Psychology

Course summary

Year 12 Social influence - conformity, obeying evil authority figures, obedience, resistance to social influence and change in society. Memory - models of memory, forgetting, eyewitness testimony and police interviews. Attachment - babies and their caregivers, when attachment goes wrong and early attachment on adult relationships. Approaches - origins of psychology, classical and operant conditioning, cognitive approach and biological approach. Psychopathology - ‘abnormality’, biological, behavioural and cognitive explanations and treatments, phobias, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Research methods - experiments and observations, investigations and presenting, analysing and interpreting data. Year 13 Psychodynamic - Freud and the unconscious, humanistic, Maslow and counselling. Biopsychology - brain regions, split-brain research and recovery after trauma, brain scans and post-mortem examination, bodily rhythms and the sleep/wake cycle. Research methods - case studies and content analysis and features of science. Issues and debates - gender and culture bias, free will and nature/nurture, behavioural laws, ethical implications and social sensitivity. Relationships - evolved partner preferences, romantic attraction, virtual relationships and ‘relationships’ with media personalities. Schizophrenia - symptoms and problems in diagnosis, genes and brain chemistry, faulty thinking and dysfunctional families, therapies, drugs and CBT. Aggression - neural and hormonal mechanisms, genetic factors, ethological and evolutionary explanations, social-psychological explanations, institutional aggression and media influences on aggression.