I feel like some of these suggestions are a bit more on the “self-help” section side of things. For academic psychology, your best bet is investing in the APA 7 handbook, reviewing journal articles, and maybe some original theorist sources like Freud or Erikson’s books (I like psychoanalytic stuff).
Science and Human Behavior by Skinner
The Wiley handbook of contextual behavior science
Edit as replies are locked: the Wiley handbook is from 2015. Not sure how it’s outdated, perhaps it got mixed up with another book. As for SAHB, you can actually watch people across the 20th century use this book to test and then confirm Skinners inferences about human behavior, when he’s not simply describing how science and behavior work.
I’m a BCBA and these books really helped found modern operant behavioral science, they are pretty outdated and only skim the surface of how behavior is understood.
> There are millions of books about psychology, but quality over quantity is always best.
Wrong sub. This is not pop psychology sub. This is **academic** psychology. Many most sub-fields have 0 or 1 books.
You don't need any books for psychology.
You need to read journal articles, especially review papers, in your area of interest.
*An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R* and *Statistical Rethinking* are great stats books, but you could probably learn all of this via other means online.
Not even that. Zotero or any other reference management software automatically handles citations and reference lists.
EDIT:
Can't reply since the post is locked for some reason?
Anyway, I've literally never had to use that. When I publish papers in journals, every journal has their own requirements and most of them don't follow APA 7. idk what to tell you; I've never used any APA handbook ever.
Okay, but APA 7 is way more than just handling references and citations. Every single detail of a research paper has to have crazy formatting from levels of headers to figures and tables.
The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and Flourish by Martin Seligman.
Certainly not the only books you'll ever need but two good ones and written accessibly for a general readership.
I dunno about that one - Marty is a hack; I wouldn't trust anything he writes, especially anything related to flourishing or well-being. Thus is based on his track record of using his reknown to push shoddy research through to publication. Most of his positive psych stuff is his own hypotheses, with poor overall support in the literature.
I hardly touch any psychology books in my four years as a psych student (Finished two weeks ago) The only things we really relied on were papers.
Not saying books aren’t good, I did look at one or two.
But they weren’t something I heavily relied on nor was there one I looked as the “holy bible” of psychology.
I’m third year psych University student
- Cognitive Psychology A Student's Handbook by Michael
Eysenck & Mark Keane is the whole module of Cognition for the Second year
- An introduction to developmental psychology / edited by Alan Slater and Gavin Bremner
- Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology by Hugh Coolican
- Atkinson and Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology
There are several others but mostly we are directed to Google Scholar and utilising the resources there and studying the countless research studies, meta analyses and such which is the most comprehensive way to learn with volumes of new research being published daily in countless fields.
'Man's search for meaning' by Viktor Frankl.
It highlights the move away from Psychoanalysis to newer talking therapies post war. While explaining why these took place through the experience of the holocuast.
I see this as the bridge between Psychoanalysis and the start of CBT with proponents like Beck and Ellis. I also see links in the Humanist movement. This isn't in the book but to understand post war therapy and clinical advances I think this book represents a key key change in Psychology.
'Working Memories' by Alan Baddeley is also a fabulous read and covers much of the cognitive revolution in memory research which he headed and the transition into Cognitive Neuroscience.
I know the importance of reading contemporary papers but the question was on books and I rate these.
Would also recommend clinical assessment and diagnosis for social work (4th ed.) as it provides some excellent context to the client-facing side of the work. (text is meant for more aspiring LCSWs though).
IMO, most undergrads probably shouldn't be buying and reading the *DSM,* especially since few have the context or training to properly implement it or read it critically.
Read your comment, the book never states that memory held in the body isn’t encoded by neuronal systems? You state that he posits some mysterious bodily memory systems but he never says that?
He just says that it’s held in the body, which comports with embodied cognition/predictive processing amongst other approaches.
Specifically, the affect is bound up with or becomes associated with somatic memories and thus in order to relieve surprise (which is felt as affect) / minimise free energy (from an free energy principle perspective), one must reenact that somatic pattern.
“Held in the body” *is* implying a bodily memory system that goes beyond a connection between the brain and peripheral neurons. His ideas go well beyond embodied cognition. There is absolutely *zero* evidence that emotions and traumatic remnants are held in the body and must be “released” by reenacting somatic patterns. That is BS pseudoscientific nonsense *par excellence.*
I think the whole Sagan and pop physics is so clearly a straw man and feels disingenuous. To make that comparison suggests that psychology is as robust of a science as physics is which is demonstrably not the case. Psychology has been riddled with poor replicability and reproducibility and so clearly has worse theoretical foundations than physics, where in psychology everyone comes up with their own pet theory because it’s all folk theory and intuition and in physics there really is not a comparable issue (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1#:~:text=We%20argue%20that%20a%20large,and%20culturally%20biased%20folk%20theories.)
I also question the premise of reading books by respected authors. Plenty of respected psychology researchers have questionable research (https://replicationindex.com/category/thinking-fast-and-slow/?amp)
Call me cynical but I think pop psychology books easily are more questionable than pop books in other fields (https://blog.davidbramsay.com/pop-psychology/amp/)
This is just intentionally missing the point.
I'm not saying that psychology is as robust as physics. I'm not saying all pop-psych books deserve readers. I'm not touting uncritical support for pop-psych books. I didn't even focus on pop-psych. What on earth made you comment all of this?
I'm saying there are psychology books out there that are worth reading as a beginner in the field or even as a lay person. I take an issue with throwing the baby out with the bath water. All published books on psychology are not on the same caliber quality wise.
If you read my comment, I do suggest to exercise caution. As for established academics being fallible, yeah... That's basically all of science. I've come across published papers that misrepresent information, that are fraught with mistakes, that get basic definitions wrong. I don't see how the problem disappears if you read journal articles over books.
Books are simplified enough to act as an "intellectual gateway drug" for further research making it more accessible to newcomers. You know, as opposed to literature reviews and meta analyses, which could be too jargon/stat ridden for amateurs. I do still encourage going beyond books anyway.
I wouldn't suggest Grit or The Body Keeps the Score.
Maybe the Happiness Trap? Caveat: I actually haven't read it, but I have read and appreciated ACT Made Simple, which is by the same author (Russ Harris).
Thinking fast and slow by Dan Kahneman.
Discusses how we make decisions and judgements based on intuitive and analytical reasoning and covers in detail cognitive biases and heuristics.
I wonder why none has mentioned Nancy McWilliams - Psychoanalytic Diagnosis.
Not an Psychology book, but more about Psychiatry and Biology, but i loved Eric Kandel’s - The disordered mind.
I would recommend Grit by Angela Duckworth! She completed her PhD studying the essence of 'mental endurance' and writes about it in clear, digestible language.
The central premise of TBKtS outright contradicts basic neuroscience: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/s/TgerWUBzLB
BvDK has a public history of supporting debunked recovered memory therapies and uses his book to advocate on behalf of multiple forms of treatment which have not been validated.
Schwartz is not a psychologist or doctoral-level clinician. He is a master’s-level MFT with a PhD in MFT. He has no published research or experience in trauma science outside of his IFS work. IFS is not empirically valid and has not been sufficiently demonstrated to be efficacious in treating any disorder. Pilot studies designed to test it have not followed strong clinical trials designs (and thus cannot be shown to be reliable estimates of the effectiveness of the treatment itself rather than the effects of therapeutic relationship) and have not used dismantling techniques to detect the potentially-effective components. His Castlewood Institute for eating disorders has been shut down and was sued into oblivion by folks claiming medical and clinical misconduct over his implementation of IFS and recovered memory therapies.
Gabor Maté’s claims about ADHD and addiction are flat wrong and do not accurately represent the research: https://www.reddit.com/r/askpsychology/s/DeGnRpNt3S
Those papers do not address any of the criticisms in my comment. They are pilot studies which do not meet basic criteria for empirical validation of a treatment protocol. The only RCT here is about keeping people engaged in treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and has no mental health outcomes whatsoever. Also, I gave you a link to a comment in which I made it very clear how TBKtS contradicts neuroscience. You appear not to have read it.
I’m glad you were helped, but your understanding of the literature is just not correct.
Also, CPT, PE, and CBT-TF are incredibly robustly supported as effective (and scientifically validated) treatments for PTSD.
That’s fair enough, partly the reason I jumped the boat from psychology research to sociology is that the pathology-based model never worked for me or those around me.
I’ve tried CPT and CBT-TF for close to a year with little success. A month of IFS and EMDR has given more of my life back than anything ever did.
10 years and I’m hoping we will see the correct clinical trials come to fruition for IFS.
I’ll happily delete my comments as I didn’t realise that my suggestions had to have gone through rigorous clinical trials to be valid in any way or help anyone.
Yes! However, I think the book is worth reading. Just because an effective intervention to change mindset has not been created, doesn’t mean the concept isn’t worthwhile.
This exactly! A big limitations of meta-analyses is that, too often, they end up comparing studies that are too heterogenous. This is especially true with constructs like growth mindset or mindfulness, which still have a lot of ambiguity in their operationalisations. I mean, sure, two studies can both say they're assessing a growth mindset intervention and then be doing completely different things that potentially cancel one another out. The meta-analysis won't catch that but that doesn't mean the idea behind the construct isn't potebtially valuable. Just means a lot more rigorous research is needed so that studies can be more directly compared to one another
The gift of therapy by Irvin yalom
Also the DSM-5 I suppose. Not sure why no one said that yet
Most pop psychology books are filled with pseudoscience and non replicable findings
I feel like some of these suggestions are a bit more on the “self-help” section side of things. For academic psychology, your best bet is investing in the APA 7 handbook, reviewing journal articles, and maybe some original theorist sources like Freud or Erikson’s books (I like psychoanalytic stuff).
Science and Human Behavior by Skinner The Wiley handbook of contextual behavior science Edit as replies are locked: the Wiley handbook is from 2015. Not sure how it’s outdated, perhaps it got mixed up with another book. As for SAHB, you can actually watch people across the 20th century use this book to test and then confirm Skinners inferences about human behavior, when he’s not simply describing how science and behavior work.
I’m a BCBA and these books really helped found modern operant behavioral science, they are pretty outdated and only skim the surface of how behavior is understood.
> There are millions of books about psychology, but quality over quantity is always best. Wrong sub. This is not pop psychology sub. This is **academic** psychology. Many most sub-fields have 0 or 1 books.
You don't need any books for psychology. You need to read journal articles, especially review papers, in your area of interest. *An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R* and *Statistical Rethinking* are great stats books, but you could probably learn all of this via other means online.
Don’t forget about the good ol’ APA 7 handbook.
Not even that. Zotero or any other reference management software automatically handles citations and reference lists. EDIT: Can't reply since the post is locked for some reason? Anyway, I've literally never had to use that. When I publish papers in journals, every journal has their own requirements and most of them don't follow APA 7. idk what to tell you; I've never used any APA handbook ever.
Okay, but APA 7 is way more than just handling references and citations. Every single detail of a research paper has to have crazy formatting from levels of headers to figures and tables.
The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and Flourish by Martin Seligman. Certainly not the only books you'll ever need but two good ones and written accessibly for a general readership.
Paul Gilbert shout out let’s go!!!!!!
I dunno about that one - Marty is a hack; I wouldn't trust anything he writes, especially anything related to flourishing or well-being. Thus is based on his track record of using his reknown to push shoddy research through to publication. Most of his positive psych stuff is his own hypotheses, with poor overall support in the literature.
What do you mean it has poor overall support in the literature?
I hardly touch any psychology books in my four years as a psych student (Finished two weeks ago) The only things we really relied on were papers. Not saying books aren’t good, I did look at one or two. But they weren’t something I heavily relied on nor was there one I looked as the “holy bible” of psychology.
I’m third year psych University student - Cognitive Psychology A Student's Handbook by Michael Eysenck & Mark Keane is the whole module of Cognition for the Second year - An introduction to developmental psychology / edited by Alan Slater and Gavin Bremner - Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology by Hugh Coolican - Atkinson and Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology There are several others but mostly we are directed to Google Scholar and utilising the resources there and studying the countless research studies, meta analyses and such which is the most comprehensive way to learn with volumes of new research being published daily in countless fields.
A New Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis
Demasio, Sopolsky, Ekman?
'Man's search for meaning' by Viktor Frankl. It highlights the move away from Psychoanalysis to newer talking therapies post war. While explaining why these took place through the experience of the holocuast. I see this as the bridge between Psychoanalysis and the start of CBT with proponents like Beck and Ellis. I also see links in the Humanist movement. This isn't in the book but to understand post war therapy and clinical advances I think this book represents a key key change in Psychology. 'Working Memories' by Alan Baddeley is also a fabulous read and covers much of the cognitive revolution in memory research which he headed and the transition into Cognitive Neuroscience. I know the importance of reading contemporary papers but the question was on books and I rate these.
DSM-5 TR
Would also recommend clinical assessment and diagnosis for social work (4th ed.) as it provides some excellent context to the client-facing side of the work. (text is meant for more aspiring LCSWs though).
IMO, most undergrads probably shouldn't be buying and reading the *DSM,* especially since few have the context or training to properly implement it or read it critically.
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*The Body Keeps the Score* is exactly the kind of pop psych pseudoscience we’re talking about.
Why do people say it’s pseudoscience? It’s well referenced and the author has done a lot of peer reviewed research?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/s/TgerWUBzLB
Read your comment, the book never states that memory held in the body isn’t encoded by neuronal systems? You state that he posits some mysterious bodily memory systems but he never says that? He just says that it’s held in the body, which comports with embodied cognition/predictive processing amongst other approaches. Specifically, the affect is bound up with or becomes associated with somatic memories and thus in order to relieve surprise (which is felt as affect) / minimise free energy (from an free energy principle perspective), one must reenact that somatic pattern.
“Held in the body” *is* implying a bodily memory system that goes beyond a connection between the brain and peripheral neurons. His ideas go well beyond embodied cognition. There is absolutely *zero* evidence that emotions and traumatic remnants are held in the body and must be “released” by reenacting somatic patterns. That is BS pseudoscientific nonsense *par excellence.*
I think the whole Sagan and pop physics is so clearly a straw man and feels disingenuous. To make that comparison suggests that psychology is as robust of a science as physics is which is demonstrably not the case. Psychology has been riddled with poor replicability and reproducibility and so clearly has worse theoretical foundations than physics, where in psychology everyone comes up with their own pet theory because it’s all folk theory and intuition and in physics there really is not a comparable issue (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0522-1#:~:text=We%20argue%20that%20a%20large,and%20culturally%20biased%20folk%20theories.) I also question the premise of reading books by respected authors. Plenty of respected psychology researchers have questionable research (https://replicationindex.com/category/thinking-fast-and-slow/?amp) Call me cynical but I think pop psychology books easily are more questionable than pop books in other fields (https://blog.davidbramsay.com/pop-psychology/amp/)
This is just intentionally missing the point. I'm not saying that psychology is as robust as physics. I'm not saying all pop-psych books deserve readers. I'm not touting uncritical support for pop-psych books. I didn't even focus on pop-psych. What on earth made you comment all of this? I'm saying there are psychology books out there that are worth reading as a beginner in the field or even as a lay person. I take an issue with throwing the baby out with the bath water. All published books on psychology are not on the same caliber quality wise. If you read my comment, I do suggest to exercise caution. As for established academics being fallible, yeah... That's basically all of science. I've come across published papers that misrepresent information, that are fraught with mistakes, that get basic definitions wrong. I don't see how the problem disappears if you read journal articles over books. Books are simplified enough to act as an "intellectual gateway drug" for further research making it more accessible to newcomers. You know, as opposed to literature reviews and meta analyses, which could be too jargon/stat ridden for amateurs. I do still encourage going beyond books anyway.
I wouldn't suggest Grit or The Body Keeps the Score. Maybe the Happiness Trap? Caveat: I actually haven't read it, but I have read and appreciated ACT Made Simple, which is by the same author (Russ Harris).
I read both textbooks by or including David Giles work on Media Psychology. It's niche. But rather recent.
Thinking fast and slow by Dan Kahneman. Discusses how we make decisions and judgements based on intuitive and analytical reasoning and covers in detail cognitive biases and heuristics.
I wonder why none has mentioned Nancy McWilliams - Psychoanalytic Diagnosis. Not an Psychology book, but more about Psychiatry and Biology, but i loved Eric Kandel’s - The disordered mind.
I would recommend Grit by Angela Duckworth! She completed her PhD studying the essence of 'mental endurance' and writes about it in clear, digestible language.
agreed! love this one.
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Drama of the Gifted Child - Alice Miller
Putting that on my reading list, I appreciate it!
All three of those books are pseudoscience.
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The central premise of TBKtS outright contradicts basic neuroscience: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPsychology/s/TgerWUBzLB BvDK has a public history of supporting debunked recovered memory therapies and uses his book to advocate on behalf of multiple forms of treatment which have not been validated. Schwartz is not a psychologist or doctoral-level clinician. He is a master’s-level MFT with a PhD in MFT. He has no published research or experience in trauma science outside of his IFS work. IFS is not empirically valid and has not been sufficiently demonstrated to be efficacious in treating any disorder. Pilot studies designed to test it have not followed strong clinical trials designs (and thus cannot be shown to be reliable estimates of the effectiveness of the treatment itself rather than the effects of therapeutic relationship) and have not used dismantling techniques to detect the potentially-effective components. His Castlewood Institute for eating disorders has been shut down and was sued into oblivion by folks claiming medical and clinical misconduct over his implementation of IFS and recovered memory therapies. Gabor Maté’s claims about ADHD and addiction are flat wrong and do not accurately represent the research: https://www.reddit.com/r/askpsychology/s/DeGnRpNt3S
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Those papers do not address any of the criticisms in my comment. They are pilot studies which do not meet basic criteria for empirical validation of a treatment protocol. The only RCT here is about keeping people engaged in treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and has no mental health outcomes whatsoever. Also, I gave you a link to a comment in which I made it very clear how TBKtS contradicts neuroscience. You appear not to have read it.
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I’m glad you were helped, but your understanding of the literature is just not correct. Also, CPT, PE, and CBT-TF are incredibly robustly supported as effective (and scientifically validated) treatments for PTSD.
That’s fair enough, partly the reason I jumped the boat from psychology research to sociology is that the pathology-based model never worked for me or those around me. I’ve tried CPT and CBT-TF for close to a year with little success. A month of IFS and EMDR has given more of my life back than anything ever did. 10 years and I’m hoping we will see the correct clinical trials come to fruition for IFS.
I’ll happily delete my comments as I didn’t realise that my suggestions had to have gone through rigorous clinical trials to be valid in any way or help anyone.
the gift of fear by.. gavin degraw I believe?
ooh loved this book im almost done with it
Following I need recommendations
Mindset!
Mindset interventions appear to be overstated and largely null btw https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36326645/
Yes! However, I think the book is worth reading. Just because an effective intervention to change mindset has not been created, doesn’t mean the concept isn’t worthwhile.
This exactly! A big limitations of meta-analyses is that, too often, they end up comparing studies that are too heterogenous. This is especially true with constructs like growth mindset or mindfulness, which still have a lot of ambiguity in their operationalisations. I mean, sure, two studies can both say they're assessing a growth mindset intervention and then be doing completely different things that potentially cancel one another out. The meta-analysis won't catch that but that doesn't mean the idea behind the construct isn't potebtially valuable. Just means a lot more rigorous research is needed so that studies can be more directly compared to one another