The Titanic & social psychology

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7841000/7841629.stm

Interesting BBC radio extract about people's putting the social requirement to queue ahead of the need to save their own lives... Has some obvious links to the 'irrational' aspects of social psychology and group behaviour.

SQA

Don't forget to visit the SQA page, they are putting more and more on there, they now have question papers from the last two exams, plus all the marking instructions for the present syllabus. There are also useful documents relating to the RI.

Features of a good sample

Another mnemonic...

While teaching one of this year's classes, I noticed that the Marking Instructions (MIs) from 2006 exam paper presented us with a good mnemonic for 'features of a good sample':

The question is: 'State the features of a good sample', and the MIs say:

Is representative of the target population; avoids bias; allows generalisation to the target population.

So we can have:

Generalisable
Representative
Avoids Bias

Or 'GRAB'.

Wikispaces

As you'll have seen from the email, I have started a 'wiki', come and visit http://hutchiepsychdept.wikispaces.com/

There is info on unit 1 & 2 topics, plus some exam advice.

HM is dead

Some papers and magazines recently included an obituary of H.M., the memory-loss patient who died last month.

In 1953, H.M. had an operation which aimed to reduce the frequency of his epileptic seizures. This included removal of a structure known as the hippocampus on both sides of his brain.

The result was that from then and for the rest of his life, H.M. has severe anterograde amnesia - he was unable to encode any new episodic or semantic memories, causing him to 'live in the past'. He was able to encode new procedural memories, however, and his working memory was intact too.

His case, although tragic, was hugely important in helping psychologists to locate memory functions, which had previously thought to be distributed throughout the brain.

Stress article

Good article on stress in the Psychology Review magazine, which you can find in the stand in the library, outside the computer room (FLS).

It focusses on biological aspects - a follow-up on psychological theiries and stress reduction is due to be in the next issue.

RI update

Since my last post back in October, most of you are well underway with the final RI now.

Some of you completed the practice RI, some didn't; if you did then hopefully it was enjoyable and useful practice, but either way it is time to move on!

Things to be thinking about:

• If you have not already gathered your RI data, this is your top priority. Of course, you can't start until you have prepared all task meterials, consent forms, instructions etc, but this should not take long, especially if you split these jobs among your group.
• Background research. The introduction section of your write-up needs to show a good, broad knowledge of background research, so get reading!
• Analyse the data. Strictly speaking, this should be done individually. As you are all doing experiments, it should be quite easy - mean, mode, median, range and standard deviation for each condition, plus a graph, probably comparing the means.
• When the above tasks are done, you should be able to write up your first draft quite easily. This is due in after the February week, but I'm willing to look over your work sooner if you wish.

I can't emphasise enough how important it is to keep on top of the RI and not be rushing at the last minute. I will post more suggestions for your write-ups in due course.