Book Report-40 Studies That Changed Psychology

1068 Words5 Pages
Book Report: 40 Studies That Changed Psychology This book report is written for Dr. Lu. It is on 40 Studies That Changed Psychology, a compulsory book for either professional or amateur psychology learners. This classical work mainly centers on the explorations into the history of psychological research. Roger R. Hock, the author, is an excellent educator and psychologist. He uses his simple and natural writing style to turn all the perplexing psychological studies into highly simplified ones, of which the difficult terms, theories and principles are all illustrated in explicit way, and thus they can be readily understood. The whole collection is composed of four studies each in ten popular fields of psychological researches, including biology and human behavior, perception and consciousness, learning and conditioning, intelligence, cognition and memory, human development, emotion and motivation, personality, psychopathology, psychotherapy and social psychology. In this report, I am not introducing many specific details about the forty studies. Instead, I will introduce what is between the lines and what is more essential about the book. There is an interesting description about psychology going like this: “Long as the past of psychology is, it has only a short history.” Because the origin of psychology should be traced back to philosophy, the oldest discipline, though it has not been recognized as a discipline until 19th century. And at present, most people still often hold the idea that psychology is a mysterious witchcraft rather than a science subject, because psychology has long been a low-key field that once mind readers claimed to use, and that at that time it only based on deduction and thinking as philosophy, known as psychology’s father. Although through the development for centuries large number of changes have happened, the same situation
Open Document