Purpose: Americans spent over $10.4 billion on "self-help books", in the year 2021. Many therapists suggest that their patients read selected self-help books to aid in their recovery. During the pandemic-depression, anxiety, addictions, problems with relationships were all on the rise and self-help books can be helpful to learn coping mechanisms.

Task:Your extra credit assignment is to critique a popular self-help book.

(1) The book must be at least 100 pages. The advice in the self-help book needs to be based on research as compared to anecdotal evidence.

(2) If you do not have access to a self-help book, OCC's Library Collection contains self-help eBooks. There is a tab in the library page called Research Guide for Psychology that currently links to 10 eBooks that students can easily access by clicking on the links and signing in with their MyOCC username and password when prompted (if not already logged into D2L). All the eBooks selected allow unlimited user access and are on the shorter side, 100-200 pages long. This is the link to the Self-help eBook section of the Psychology Research Guide:

https://libguides.oaklandcc.edu/Psychology/Self-Help

(3) Some self-help book suggestions (these are in the HL-Library):

Living, Loving and Learning (Buscagli), Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (Gray), Ageless Body and Timeless Mind (Chopra), Don't Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It's All Small Stuff (Carlson), Life Strategies (McGraw), Self-Nurture (Domar and Dreher) and Happiness Is Free (Dwoskin and Levenson), Feeling Good (Burns), Self-Matters (McGraw), Dianetics (Hubbard), The Dance of Intimacy (Lerner), How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), You Just Don't Understand (Tannen), The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey), 10 Stupid Things People Do to Mess Up Their Relationship (Schlessinger) and Your Perfect Right (Alberti and Emmons).

(4) Finally, answer the following questions with at least a couple sentences response for each question. Organization, spelling, and sentence construction should be checked. Please number your questions with your responses. Each question is worth one point.

1. What is the name of your self-help book? Who are the authors and what are their credentials (you may have to Google their credentials)? Is there a reason why you selected this self-help book? (For yourself, for someone else or general interest?).

2. Describe the topic of the book and the specific self-help techniques that the author suggests.

3. Is this book dominated by psychobabble (ill defined, meaningless, or vague language such as "You have to be you")?

4. Is the advice offered in this book based on scientific research or is it based on fashionable trends in thinking or intuition? Maybe the advice is more generated by sales.

5. Is this book based on published research, accepted theory, and clinical trials (or is it filled with speculation and personal anecdotes)? A good self-help book is research based.

6. Does this book focus on one problem such as anorexia or depression or does it give advice on a whole host of problems? A good self-help book focuses on one problem.

7. Does this book give clearly defined strategies and clear advice about changing behavior or solving a problem? A self-help book should give clear advice.

8. Is this book realistic about changing behavior or does it promise immediate change? A good self-help book is realistic about behavior change.

9. Was this book helpful for self-diagnosis or for checking progress? Would you recommend this book to someone in need?

10. Explain the most interesting fact that you learned from this self-help book?

Criteria for Success: Your assignment will be graded based on the following criteria: (a) Do you have a 2-4 complete sentence response for each question that is free of spelling and grammar errors? (b) Did you provide an answer to all the questions that is clear to the reader? (c) Did you number your response to each question?