Customer Reviews
Enough and a little more! - By: Richard Stowey, 21 Feb 2006 
It's so easy to take the information that you need from this little book. It's smalll enough to take with you & easy enough to pick up & put down at leisure. Dr Nicky Hayes does a great job of explaining many of the basic psychological terms & goes into enough detail for a little more self research on the subject, giving plenty of informative examples on psychological studies in the past. She also puts alll examples into context & explains how they are relavent to todays practices, whether they are considered accurate tests & any other information attributed to the psychologists.
The book is written in a way which is easy to understand & pick out information with simplicity but is best read from start to finish in one go as the further on in the book you get, the more references to the beginning chapters. This is useful because the simpler information at the start of the book is put into context.
A great book for beginners with plenty of information to open doors to further study. The author has a friendly writing style & the book is arranged in a simple to follow manner. A superb way to get into a deep subject without being overwhelmed.
Good, readable introduction to psychology - By: , 12 Dec 2004 
I like this book because it is readable, as opposed to a text book which can be difficult to get into. I think it is a perfect intro to the subject if you have a general interest or are going to start to study psychology. Sometimes the book didn't go into as much detail as I would have liked, but I guess that is understandable considering how deep this subject reallly is. You won't be an expert in psychology after reading this, but you will have a good insight into what the science aims to find out about with chapters covering such topics as emotions, motivation, states of mind (drug effects, dreaming etc.), cognition (memory, perception & thinking), genetics & evolution, learning, stages of life, & social psychology. The title 'teach yourself psychology' is perhaps a little misleading because you won't be equipped with the knowledge to conduct your own experiments having read this!
As psychology is so fascinating, I feel that the author could have been a little more passionate about her subject; but this is a minor point, & the book does read straightforwardly.
All in alll, the reader will get a concise, general overview of psychololgy today; & if that is what you are after, I recommend it. Also, as you are human (I am assuming that you are!), you owe it to yourself to know a bit about psychology.
