Experiencing Psychology

"Informed by student data, Experience Psychology helps students understand and appreciate psychology as an integrated whole. The personalized, adaptive learning program, thought-provoking examples, and interactive assessments help students see psychology in the world around them and experience it in everyday life. Experience Psychology is about, well, experience-our own behaviors; our relationships at home and in our communities, in school, and at work; and our interactions in different learning environments. Grounded in meaningful real-world contexts, Experience Psychology's contemporary examples, personalized author notes, and applied exercises speak directly to students, allowing them to engage with psychology and to learn verbally, visually, and experientially-by reading, seeing, and doing. Function is introduced before dysfunction, building student understanding by looking first at typical, everyday behavior before delving into the less common-and likely less personally experienced-rare and abnormal behavior. Experience Psychology places the science of psychology, and the research that helps students see the academic foundations of the discipline, at the forefront of the course. With Experience Psychology, students do not just "take" psychology but actively experience it"--

Unique in approach, this activity book provides readers with hands-on experience in "doing" psychology, rather than just reading about it. It contains thirty-nine active learning experiences that correspond to major topics in psychology. Features active learning experiences in all major topical areas of psychology--Research Design; Biopsychology; Sensation and Perception; Consciousness; Learning; Memory; Language, Thinking, and Intelligence; Motivation and Emotion; Development; Personality; Psychological Disorders; Therapies; and Social Psychology. For anyone interested in learning more about the major areas of psychology, firsthand, by engaging in a variety of activities that involve data gathering, assessment, etc.

Some students take psychology...others experience it! Informed by student data, Experience Psychology helps students understand and appreciate psychology as an integrated whole. The personalized, adaptive learning program, thought-provoking examples, and interactive assessments help students see psychology in the world around them and experience it in everyday life.

The authors present an insight into the social psychology of experience drawing upon a few classic works to help develop their argument. The signficance of their ideas for developing a contemporary psychology of experience is illustrated with material from studies focused on setting at home and at work.

When I began to study psychology a half century ago, it was defined as "the study of behavior and experience." By the time I completed my doctorate, shortly after the end of World War II, the last two words were fading rapidly. In one of my first graduate classes, a course in statistics, the professor announced on the first day, "Whatever exists, exists in some number." We dutifully wrote that into our notes and did not pause to recognize that thereby all that makes life meaningful was being consigned to oblivion. This bland restructuring-perhaps more accurately, destruction-of the world was typical of its time, 1940. The influence of a narrow scientistic attitude was already spreading throughout the learned disciplines. In the next two decades it would invade and tyrannize the "social sciences," education, and even philosophy. To be sure, quantification is a powerful tool, selectively employed, but too often it has been made into an executioner's axe to deny actuality to all that does not yield to its procrustean demands.

It is well-established that while cognitive psychology provides a sound foundation for an understanding of our interactions with digital technology, this is no longer sufficient to make sense of how we use and experience the personal, relational and ubiquitous technologies that pervade everyday life. This book begins with a consideration of the nature of experience itself, and the user experience (UX) of digital technology in particular, offering a new, broader definition of the term. This is elaborated though a wide-ranging and rigorous review of what are argued to be the three core UX elements. These are involvement, including shared sense making, familiarity, appropriation and “being-with” technologies; affect, including emotions with and about technology, impressions, feelings and mood; and aesthetics, including embodied aesthetics and neuroaesthetics. Alongside this, new insights are introduced into how and why much of our current use of digital technology is simply idling, or killing time. A particular feature of the book is a thorough treatment of parallel, and sometimes competing, accounts from differing academic traditions. Overall, the discussion considers both foundational and more recent theoretical and applied perspectives from social psychology, evolutionary psychology, folk psychology, neuroaesthetics, neuropsychology, the philosophy of technology, design and the fine arts. This broad scope will be enlightening and stimulating for anyone concerned in understanding UX. A Psychology of User Experience stands as a companion text to the author’s HCI Redux text which discusses the contemporary treatment of cognition in human-computer interaction.