Psychology

Course summary

Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behaviour, and the AQA course is broken into three parts: Part 1 – General topics • Approaches in Psychology looks at the Psychodynamic, Behaviourist, Cognitive, Humanist and Biological approaches to understanding behaviour • Research methods evaluates both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research, the different research methods (experiments, correlations, descriptive, case studies), and the various data gathering techniques (observation, interview, questionnaire, psychometric, physiological) • Issues and debates focuses on the issues of culture, gender and ethics, and the debates of nature vs nurture, free will vs determinism, holism vs reductionism, and idiographic vs nomothetic Part 2 – Key theories • Social psychology is about the power of the situation and other people to influence individual behaviour, and includes the study of conformity, obedience and minority influence. • Cognitive psychology is about mental processes influencing behaviour, and includes the study of models of memory, forgetting, reliability of memory and how to improve memory • Biopsychology is about how our anatomy and physiology influence behaviour, and includes the study of the nervous system, endocrine system, localization of function, evolution, genetics and rhythms Part 3 – Applications • Developmental psychology considers how people change and develop throughout their lives, with a particular focus on cognitive development and attachment theory • Psychopathology is the study of the causes of mental disorders including depression, OCD, phobias and eating disorders • Forensic psychology is the application of psychological theory in the criminal justice context and includes offender profiling, biological causes of offending, psychological causes of offending, and treatment and prevention of crime