Psychology: An Overview

CHAPTER 2 The workings of the brain can be explained as a series of electrical reactions by nerve cells to an outside stimulus. The brain acts as the central control mechanism for regulating and responding to these reactions, depending on where they are processed and what that portion of the brain is either designed to do automatically or has learned to do because of previous experience. Although understanding the details of the brain's biological functioning can be useful, such understanding provides merely the beginning of a comprehension of how the human mind works.

CHAPTER 3 Motivation is the collection of forces that activate and direct an individual's behavior toward or away from a specific goal. This chapter concentrates on biological motivations. These include functions such as hunger, which encourages the body to seek food in order to gain energy and continue to function. Situations outside the body can provide motivations as well, as when the roar of a lion stimulates the intense collection of responses known as the "fight o

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intelligence. Most intelligence tests, like other efforts to quantify psychological capacities, try to place each individual on a scale that compares him or her to other similar individuals. Many researchers argue that intelligence is not a fixed, specific factor but is instead a combination of skills, facilities, and abilities to manipulate and process information that may even vary with age or circumstance. Educator Howard Gardner has proposed the existence of multiple intelligences, a range of different, unrelated mental capacities. He suggests that an individual who performs well on a standardized I.Q. test may be score quite differently on many other sets of measures. CHAPTER 16 Personality can be defined as the individual's particular set of dominant desires, characteristic emotions, and typical means of expressing those desires and emotions. Psychologists disagree in their explanations of both the causes and the meaning of personality differences, and their attempts to categorize personality attributes are inventive and numerous, ranging from detailed listings of major traits to the belief that personality is fluid, responding to changes in the environment and in the individual's capacity to learn and grow. Studies o
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