Category: Essay Examples
Essay examples are of great value for students who want to complete their assignments timely and efficiently. If you are a student in the university, your first stop in the quest for research paper examples will be the campus library where you can get to view the sample essays of lecturers and other professionals in diverse fields plus those of fellow students who preceded you in the campus.
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Many college departments maintain libraries of previous student work, including essays, which current students can examine. This collection of free essay examples is our attempt to provide high quality samples of different types of essays on a variety of topics for your study and inspiration.
In 1949, Antonio Egas Moniz shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of the therapeutic value of frontal leucotomy.” Frontal leucotomy is better known by its more common name, prefrontal lobotomy. The procedure, which involves severing the connection between the most anterior portions of …
Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD, has been one of the more controversial additions to the disorders listed in the DSM-IV (it appeared in the DSM-III-R as Late Luteal Phase Dysphoric Disorder), not least because the distinctions between it and premenstrual syndrome (PMS), a perfectly normal, biological part of …
Primal therapy (also known as primal scream) is the brainchild of Arthur Janov. It is a psychodynamic therapeutic technique that claims to cure psychological disorders by encouraging people to feel deeply, and release, the feelings of pain and anger that have been within them since early childhood. Janov …
In a projective test, the examiner presents unstructured, vague, or ambiguous stimuli (such as the inkblots of the Rorschach test) with the belief that responses to the test represent revelations about the unconscious mental processes of the respondent. As of the mid-1990s, five of the fifteen most frequently …
Pseudoscience is simply false science. That is, anything that superficially resembles science, yet isn’t science, is pseudoscience. The difference between them is one of degree rather than of kind, with no single clear boundary demarcating the essential difference. Although the boundaries are fuzzy, however, the distinction is a …
The word psychedelic is formed from Greek roots meaning “mind-manifesting,” an appropriate name for psychoactive (hallucinogenic) drugs that can severely distort perceptions and evoke vivid hallucinations. A hallucination is simply a sensory experience that occurs in the absence of sensory input; in other words, seeing, hearing, feeling, or …
Psychiatry is the medical specialty that concerns itself with the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of psychological disorders. A psychiatrist is, first and foremost, a physician, complete with M.D. degree. In addition to the usual medical training, however, a psychiatrist receives additional special training and clinical experience in the …
As a scientific enterprise, psychology follows the methods of science, meaning that it uses data to generate testable hypotheses and constructs theories to explain the results of those tests. Research efforts are largely devoted to trying to describe people but also attempt to construct explanations. A theory is …
Canadian-born magician and escape artist James Randi had a highly successful career as a stage performer from the 1950s into the 1970s, but since the early 1960s, he has been primarily known as the world’s leading skeptical investigator of paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. In the beginning of …
Yet another example of therapeutic pseudoscience, rebirthing consists of a series of deep-breathing techniques intended to reduce stress, increase energy, and bring ease and pleasure to one’s life and relationships. This sounds fairly innocuous so far; the problem lies in the reasons given for the technique’s alleged effectiveness. …
In the 1930s, Ida P. Rolf (1896–1979), an organic chemist who had also dabbled in yoga and chiropractic, introduced a form of massage that she believed would relieve people of stress caused by past traumatic experience. According to Rolfing theory, memories of traumatic experiences are stored in various …
St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) is a plant that has been widely claimed to be an effective natural antidepressant and has thus gained enormous popularity in the United States and Europe. Hypericin, one of many compounds found in the plant, is generally believed to be primarily responsible for …
The linguistic relativity principle, formulated by Edward Sapir (1884–1936) and refined by his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), states that human thinking is highly dependent on the language spoken by the individual thinker. As language is our main tool for organizing our experiences, the argument goes, the language …
Under hypnosis and during various other types of suggestive therapy, many individuals have eventually “recovered” memories of prolonged sexual, psychological, or physical abuse at the hands of devil worshipping adults. Often these memories date from an age of less than two years old, a time from which most …
The people known today as savants were previously known by the somewhat less-sensitive term idiot savants, reflecting the terminology that was once used with reference to mental retardation. A savant is a person in whom severe mental handicap, usually mental retardation or autism, coexists with exceptional talent in …
Schizophrenia is one of the most severe psychological disorders, as well as one of the more common, and possibly the most widely misunderstood. The disorder’s name is partly responsible for the confusion. It is not unusual to find people confusing schizophrenia with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder), …
Self-esteem has become a very widely used term over the last thirty years as teachers, parents, and therapists have expended enormous effort and expense on increasing it, on the assumption that raising self-esteem will provide benefits and improve outcomes in many areas of life, including school performance, relationships, …
Though John B. Watson was the originator of behaviorism, it is through the efforts of Burrhus Frederic (B. F.) Skinner that behaviorist principles have found widespread practical application, through the therapeutic approach known as behavior modification, or applied behavior analysis. Like Watson, Skinner envisioned psychology free of mentalistic …
Sleep is the most common altered state of consciousness, as most people spend a substantial fraction of every day engaged in it. Researchers who study sleep have made tremendous use of a device known as the electroencephalograph (EEG), which has in a few short decades provided far more …
Much of what is known about hemispheric specialization in the brain (that is, the distribution of various functions between the two sides) comes from the in-depth study, mostly by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga, of three patients who endured a very drastic and controversial surgical procedure. The split-brain …
