Essay competition

Corpus Christi College (Cambridge University) is holding its annual essay competition for subjects including Psychology. This is aimed at A-Level and Higher students. Each school can enter up to two essays. Your essay should be 1,500 - 2,00o words in answer to one of the following questions:

1) Why do some people oppose immigration?
2) Is it possible to predict at birth which children are most likely to behave anti-socially?
3) "It is vital that action is taken to improve the health of those who regularly drink above the recommended daily limits for lower risk drinking" (Department of Health). What kind of action can be taken to encourage people to drink less alcohol, and how successful are the options likely to be?

It is noted that students are not expected to be studying any of the above subject matter on their course, and that they should draw on information from across the curriculum in their answers.

Let me know if you're interested - prize money is available, plus it would look fantastic on your CV!

Topics

Just a quick word on topics - any of you browsing through this blog might notice changes compared to previous years. Just to clarify:

There are three topics in unit 1, but we only study two of them (the third topic, Early Socialisation, will be in the exam paper but you won't answer those questions).

There are several option topics in unit 3, and I have tended to vary these from year to year depending on what I think will be of most interest, and lead to the best exam results. This year the syllabus has changed slightly, and in light of this I think the best ones to do will be Prejudice and Atypical Behaviour.

Et al

Some of you were asking about 'et al'. As you know, this is often used to shorten the researchers' names in a text, so you might see a reference to Rahe et al (1970).

The convention in psychology writing (such as articles and textbooks) is for one or two names to be given in full - e.g. Miller (1956), Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968) - but any more than that get reduced to the first name from the publication plus 'et al'.

Apparently the latin origin of the term is the word alius meaning 'other'. Et al is an abbreviation of the plural et alli, so it means 'and others'. However, it would be unusual in speech or writing to actually say 'and others'; the convention would be to say 'and colleagues', e.g. "Lazarus and colleagues investigated the transactional nature of stress...".

Hope that clears it up!

Key aspects of the WMM and MSM theories of memory

A summary of the points about these two models that I wrote on the whiteboard. This is the kind of information you should put in if asked in a test/exam to describe or explain the model(s).

MSM:
3 separate stores
Linear - info goes through each store in turn
Rehearsal is key to LTM encoding
Passive storage

WMM:
Modalities of slave systems allow two different tasks to be done at once
Flexible - info travels between slave systems, controlled by C.E.
Processing time is based on real time to do tasks (e.g. articulate words)
Active processing of everyday tasks