This text offers an up-to-date view of the dynamic nature of contemporary psychology. The authors build a strong foundation in the fundamentals of psychology while featuring the most innovative contemporary research. With plenty of supportive pedagogy, experiments are explained in detail, and charts and figures add to an understanding of the results. The book offers an integrated biological orientation, a trend that is changing the way psychological topics are viewed, exemplified by the coverage of bio-evolutionary research.

This text offers an up-to-date view of the dynamic nature of contemporary psychology. The authors build a strong foundation in the fundamentals of psychology while featuring the most innovative contemporary research. With plenty of supportive pedagogy, experiments are explained in detail, and charts and figures add to an understanding of the results. The book offers an integrated biological orientation, a trend that is changing the way psychological topics are viewed, exemplified by the coverage of bio-evolutionary research.

2007-12-29 The best comprehensive book of psychology

Atkinson and Hilgard is a very comprehensive book on psychology that covers just about every topic in the field. It is very nicely written, clear, easy to understand and very enjoyable to read provided that you are interested in the topic. The diagrams and pictures are in color, of high quality and very informative. The whole book is full of many such high quality pictures. The explanations are scientific and based on sound research. Opposing points of view and controversies are introduced at the end of each chapter. The book comes with a workbook and additional sources on the internet are listed at the end of each chapter. It is a long book, I have yet read the first several chapters and am already very motivated to go on. Although the title is introduction to psychology it is not a superficial book. I recommend that absolute beginners to psychology read shorter more basic books about psychology before reading this one, otherwise this book maybe a bit difficult to understand for them. That is what I did. I highly recommend this book to anybody who wants to develop a comprehensive knowledge on psychology. It can also be used as a reference book, each chapter can be read selectively depending on what the rader wants to learn about. It is not obligatory to read each chapter in sequence. The organization is such that each chapter can be read independently like an encyclopedia.
Congratulations to the authors for writing such a clearly understandable and comprehensive book on a complicated subject.

One word of caution : if you are not a native speaker of English and wish to read a translation of this book in your mother tongue, make sure that the translated version is of high quality. I saw a translated edition in another language where it was completely black and white with very poor quality diagrams and pictures.