This blog is for...

This blog is aimed at pupils of Hutchesons' Grammer School and provides information about assignments, deadlines etc. For a blog with more general information on introductory/Higher/A-Level Psychology, see www.mindsandmodels.blogspot.com

RI final drafts

When looking over your RI final drafts, please check that your scripts have all of the following:

Title page
Page numbers (on Word, click 'Insert' tab and then you see the option for page numbers)
Abstract should contain: aim, background, hypothesis/variables, method & design, sample (who & how many), procedure, results & conclusion.
Aim/rationale: should clarify both aim and link between background research and the current study (2 marks)
Design should mention conditions of the IV (for experiments only)
Materials - all paper materials should be included in appendices
Procedure - should include ethical procedures
Results - Raw data & calculations in an appendix
Graphs and tables labelled e.g. 'Table 1' and referred to in text.
Discussion - Findings stated and explained in terms of variables studied.
Discussion - problems and solutions identified
Discussion - Future research ideas and/or real-world implications
Short conclusion section with main finding and conclusion
Refs in alphabetical order by researcher surnames
Appendices complete
Throughout, avoid use of 'I', 'We', 'Our' etc.

These apparently small things could add up to losing a quarter of the available marks! Well done on your efforts, it is well worthwhile getting these as good as possible.

Prejudice

What is prejudice?
I think that essays along the lines of 'Explain the nature of prejudice' are among the most difficult to answer in the Higher Psychology exam. That doesn't mean that you should do badly in them - just that a bit more planning may be necessary.
The reason they are hard, is that psychological concepts - in this case prejudice, stereotyping, discrimination etc - can be difficult to define, and even experts in the field don't often agree. It should be easier to describe and evaluate a theory.
On a positive note, the Higher exam now provides some guidance to help you structure an answer. This could read as follows (source - the 2010 question paper):

• A definition of prejudice, with examples
• Cogntive, affective and behavioural aspects of prejudice
• Evaluation of research evidence on the nature of prejudice.

These are things that you are told that you "may include" suggesting that there are other equally good ways of answering the question. That might be true in principle, but you can be sure of two things:

Nearly everyone will use the structure suggested in the exam paper

and

The marking instructions will link strongly to these bullet points.

It's therefore by far the safest option to stick to the suggested headings, thinking of your essay as having three sub-sections. Here are some things to include.

• You should have a definition of prejudice ready from your revision (make sure you can define all key concepts in the Higher!) In this section, also define and explain stereotyping and discrimination, and try to make clear the difference between these three processes. Any examples can be used, but ones from your coursework which are linked in to a research or historical context are more likely to gain valuable A&E marks.
• Here you work through the three aspects of prejudice as an attitude - cognitive (thoughts), affective (feelings) and behavioural (actions). Make sure that they are fully explained, and you are making clear the differences between the three. You can use examples again, but keep them brief. Mentioning supporting research should pick up extra marks.
• Here, you should describe and evaluate your key research evidence. I suggest a detailed dicsussion of one study, plus mentioning 2-3 others more briefly. Avoid studies which very clearly link to the other two aspects of the prejudice topic (e.g. Adorno, 1950). A good choice for this question would be the Cohen (1981) study of stereotypes, or LaPiere's (1934) study of attitudes v's actions. Sherif et al (1954) could also be used.

Overall, make sure your essay is long and detailed enough to pick up the 20 marks, and ensure that you have encluded enough evaluation points, especially in that third bullet point. Supporting research studies and/or examples in the first two can also pick up A&E marks.

A useful blog

Kendra's psychology blog - this post is about doing psychology research write-ups.

Neurofeedback article

Tulving

Here is a link to a website about psychologist Endel Tulving:

Tulving website

The site & short video clip mostly talks about the difference between encoding and retrieval. Tulving is also known as one of the researchers who distinguished between episodic and semantic LTM (Tulving, 1972).

You may remember the study by Craik and Tulving (1975) which shows that a word (e.g. 'pig') is better encoded to LTM if you ask a meaningful question about it (e.g. is it a kind of animal?) rather than focussing on sound or appearance (e.g. does it rhyme with 'fig'?).

He also developed the encoding specificity principle, which states that cues to memory need to have some connection to the context in which something is learned. Recognition is usually easier than free recall, but can be harder when things are out of context (e.g. seeing your neighbour at a nightclub in Ibiza).

Poggendorff Illusion

A real 'classic' illusion, this is where people find it hard to judge whether the lines outside the rectangle/central stripe will meet or not.

The union jack flag allows for this effect by offsetting the lines of the Saint Patrick's Cross (the red diagonal lines) so that they appear to match up - when actually they don't:

Look at the white spaces (or check them with a ruler!)

Study skills article

Amazing article on study skills:

New York Times article

BBC memory article

Article about how memory changes with age:

Here

Welcome to the new S6 psychology!

Welcome

Hello! Welcome to Higher Psychology at Hutchie, I hope you enjoy the course, learn a lot and have a fun year.

Rather than give you yet another handout, I have put course information onto this blog. You can click on the label 'course info' (see the labels at the bottom of this post) to find all the info, or search for something specific using the box at the top.

A couple of general points here:

Course structure & assessment

This is a one-year crash higher. It is assessed by project work done in winter-spring, and an exam in the summer. You also need to pass internal assessments (NABs).

Homework

For each topic, you will be provided with a topic handout which includes homework assignments. You will be given deadlines for these assignments during the course - roughly one assignment per week.

Study materials

You should find a suitable way of taking and organising notes and handouts, such as filing them by topic in a large ring binder. You will be given a booklet for each topic, and you should also take notes in class. A jotter or loose A4 paper would be fine for this. Homework should be handed in on a separate sheet of paper (i.e. not your jotter), handwritten or printed, or can be emailed as an attachment. It is also strongly recommended that you implement a system of summarising your notes and handouts for revision purposes, perhaps using a separate notebook for this.

Textbook

Booklets will include a basic summary of each topic, but for full information on the topic you will need a suitable textbook. The recommended textbook for the course is ‘Higher Psychology’ by Williamson et al (2007).

Communication

It is essential for the smooth running of the class that you can be contacted by email, so please check your school email address regularly. You can contact me at firthj@hutchesons.org, or come and see me in room C8 (top floor, same floor as economics & art).

Dealing with anger - BBC news article

We have all felt like bashing our heads against brick walls when we cannot get what we want as a consumer. Conversely, many of us have suffered awkward customers. So how do we stop irritation boiling over into anger?

(Article link)

Procrastination

Good article from 'Psychology Today' - you can follow them on Facebook if you like this sort of thing:
Procrastination: ten things to know

The exam 2010

Well I just saw the exam paper and there were a couple of tough ones...

On the positive side, Memory, research methods and atypical behaviour were pretty predictable. I'd even go as far as to say the questions on memory were good!
I think the one on prejudice is one of the harder Qs to answer on this topic, but it was one of your homework questions so hopefully not any great shock to you! Looking at the other social psychology topics, they were tough too.
The worst in my opionion was stress - I wouldn't have expected the 2 questions to be only on fight/flight and transactional model - both smallish areas of the topic. Hope you managed to give a good account of yourselves!

Good luck with the rest of your exams, or if you are finished - congratulations!

Eyewitness Testimony

A new part of the topic of memory for 2009-10 is eyewitness testimony or 'EWT'.

The area draws heavily on the work of Bartlett, the first British professor of Psychology, who studied distortions in memory. Using folk stories and pictures, Bartlett (1932) found that memories were subject to things being omitted, added or changed, in order to fit with a person's expections and experience.

Loftus & Palmer (1974) showed videos of car crashes to students, and found that their estimates of speed depended on the wording of the question. This has implications for how accurate an eyewitness will be in a court room. But were they mis-remembering, or just responding to a leading question?

To test this, L&P showed another three groups of 50 students a car accident. As part of a series of questions, 1 group were asked about the car's speed when it 'smashed' into each other, the second group about the car's speed when it 'hit', and the final group were not asked about speed at all.

A week later they were asked if they had seen broken glass. Because this was not one of the original questions, the researchers didn't think participants could have been led to an answer (through response-bias). Instead, they had apparently remembered the accident as more severe than it actually was. Loftus & Palmer concluded that verbal information in the form of questions can merge with our memory of an event.

The car crash experiments were quite artificial, and Yuille & Cutshall (1986) studied a real-life robbery, finding that eyewitnesses showed accurate recall even three months later. A real life event can stick in your mind as a 'flashbulb memory'.

However, the documentary we view recently showed how distortions in eyewitness memory can impact on a real criminal case - see my previous post for the youtube links etc.

What factors affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony? I suggested a mnemonic to help with this: "I see"

I - Information after the event (like Loftus experiments)

S - Social pressure (like Asch length of lines expt - see textbook)

E - Expectations (Bartlett research which showed how things are distorted to fit expectations)

E - External appearance (Race, sex etc - this overlaps with the above).

(One other thing - a lot of the older blog posts may be useful, but be careful as some of them refer to topics such as memory strategies, intelligence etc that we didn't do this year, or info about the exam that has now changed).

Medical research 'underfunded'

News article about how mental health research is 'underfunded':

Article

An interesting point to consider - see the close parallels that are drawn between the way mental and physical illnesses are treated. The 'medical model' of atypical behaviour is an underlying assumption here.

Contact Hypothesis

It may seem like you have less to say on the Contact Hypothesis than on the other two theories of prejudice reduction (Education and Superordinate Goals).
So what about this mnemonic to help you remember the key factors which according to Allport (1954) are necessary for contact to work - 'SIDE':

- Superordinate goals - groups must have shared aims, goals, targets. If their aim is to harm each other then contact won't reduce prejudice.
- Institutions - institutions and laws in society must support integration. In Nazi Germany, the law supported prejudice against Jews.
- Differences - differences must be valued. You can't expect other groups to look or act the same as you, or adopt your customs.
- Equal status - groups must have equal status in society. So a high level of contact between slaves and slave owners did not lead to reduced prejudice.

(More morbidly, the mnemonic could also spell 'dies')

SIT and Americans

An article from 'The Onion'

http://www.theonion.com/articles/man-whos-116th-irish-proud-of-his-irish-heritage,103/

I think this shows that with social identity, it's not so much what you are, but groups you choose to identify with.

SQA info

Your source for key SQA documents like past papers, marking instructions, SQP etc:

http://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/40964.html

Unit 2 exam question

Looking at past papers and the SQP, they tend to focus on a research example featuring a single method. Most methods have now come up in the last five years (2005: questionnaires with correlation; 2006: observation; 2007: case study; 2008: experiment; 2009: interviews).

It would be easy to assume that one of the methods from a few years ago will appear again this year, and that may well be the case. Correlation has been neglected a bit, so you should ensure that you are good on that (remember that corr is actually a data anlysis technique, not a method as such). Observation is a likely option too - 2006's research example was a naturalistic observation, so if I was an exam setter I might put in a participant observation this time.

One other possibility to bear in mind is that there could be a combination that hasn't been tried before. So for example, instead of having survey and correlation, maybe questions on correlation and experiments this year, or correlation and observation. For example, there could be a correlation research example, followed by questions on how a similar study could be done as an experiment instead.

With so many methods to choose from, it seems very unlikely is that interviews will come up again so soon. I also think case study is an unlikely choice, and shouldn't be top priority for your revision.

Here are the key points on the CAS for Section B:

• A research scenario (100–200 words) is provided in this section.


• A structured question, worth 20 marks, will be based on the research scenario. This
  question will consist of a set of 5–8 related parts, each part with a possible mark range of
  1–8 marks.


• Candidates are required to answer all parts of this question.


• The research scenario may be of an experimental or a non-experimental study.


• Candidates may be asked to suggest/evaluate a non-experimental or experimental
  alternative.


• Although no numerical calculations will be required in the exam, interpretation of given
  numerical or graphical data may be required.

Ref for the documentary we watched

The documentary we saw in class this morning featured a researcher called Wells... Below is a reference to one of his studies on using lineups to identify criminals. If you mention it in the exam of course you can just say 'Wells, 1998'.

For anyone who missed the class, the film is on two parts on youtube, here is the first bit:

Documentary part 1

It's an interesting story but also relevant - a lot of it supports a key conclusion of Loftus & Palmer (1974) i.e. that information after an event (in this case, the face of the innocent suspect) can be integrated into our memory of the event, resulting in false memories.

Reference

Wells, G.l., Small, M., Penrod, S., Malpass, R.S., Fulero, S.M., and Brimacombe, C.A.E. (1998). Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Recommendations for Lineups and Photospreads. Journal of Law and Human Behavior, 22, 603-647.