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')