Sunday, October 5, 2014

Salem Health: Psychology & Mental Health



Piotrowski, A., N. (Ed.). (2010). Salem Health: Psychology & Mental Health. (Vols. 1-5). Hackensack, New Jersey: Salem Press.

Salem Health: Psychology & Mental Health is a five volume encyclopedia published by Salem Press in 2010.  The encyclopedia itself is a revision of Magill’s Encyclopedia of Social Science: Psychology, which was published in 2003 as a three volume set, by the same publisher and editor.

This updated encyclopedia offers more than 500 entries, covering a wide variety of the field of psychology, and offers three indexes to guide navigation of the five volumes. The second index is an alphabetical subject index, while the first index is separated by category, breaking the field into about sixty different categories, like, childhood, adolescence, depression, coping, personality and women’s psychology.  This second index allows a student to see a large overhead of different focuses within psychology in order to narrow down a specific interest. In addition, there is also a personage index that lists the entries for every major person covered, and their relevant pages.

Entries in the encyclopedia cover substantial territory in researching psychology, the range of which includes the history of the field itself, as well as different disciplines within psychology, such as behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and psychoanalytic psychology.   The encyclopedia is also a good starting point for different key figures in each field which describes the individual’s life, death, and research areas.

Major entries on disorders can be up to eight pages in length, and each are broken up into different sections that include introductions, possible causes, treatment approaches, various approaches taken by different forms of relevant therapy (i.e. speech therapy for an entry on stuttering), recent technological advances (such as research conducted using MRI), see also references, and sources for further study.

The encyclopedia’s editor is Nancy A. Piotrowski, from Capella University and the University of California, Berkeley.  Piotrowksi holds a Ph. D. in general psychology and addiction psychology and has written extensively on addiction psychology.

Salem Health: Psychology & Mental Health, is a recent enough publication as to not be dated. It is also part of a series that has undergone revisions since it first appeared in 1993, this duration of revisions should be indicative that it has been considered reliable and trustworthy enough to warrant  three heavily revised sets. This encyclopedia set is expansive enough in coverage to be useful to anyone beginning their research in the field of psychology.

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