An Introduction to Psychological Science, Canadian Edition, 4th edition

For courses in Introductory Psychology.

An Introduction to Psychological Science presents students with a model for scientific literacy; this model forms the core of how this book is written and organised. We believe a scientific literacy perspective and model will prove useful in addressing two course needs we often hear from instructors - to provide students with a systematic way to categorise the overwhelming amount of information they are confronted with, and to cultivate their curiosity and help them understand the relevance, practicality, and immense appeal of psychological science.

Psychological science is in a privileged position to help students hone their scientific literacy. It is both a rigorous scientific discipline and a field that studies the most complex of all phenomena: the behavioural, cognitive, and biological basis of behaviour. With this focus on behaviour, one can rightly argue that psychology resides at the hub or core of numerous other scientific disciplines; it also shares connections with neuroscience, education, and public health, to name a few linkages. From this perspective, the knowledge acquired by studying psychological science should transfer and apply to many other fields. This is great news when you consider that psychology is one of the few science courses that many undergraduates will ever take.