Books in the Problems in the Behavioural Sciences series

This book provides a basis in learning theory and particularly in frustration theory, for a comprehension of the mechanisms controlling these dispositions, their order of appearance in early development and their neural underpinnings.

First published in 1982, this book describes the control of thirst and water intake, and the physiology and psychology of drinking. Although this book is intended primarily for students of psychology, physiology and medicine, it should be of interest to all those concerned with the scientific study of thirst and with the physiological and neural bases of behaviour.

What is the mind? How does it work? How does it influence behavior? Some psychologists hope to answer such questions in terms of concepts drawn from computer science and artificial intelligence, testing their theories by modeling mental processes in computers. This book shows how computer models are used to study many psychological phenomena - including vision, language, reasoning, and learning.

The central idea of this book is that biology, and particularly evolution, provide the best starting point for the study of emotion. In particular, it argues that all the conventional properties of emotion, such as expression, feeling and motivation can be considered scientifically and conclusions drawn.

This well-written and lively account of the principles of how motivational systems operate includes discussions of both theories and empirical results from individual systems. The book deals with motivation at all levels from the physiological to that of mathematical modelling and explains complex ideas lucidly.

Learning the ways in which events are related to one another is called associative learning. This book provides a fresh look at learning theory by reviewing psychological research on the nature of human associative learning and memory.

After considering the problems involved in assessing memory, this book provisionally advances a taxonomy of elementary memory disorders and reviews both the specific processes that are disrupted and the lesions reponsible for the disruption.

Latent inhibition is an exquisitely simple, robust, and pervasive behavioural phenomenon - the reduced ability of an organism to learn new associations to previously inconsequential stimuli. It has been demonstrated in a variety of animals, including humans, across many different learning tasks.

Genius and creativity have long been related to psychopathology. In this book, Professor Eysenck examines the nature of genius, and suggests what role factors such as intelligence, social status and gender play in its expression. The book will be required reading for psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers and sociologists.

Incentive relativity is the study of the irritation and disappointment shown by animals and humans when they fail to obtain an expected reward, and this book provides a full account of the subject.

This book offers a critical discussion of the most important theories which have been put forward to explain obsessive-compulsive disorder. This book is unique in both the comprehensiveness and the depth of its coverage of theories of OCD. It also offers an entirely new approach to the definition of the disorder.

A general but comprehensive 1980 study of the way in which animals learn and in particular, learn about the relationship between events in their environment. The study of animal learning and conditioning can be approached from two very different perspectives, surveyed here by Dr Dickinson.