Key Insights into Basic Mechanisms of Mental Activity

A more nuanced perspective on cognition, behavior, personality, and pathology. 

Mind/brain.
It is explained that mental activity is not possible without concepts/memory structures that exist in the brain and result from perceptual learning. Core mental activities including thinking, reasoning, and judgment are described as components of self-regulation and in terms of interacting neural systems.

This framework also leads to a more specific and less stigmatizing system for classifying and diagnosing mental illnesses.

This concise volume: 

Introduces the S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) model of mental activity.
• Recasts mental processes as neuro-mental processes.
• Provides empirical evidence for the neural basis for judgments.
• Addresses ongoing mind/brain questions such as whether thinking is unconscious.

Key Insights into Basic of Mental Activity will interest scientists doing research in psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, human biology/anthropology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Professors, lecturers, and instructors will find it important as a class text in these fields. And the book’s clinical implications make it useful to practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy.

• acquisition of language
• amygdala
• anterior cingulate cortex
• arousal
• attention
• cognition
• cognitive algebra
• computational neuroscience
• concept
• cortex
• decision-making
• determinism
• social cognition
• mental activity
• memory
• mind-brain problem
• perceptual learning

• Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

  Otto Buxbaum

Otto Buxbaum, born 1942 in Vienna, Austria. Studies in psychology, anthropology and philosophy (1966-1972, Vienna). Dissertation: Über den Ausdruck von Sprachlauten (About the expression of speech sounds). 1972-1983 Assistant at the Institute of Psychology, University of Graz. Habilitation in 1982 (Habilitationsschrift: Kognitionspsychologische Analysen von Kategorisierungsvorgängen) (Thesis: Cognitive analysis of categorization processes). Since then private lecturer. Many years of research on personality theories, person perception and psychiatric-psychological assessment, more and more with reference to human information processing and neuroscience. The current work comprises three studies. These are „Neues Wissen über Grundfragen der Psychiatrie” (New knowledge about basic questions of psychiatry) published by Springer 2015, the planned book and „Neues Wissen über grundlegende pädagogisch-psychologische Begriffe” (New knowledge about basic pedagogical-psychological concepts) submitted for publication. He is currently researching on the coordination of fundamental scientific concepts of psychiatry, psychology and pedagogy.

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