The mysteries of the human mind and human behavior have been a source of fascination and speculation throughout recorded history, and surely, for a long time before that. Attempts to explain human thoughts, emotions, and behavior, especially when they are disordered, go back just as long; and have often involved magic, evil spirits, invisible entities, and such unusual ideas as stones in the head and memories of previous lives. The scientifi c fi eld of psychology is less than 150 years old. Most textbooks date its beginning to the establishment of Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. Since that time the fi eld has grown rapidly, and the application of scientifi c method has led to many remarkable discoveries about how the human brain and mind actually work, along with what actually determines human behavior.

Unfortunately, magical thinking and superstition had a head start of 20,000 years on the scientifi c method, and so their elements still permeate the popular presentation of psychology, or “pop” psychology. We in the academic world probably should not be as surprised as we are that people are still willing to believe in a wide array of bizarre causal mechanisms for mental illness and in the treatments those beliefs inspire, despite a complete lack of empirical evidence supporting them. The realm of pop psychology certainly overlaps the science of psychology, but there are large areas of the two that rarely meet. A central purpose of this book is to explore key areas of both, in hopes of fi nding what is good science in the popular presentation of psychology, while providing some of the necessary tools for detecting those parts that are unworthy of serious attention.