Overview/About the Author

The following are my thoughts on writing this textbook the way I did. General Psychology is typically the first academic encounter college students will have with a scientific study of human behavior and the mind among its many subfields, such as physiological psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, learning theories, memories formation, and perception. The conventional Psychology program can also include courses like History and Systems, Human Growth and Development in the physical, cognitive, and social aspects of human lives, Sports Health, Clinical Psychologies, and Social Behavior. Faculty are predictably not expected to do not have to give every aspect of the discipline to students in their first semester in college. Let’s teach, mentor, and cover the content needed by psychology students that wish to establish a solid foundation for the major, students interested in the major but are undecided as to major, and individuals that feel psychology will have significant applications that may even improve their daily lives such as is found in these nine chapters of this new textbook.

For the past thirty-four years of my teaching nearly every course in the typical undergraduate and graduate psychology departments except for counseling courses, I have come to find that first-time college students take general psychology, or introduction to psychology because it is a “general education requirement that everyone must take”, they “need a science credit” to study what they will major in, for “personal interest”, and with a lack of knowledge of a major in psychology think that it will be their life career pathway.

No matter why students are in my classes, they get my best. I want to become their mentor, so they feel comfortable transferring what I consider essential knowledge needed for their academic goals and at ease seeking my counsel in their career paths. I want students engaged in their educational pursuits and wanting to come to class to learn through understanding, analysis, and application, not memorization, so that they make sound, critically thought-out decisions that influence their futures. I want them to add meaning to the new information they are learning and make accommodations to the “schema” they thought they knew.

If we are honest with ourselves, we cannot accomplish this learning in this way for fifteen or sixteen chapters in the twelve to thirteen weeks we have in class. I think that all of this can be accomplished in the nine chapters if one touches on the varied areas of psychology like history and systems, methodology, cognitive, abnormal, personality, and perception, even though some authors seem to think that one more chapter will make the textbook more complete and better considering today’s issues. Again, I think that the chapters I chose can give students in a two-year program a solid foundation in psychology and the two years to decide what to do academically, preparing them for two years to finish a bachelor’s degree and carry that solid degree on to graduate school if they are of that ilk because these content areas of psychology are comprehensive and customizable in their ability to apply to other courses of study or one’s personal life.