We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain - an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is ''a virtual self in a virtual reality.'' But if the self is not ''real,'' why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.

This updated edition covers a range of new topics, including stress and the immune system, post-traumatic stress and crisis intervention, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD), Crisis Management Briefings in response to mass disasters and terrorism, Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM), spirituality and religion as stress management tools, dietary factors and stress, and updated information on psychopharmacologic intervention in the human stress response. It is a comprehensive and accessible guide for students, practitioners, and researchers in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, medicine, nursing, social work, and public health.

Curiosity about the human mind—what it is and how it functions—began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes are so elusive, they could be described only by means of metaphor. Michael Kearns, in this prize-winning study, examines the development of metaphors of the mind in psychological writings from Hobbes through William James and in fiction from Defoe through Henry James. Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth, metaphors of the mind as a relatively simple entity, either mechanical or biological, dominated both those engaged in psychological theorizing and novelists ranging from Richardson and Smollett through Dickens and the Brontes. In the nineteenth century, such psychologists as Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain conceived of the mind as a complex organism quite different from that embodied in earlier thinking, but their figurative language did not keep pace. The result was a tension between theoretical expression and actual discussion of mental phenomena

With essentially the same basis as the 1971 Abilities, Their Structure, Growth and Action, this new volume reflects the developments of subsequent years.

This is the original work on which Hans Eysenck's fifty years of research have been built. It introduced many new ideas about the nature and measurement of personality into the field, related personality to abnormal psychology, and demonstrated the possibility of testing personality theory experimentally. The book is the result of a concentrated and cooperative effort to discover the main dimensions of personality, and to define them operationally, that is, by means of strictly experimental, quantitative procedures. More than three dozen separate researches were carried out on some 10,000 normal and neurotic subjects by a research team of psychologists and psychiatrists. A special feature of this work is the close collaboration between psychologists and psychiatrists. Eysenck believes that the exploration of personality would have reached an advanced state much earlier had such a collaboration been the rule rather than the exception in studies of this kind. Both disciplines benefit by working together on the many problems they have in common. In his new introduction, Eysenck discusses the difficulty he had in conveying this belief to scientists from opposite ends of the psychology spectrum when he first began work on this book. He goes on to explain the basis from which Dimensions of Personality developed. Central to any concept of personality, he states, must be hierarchies of traits organized into a dimensional system. The two major dimensions he posited, neuroticism and extraversion, were in disfavor with most scientists of personality at the time. Now they form part of practically all descriptions of personality. Dimensions of Personality is a landmark study and should be read by both students and professionals in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and sociology.

This book provides a detailed review of much of the existing research on visual perception and sports performance. It summarises and integrates the findings of up to five hundred articles from areas as diverse as cognitive and ecological psychology.