Los Angeles Valley College Library: OER: Open Educational Resources: Psychology

Textbooks

General Psychology by Rose M. Spielman et al. (2019): OpenStax.

Psychology is designed to meet scope and sequence requirements for the single-semester introduction to psychology course. The book offers a comprehensive treatment of core concepts, grounded in both classic studies and current and emerging research. The text also includes coverage of the DSM-5 in examinations of psychological disorders. Psychology incorporates discussions that reflect the diversity within the discipline, as well as the diversity of cultures and communities across the globe.

Psychology: The Science of Human Potential by Jeffrey Levy (2020): BCcampus.

Psychology: The Science of Human Potential is designed to be a concise, cohesive introduction to psychology textbook. The first chapter provides an overview of the textbook and reviews the history of psychology and its methodology. Psychology is described as a science studying how hereditary (nature) and experiential (nurture) variables interact to influence the thoughts, feelings, and behaviour of individuals. The remainder of the text is organized into sections entitled “Mostly Nature” (biological psychology; sensation and perception; motivation and emotion), “Mostly Nurture” (direct learning; indirect or observational learning; cognition), and “Nature/Nurture” (human potential, with regard to each of human development, personality, social psychology, maladaptive behaviour, and professional psychology). Includes H5P review exercises at the end of each chapter.

Cognitive Psychology by Meghan Andrade et al (2019): College of the Canyons.

A Zero-Cost Textbook compiled by College of the Canyons, Cognitive Psychology covers the basics of cognition, brain biology, research methods in cognition, how memory works from perception to encoding to storage of information, working memory, problem solving, creativity, reasoning, decision making, perception, attention and pattern recognition.

College of the Canyons

Introduction to Psychology: The Full Noba Collection by Robert Biswas-Diener (2016): NOBA.

This textbook represents the entire catalog of Noba topics. It contains 101 learning modules covering every area of psychology commonly taught in introductory courses. This book can be modified: feel free to rearrange or remove modules to better suit your specific needs.

Discover Psychology 2.0: A Brief Introductory Text by Robert Biswas-Diener (2015): University of Utah.

This textbook presents core concepts common to introductory courses. The 15 units cover the traditional areas of intro-to-psychology; ranging from biological aspects of psychology to psychological disorders to social psychology. This book can be modified: feel free to add or remove modules to better suit your specific needs. Each module in this book is accompanied by instructor's manual, PowerPoint presentation, test items, adaptive student quiz, and reading anticipation guide. Please note that the publisher requires you to login to access and download the textbooks.

Introduction to Psychology by Unknown (2015): University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing.

When you teach Introduction to Psychology, do you find it difficult — much harder than teaching classes in statistics or research methods? Do you easily give a lecture on the sympathetic nervous system, a lecture on Piaget, and a lecture on social cognition, but struggle with linking these topics together for the student? Do you feel like you are presenting a laundry list of research findings rather than an integrated set of principles and knowledge? Have you wondered how to ensure your course is relevant to your students? Introduction to Psychology utilizes the dual theme of behavior and empiricism to make psychology relevant to intro students. The author wrote this book to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level. Five or ten years from now, he does not expect his students to remember the details of most of what he teaches them. However, he does hope that they will remember that psychology matters because it helps us understand behavior and that our knowledge of psychology is based on empirical study.

Introduction to Psychology by Jennifer Walinga (2010): BCcampus.

This book is designed to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level. The focus on behaviour and empiricism has produced a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading books. The beginning of each section includes learning objectives; throughout the body of each section are key terms in bold followed by their definitions in italics; key takeaways, and exercises and critical thinking activities end each section.

Psychology as a Biological Science by Robert Biswas-Diener (2016): NOBA.

This textbook provides standard introduction to psychology course content with a specific emphasis on biological aspects of psychology. This includes more content related to neuroscience methods, the brain and the nervous system. This book can be modified: feel free to add or remove modules to better suit your specific needs.Please note that the publisher requires you to login to access and download the textbooks.

Together: The Science of Social Psychology by Robert Biswas-Diener (2016): Noba.

This textbook presents core concepts common to introductory social psychology courses. The 8 units include 27 modules covering key social psych topics such as research methods, group processes, social influence, and relationships. This book can be modified: feel free to add or remove modules to better suit your specific needs.

Research Methods in Psychology by Carrie Cuttler et al. (2019): Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

This fourth edition (published in 2019) was co-authored by Rajiv S. Jhangiani, Carrie Cuttler, and Dana C. Leighton and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Revisions throughout the current edition include changing the chapter and section numbering system to better accommodate adaptions that remove or reorder chapters; continued reversion from the Canadian edition; general grammatical edits; replacement of “he/she” to “they” and “his/her” to “their”; removal or update of dead links; embedded videos that were not embedded; moved key takeaways and exercises from the end of each chapter section to the end of each chapter; a new cover design.

Developmental Psychology by Neil Walker & Fredrick Bobola (2017): College of the Canyons.

This text describes, from a psychological standpoint, human growth and development. The book includes topics such as developmental theories and theorists, heredity and prenatal development, infancy, early childhood, then covers each subsequent portion of human lifespan development, including adolescence, stages of early, middle and late adulthood, aging, death and dying.

College of the Canyons

Courses

Introduction to Psychology (MIT OpenCourseWare)
This course is a survey of the scientific study of human nature, including how the mind works, and how the brain supports the mind. Topics include the mental and neural bases of perception, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, child development, personality, psychopathology, and social interaction. Students will consider how such knowledge relates to debates about nature and nurture, free will, consciousness, human differences, self, and society.
Introduction to Psychology (Open Yale)
What do your dreams mean? Do men and women differ in the nature and intensity of their sexual desires? Can apes learn sign language? Why can’t we tickle ourselves? This course tries to answer these questions and many others, providing a comprehensive overview of the scientific study of thought and behavior. It explores topics such as perception, communication, learning, memory, decision-making, religion, persuasion, love, lust, hunger, art, fiction, and dreams. We will look at how these aspects of the mind develop in children, how they differ across people, how they are wired-up in the brain, and how they break down due to illness and injury.
Introduction to Psychology (Saylor)
This course will introduce you to the fundamental principles of psychology and to the major subjects of psychological inquiry. It has been designed to not only provide you with the tools necessary for the study of psychology but to present you with a sampling of the major areas of psychology research. The course begins with a short overview of how psychology developed as an academic discipline and an introduction to a number of the principal methodologies most commonly deployed in its study. The subsequent units are arranged around broad areas of research, including emotion, development, memory, and psychopathology. We will focus on well-substantiated research and current trends within each of these categories.
Introduction to Psychology (Lumen/Waymaker)
This comprehensive, ready-to-adopt Introduction to Psychology course provides thorough coverage of all topics covered in a typical introductory course, including biological psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social and personality psychology, and mental and physical health.
With the OpenStax Psychology textbook as a foundation, this course enriches learning with frequent real-world examples, curated videos, selected NOBA content, and interactive learning activities to foster practical skills. Engaging “Psychology in Real Life” features use recent research to help students think critically about experimental design.
Understanding Memory: Explaining the Psychology of Memory through Movies (Coursera/Wesleyan University)
Welcome to Understanding Memory. Someone once said that memory is fascinating because sometimes we forget what we want to remember, sometimes we remember what we want to forget, and sometimes we remember events that never happened or never happened the way we remember them. I want to show you how memory works, why it sometimes fails, and what we can do to enhance it.