|
As I describe in my post about scanning books, I love a good alphabetical reference book. And this one is one of the best.
The American Psychological Association APA Dictionary of Psychology by Gary R. VandenBos (APA, 2007) is a big fat reference book that covers the waterfront of the mind, and everything related, in 25,000 readable definitions, descriptions, and short biographies. Like the field of psychology itself, it covers everything from IQ to brain science, from mental disorders to amazing experiments.
From LSD to myasthenia gravis, from Lou Gehrig’s disease to the lost letter procedure, from Freud and Skinner to the Kuder Preference Record, it’s all here. Now you can finally confirm or deny some of the pseudo-science that those crime scene investigators are talking about on prime time TV every night.
Did you know that graphorrhea is the incoherent writing of long lists of meaningless words? Hopefully something I don’t have, at least not yet. Perhaps not quite as bad as steatopygia – the presence of large quantities of fat in the buttocks. Did you know that Immodium (loperamide) is an opioid, a synthetic form of an opiate? (Don’t expect to get any high from it; it just shuts down your digestive system.) That the famous Myers-Briggs test was created by a mother-daughter team? Do you ever get a Piloerection? Perverse as it sounds, it’s the technical name for goose bumps.
This great book is fun to scan through as well as being a definitive reference book. Multiple versions are available to fit your budget, as shown on the right. This review is of the top, most comprehensive version.
|
|
