Book

Psychology · A Complete Introduction

What this book is

Mann's whole-of-psychology survey for the curious adult — a Teach Yourself volume that walks 18 topics covering everything a first-year undergraduate psychology course would touch, paced for self-study and written without unexplained jargon. The topics cluster into five working areas: research methods, cognition, individual differences, social behaviour, and clinical psychology, with a closing pair on the brain and on sleep.

It is the right entry point if you want a working vocabulary across psychology — enough to read articles, understand a friend describing their therapy, or pursue a single sub-field in depth. Not enough to substitute for a university curriculum; enough to make every popular psychology book legible afterwards.

The shape of the survey

Executive summary

The book makes three load-bearing claims.

Psychology is an empirical science, not a collection of armchair theories

Topic 2 is the methods chapter. Every later claim is anchored in studies — experiments, correlational designs, longitudinal cohorts, neuroimaging. The popular-press psychology that lacks this anchor (most of it) is described in the source but flagged for what it is.

The cognitive turn changed everything

For the first half of the twentieth century, behaviourism dominated: only observable stimulus-response counted as scientific. Topics 3-6 cover the cognitive revolution that reopened the mind to study — perception, attention, memory, language, thought as information processing — and the modern synthesis with neuroscience.

Clinical psychology is the discipline's most consequential application

Topics 14-16 cover stress, mental disorders, and therapies. The book treats these as the field's most direct payoff: a discipline that started as philosophy now produces evidence-based therapies that change lives. It also covers the field's hard problems honestly — diagnostic boundaries, cultural bias, the treatment-gap.

Who this is for

Topic index

Topic 1 — IntroductionWhat psychology is, what it is not, the major schools and how they relate.Topic 2 — Psychology researchExperiments, surveys, correlational studies, case studies, longitudinal designs — and the ethics framework that constrains them.Topic 3 — Perception and attentionHow sensory input becomes experience, and how the brain selects what to process. Gestalt principles, perceptual constancies, divided attention.Topic 4 — MemoryShort-term and long-term memory, encoding/storage/retrieval, the eight-item myth, eyewitness reliability, and the modal Baddeley model.Topic 5 — LearningClassical conditioning (Pavlov), operant conditioning (Skinner), observational learning (Bandura) — and where each fits in modern psychology.Topic 6 — Language and thoughtHow language is acquired, the Whorfian hypothesis, problem-solving, decision-making, and the role of mental representations.Topic 7 — EmotionTheories of emotion (James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer), the universality debate, and the modern affective-science synthesis.Topic 8 — IntelligenceWhat IQ measures, what it does not, the heritability debate, multiple-intelligence theories, and the Flynn effect.Topic 9 — Personality and motivationTrait theory (Big Five), psychoanalytic, humanistic, and social-cognitive frameworks — and Maslow's hierarchy of needs.Topic 10 — Developmental psychologyPiaget on cognitive stages, Erikson on psychosocial stages, attachment theory (Bowlby/Ainsworth), and lifespan development.Topic 11 — Gender and sexualitySex vs gender, gender development theories, sexual orientation, and the moving line between biology and social construction.Topic 12 — Social influenceConformity (Asch), obedience (Milgram), persuasion, attitudes, and the classic social-psychology experiments.Topic 13 — Social and group processesGroup dynamics, intergroup relations, prejudice, stereotypes, deindividuation, bystander effect, prosocial behaviour.Topic 14 — Stress and mental healthWhat stress is biologically and psychologically, the general adaptation syndrome, and the determinants of wellbeing.Topic 15 — Psychological disordersDSM categories, anxiety and mood disorders, schizophrenia, personality disorders — and the boundary problem of diagnosis.Topic 16 — Psychological therapiesPsychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), humanistic, group, family — and the evidence base for each.Topic 17 — The brain and nervous systemNeurons and synapses, the major brain regions and what each does, and the methods of cognitive neuroscience.Topic 18 — SleepStages of sleep, what dreams are, circadian rhythms, sleep disorders, and why we sleep at all.

How to read these summaries

Topics 1-2 are the prerequisites. After that the book is mostly readable in any order — each topic stands on its own. The clinical topics (14-16) build on the personality (9) and developmental (10) topics, so read those first if you came for the clinical material. Topic 17 (the brain) is the empirical substrate referenced throughout the rest; read it early if you want the neuro angle on every later topic.

Concept companions

Cognitive psychologyThe information-processing view of the mind that displaced behaviourism in the 1950s-60s and remains central.BehaviorismThe 20th-century school that limited psychology to observable stimulus-response, productively and reductively.PersonalityThe stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that distinguish individuals — captured in trait, psychoanalytic, and humanistic theories.Mental healthThe presence of wellbeing and the absence of disabling distress — the discipline's most contested concept.Social psychologyThe branch studying how individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are shaped by the presence of others.