomy of cognitive errors made on tasks in the heuristics and biases literature. He presents the empirical data to show that the tendency to make these thinking errors is not highly related to intelligence. Using his tripartite model of cognition, Stanovich shows how, when both are properly defined, rationality is a more encompassing construct than intelligence, and that IQ tests fail to assess individual differences in rational thought. He then goes on to discuss the types of thinking processes that would be measured if rational thinking were to be assessed as IQ has been.

At least one of every three Americans has used an illicit drug. Drugs attract considerable attention in science, legislation, and the media. Nonetheless, many people develop attitudes about drugs and drug users based on limited information. Researchers often find themselves divided into camps based on the drug they study most often, which limits their ability to benefit from important work done on other drugs. As a result, government policies form without a complete understanding of the intoxication experience. What is the nature of intoxication? At first, this question appears to be simple and straightforward, but upon closer inspection, the dichotomous distinctions between everyday awareness and its alternatives grow fuzzy. An in-depth examination of the subjective effects of drugs and the pursuit of altered states soon leads to age-old questions about free will, heredity, environment, and consciousness. Mind-Altering Drugs is the first book to bring together chapters from leading researchers that present diverse, empirically based insights into the subjective experiences of drugs a nd their links to addictive potential. By avoiding simple depictions of psychoactive chemicals and the people who use them, these recognized experts explain how modern research in many fields reveals a complex interaction between people, situations, and substances. Their work demonstrates that only a multitude of approaches can show the nuances of subjective experience, and that each substance may create a different effect with every administration in each user. Simple references to physiological underpinnings or positive reinforcement fail to explain the diverse responses to drugs. However, research has progressed to reveal broad, repeatable evidence that the subjective effects of substances play an important role in our understanding of drug abuse, and so should inform our decisions about policy. This thorough and accessible review of the subjective effects of drugs and the dominant theories behind those effects will provide a wealth of information about the experience of intoxication for lay readers, and a road map to studies in other disciples for student and professional researchers.

In this timely and comprehensive text, Cesare Cornoldi and Tomaso Vecchi describe their recently developed experimental approach to the investigation of visuo-spatial cognition, based upon the analysis of individual differences. A review of the most influential theoretical advances in the study of visuo-spatial cognition is presented, including both critical analysis and comparisons between the distinct approaches. In addition, the authors describe recent research into memory for spatial configurations, mental manipulation and the active integration of visuo-spatial information. This includes studies on the effects of congenital blindness on mental imagery abilities, developmental and age-related modifications, gender effects, and the role of genetic syndromes in determining visuo-spatial abilities. The authors draw together these distinct areas of research and integrate the findings within an innovative framework of working memory.This text will be a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, as well as researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience.

The concept and measurement of intelligence present a curious paradox. On the one hand, scientists, fluent in the complex statistics of intelligence-testing theories, devote their lives to exploration of cognitive abilities. On the other hand, the media, and inexpert, cross-disciplinary scientists decry the effort as socially divisive and useless in practice. In the past decade, our understanding of testing has radically changed. Better selected samples have extended evidence on the role of heredity and environment in intelligence. There is new evidence on biology and behavior. Advances in molecular genetics have enabled us to discover DMA markers which can identify and isolate a gene for simple genetic traits, paving the way for the study of multiple gene traits, such as intelligence.Hans Eysenck believes these recent developments approximate a general paradigm which could form thebasis for future research. He explores the many special abilities verbal, numerical, visuo-spatial memory that contribute to our cognitive behavior. He examines pathbreaking work on'multiple'intelligence, and the notion of'social'or'practical'intelligence and considers whether these new ideas have any scientific meaning. Eysenck also includes a study of creativity and intuition as well as the production of works of art and science identifying special factors that interact with general intelligence to produce predictable effects in the actual world.The work that Hans Eysenck has put together over the last fifty years in research into individual differences constitutes most of what anyone means by the structure and biological basis of personality and intelligence. A giant in the field of psychology, Eysenck almost single-handedly restructured and reordered his profession. Intelligence is Eysenck's final book and the third in a series of his works from Transaction.

Integrating a decade-long program of empirical research with current cognitive theory, this book demonstrates that psychological research has profound implications for current debates about what it means to be rational. The author brings new evidence to bear on these issues by demonstrating that patterns of individual differences--largely ignored in disputes about human rationality--have strong implications for explanations of the gap between normative and descriptive models of human behavior. Separate chapters show how patterns of individual differences have implications for all of the major critiques of purported demonstrations of human irrationality in the heuristics and biases literature. In these critiques, it has been posited that experimenters have observed performance errors rather than systematically irrational responses; the tasks have required computational operations that exceed human cognitive capacity; experimenters have applied the wrong normative model to the task; and participants have misinterpreted the tasks. In a comprehensive set of studies, Stanovich demonstrates that gaps between normative and descriptive models of performance on some tasks can be accounted for by positing these alternative explanations, but that not all discrepancies from normative models can be so explained. Individual differences in rational thought can in part be predicted by psychological dispositions that are interpreted as characteristic biases in people's intentional-level psychologies. Presenting the most comprehensive examination of individual differences in the heuristics and biases literature that has yet been published, experiments and theoretical insights in this volume contextualize the heuristics and biases literature exemplified in the work of various investigators.

A title in the modular'Principles of Psychology'series, designed for A- level and other introductory courses. While normal individuals obviously differ from each other in various ways, psychologists have emphasized differences in intelligence and personality. This emphasis is reflected in the book, and various different views are discussed at length.; Abnormality has always been a source of fascination, although it has been difficult to form a good understanding of why and how abnormality develops. Psychologists have also grappled with other complex issues, such as how to classify abnormal individuals and what forms of treatment will prove beneficial. In spite of complexities, much progress has been made.