What’s New in Achieve

You can rely on Achieve to keep your teaching current, with continuous updates that reflect the latest developments in Psychology and the evolving needs of your classroom.

Summer 2026 Updates

• AI Skills Modules give students practical understanding of artificial intelligence through two interactive activities focused on responsible use and incorporating AI ethically into their coursework.
• Data Literacy Activities help students build confidence in analysing research, interpreting statistics, and applying data practices. These activities allow you to assign and assess these skills directly in Achieve.
• AI-Enabled Guided Quiz Review provides personalised formative feedback between quiz attempts, helping students identify gaps in their understanding and focus on mastering concepts, without adding extra work for you.
• Short-Form Writing Creator helps you turn videos, webpages, PDFs, articles, and other sources into meaningful writing assignments in minutes. Built-in AI can help create or refine prompts, generate rubrics, and evaluate student submissions against those rubrics.

What’s New in this Edition

• Explore updated research and contemporary topics across psychology, including sleep, perception, memory, development, personality, social psychology, and psychological disorders.
• Challenge common psychology myths with updated coverage of topics such as subliminal persuasion, learning styles, and how memory works.
• Connect psychology to students’ lives through current examples involving video games, mobile phones, electronic devices, studying, and multitasking.
• Build understanding of key concepts with clearer, more student-friendly explanations of topics including conditioning, memory, intelligence, and psychological disorders.
• Engage with emerging research on topics such as screen use and learning, prenatal development, the bystander effect, and virtual reality therapy.

Griggs and Jackson’s Psychology: A Concise Introduction, Sixth Edition, has been thoroughly revised without increasing its length. The following is a list of the main revisions (updates, deletions, and additions), chapter by chapter.

Chapter 1

• Converted laboratory observation to be a glossary key term and redefined both laboratory observation and naturalistic observation so that the definitions of these two descriptive methods were briefer and agreed with those in Table 1.3
• Deleted the glossary key term regression toward the mean and the subsequent discussions of it in the text
• Substantially reduced and simplified the discussion of the placebo effect and segued the discussion of placebo effect, placebo group, and placebo directly into the discussion of the hypothetical aerobic exercise experiment
• Deleted the glossary key term nocebo effect and the subsequent discussion of research findings about this effect
• Deleted the brief discussion about the replication crisis in psychology
• Deleted the text discussion and figural depiction of the "long tail" distribution that had been used as an example of a right-skewed distribution and replaced it with a less detailed example of a right-skewed distribution

Chapter 2

• Reorganized the discussion of the ratio of glial cells to neurons in the brain for better student comprehension
• Deleted discussion of the discovery and naming of synapse
• Deleted brief discussion of the variance in humans of the size of the primary visual cortex and its impact on the perception of the size of visual illusions
• Moved the discussions of sensory interaction, the McGurk effect, and synesthesia to Chapter 3 on sensation and perception
• Reduced the length of the discussion of Phineas Gage’s proposed recovery from his tragic accident
• Revised discussion of sleep stages–identifying first four stages of sleep as non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM) to contrast with rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and explaining how deep NREM sleep dominates first half of sleep time but REM sleep dominates second half of sleep time
• Added a brief discussion of the comparisons of total sleep time and REM sleep time between humans and other primates

Chapter 3

• Updated the discussion of subliminal persuasion, pointing out that it is a myth of popular psychology
• Added the discussions of sensory interaction, synesthesia, and the McGurk effect from Chapter 2 to the How We See and How We Hear sections
• Added a brief discussion of difference between farsightedness and presbyopia
• Added a discussion of the global spikes in the rate of nearsightedness and how researchers have found this to be related to years of education and how this link likely stems from more time indoors, resulting in insufficient exposure to natural light thereby impacting normal eye development
• Added a brief discussion of the tendency to see the young woman first in the young woman/old woman ambiguous figure but that this tendency weakens with age
• Added a brief discussion of whether the four phantom Necker cubes are present if you do not look at the ambiguous figure
• Deleted Figure 3.13 ("Two More Organizational Perceptual Ambiguities") and the related discussion in the text of these two ambiguities

Chapter 4

• Made neutral stimulus (NS) a glossary key term so that all five of the stimuli and responses involved in classical conditioning are now key terms
• Added a brief discussion about Pavlov’s dogs, including the kinds of dogs that he used and that he named them as well as a Web site with photos of the dogs
• Added a brief discussion of Tolles’s (2014) claim that Pavlov never used a bell to classically condition a dog to salivate and the controversy as to whether he did or did not do so
• Shortened the discussion of delayed and trace classical conditioning
• Made evaluative classical conditioning a glossary key term and expanded its discussion
• Deleted the subsection on operant and classical conditioning without awareness
• Revised discussion of Premack principle for clarity; updated example of this principle so that it relates to current students’ experience
• Updated example of fixed ratio schedule using video games instead of piecework in a factory; also used updated example in multiple-choice question that in 5e involved piecework in a factory
• Reduced the length of the discussion of the controversial mirror neuron systems in the observational learning section

Chapter 5

• Described the encoding process from the visual sensory register into short-term memory in more detail relating it to the difference between sensation and perception in Chapter 3; also related this explanation to the arrow going from long-term memory back to the recognition process in Figure 5.1
• Revised the descriptions of the temporal integration and Sperling’s full versus partial report procedures used to demonstrate the existence, duration, and capacity of iconic memory so that they were more student-friendly
• Extended the discussion of the durations of the other sensory registers to include an explanation why the duration of the auditory register is slightly longer than the visual register and the duration for the haptic register
• Added brief discussion of the finding that about 50% of people believe the myth that human memory works like a video recorder
• Revised the example of maintenance rehearsal in short-term memory so that it was more congruent with current students’ experience; it now involves entering a new cell phone number into contacts list
• Integrated the discussions of automatic versus effortful processing and levels-of-processing theory to lead into the discussion of elaborative processing
• To further student understanding of LTM and STM and primacy and recency effects, added a thought exercise asking the student to predict what would be observed on a free recall task for anterograde amnesics such as H. M.
• Added a discussion of the myth of learning styles
• Added a discussion of why taking class notes by hand typically leads to better memory than taking notes using a computer
• Added a discussion of the finding that using electronic devices for non-academic purposes during class leads to impaired subsequent exam performance and that multitasking during study sessions has a similar negative effect
• Added a discussion about the differences in learning for merely re-reading your text and class notes and re-watching a lecture video versus using the elaboration study strategy along with repeated self-testing

Chapter 6

• Deleted discussion of finding of a Tower of Hanoi practice effect in anterograde amnesics, which has now been shown to be nonreplicable
• Revised the discussion of dread risk to be more student-friendly
• Added to the discussion of recent research on the misperception of a relationship between weather changes and arthritic pain so it is clearer that this is an illusory correlation
• Deleted lengthy subsection on testing medical hypotheses
• Revised discussion of WAIS to include the new way test results are reported—four individual test scores and the overall intelligence score
• Added some discussion of environmental factors that help to account for the academic gap between Asian-American and Caucasian children

Chapter 7

• Added discussion of recent research indicating that prolonged usage of acetaminophen during pregnancy increases risk of offspring for ADHD and ASD
• Added a discussion of the recent research showing reductions in gray matter volume in brain areas associated with social cognition in first-time mothers and their significance for being a new mother
• Added discussion of recent research using new technology to study vision in fetuses in the final trimester that demonstrated that our preference for face-like stimuli is likely innate
• Added a brief discussion of the troublesome aspects of Kohlberg’s later life that led to bouts of depression and consequently, suicide

Chapter 8

• Redefined Freud’s concept of preconscious mind to make it more consistent with the definitions of his other two proposed levels of awareness
• Expanded discussion of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to include more detail on the test and the disconnect between its wide use and the numerous criticisms of its lack of scientific merit
• Added a discussion of Kaufman’s recently developed test of Maslow’s concept of self-actualization
• Added a discussion of the recently proposed General Factor of Personality (GFP) theory at the beginning of the section on trait theories of personality

Chapter 9

• Added a brief explanation of why Asch’s social pressure study moved from being known as an independence study to being known as a conformity study in that social psychologists were more interested in studying conformity than dissent
• Shortened discussion of Milgram’s obedience study, the recent criticisms of it, and the recent reinterpretation of the study’s findings
• Updated research findings on the bystander effect by adding brief discussion of the findings of the Fischer et al. (2011) meta-analysis of bystander effect studies and the Plötner et al.(2015) study demonstrating the effect in children as young as 5 years old
• Added brief discussion of the ironic story of how Kitty Genovese’s killer was apprehended because of bystanders actually helping
• Added coverage of recent SPE archival critical findings to discussion of the older criticisms of the SPE

Chapter 10

• Deleted discussion of the use of the terms "sane" and "insane" and revised the introduction to the DSM discussion
• Deleted brief discussion of false-positive patients in the description of DSM-5 because false positives are no longer discussed earlier in Chapter 6
• Deleted discussion of Horwitz and Wakefield’s overdiagnosis-hypothesis for the prevalence rate for depression; also deleted discussion of Andrews and Thomson’s related argument that this prevalence rate poses an evolutionary paradox
• Expanded discussion of neurotransmitter imbalances as a biological mechanism for major depressive disorder
• Deleted discussion of Botox injections as a treatment for major depressive disorder
• Added a brief discussion of the recent finding that early-life complications interacts with genetic risk score for schizophrenia to significantly increase the likelihood of the development of schizophrenia
• Added recent successful results in treating fear of heights with virtual reality therapy administered by a virtual coach and not face-to-face with a therapist