Motivation and emotion/Book/2014/Preface

Motivation and emotion:
Understanding and improving our motivational and emotional lives using psychological science (2014)

Preface

The book chapters each have a primary author, but co-authorship and peer review was supported and encouraged.

The 2014 edition of the Motivation and Emotion book series provides 134 freely available online chapters about how psychological science can be used to better understand and improve specific aspects of human's motivational and emotional lives.

These chapters were developed by third year undergraduate psychology emerging academics as part of their participation in a unit called Motivation and emotion at the University of Canberra, Australia. The idea is to involve emerging academics to engage in authoring unique, openly available online book chapters as a learning and assessment exercise, but also as a socially beneficial exercise - and as a contrast to the archaic traditional requirement that students to write essays on the same topics, year after year, with their efforts largely hidden and unshared.

Each 2014 book chapter focuses on a each unique topic, but also seeks to build and extend upon earlier Motivation and emotion book chapters (developed in 2010, 2011, and 2013). In 2010, the focus was towards developing textbook style chapters. This focus evolved in 2011, 2013 and 2014 towards addressing a self-help audience by offering a psychological science viewpoints about how humans can enhance their motivational and emotional lives.

Each of the chapters is also accompanied by a 5 minute online multimedia overview.

Feel free to comment on the chapters or to improve them by editing.