New Dog Book spreads for anomalistic psychology

Click here to download the new spreads from the third edition of the Dog Book for the updated specification, in case you can't find these (I have been giving them out...).

This also explains how the specification has changed since your Nelson Thornes textbook and the second edition of the Dog Book were written. This is well worth a look, or you will be underprepared for probability judgement / coincidence / superstition / magical thinking questions in particular.

RWa and TLa available for revision support

Here is when we have Y13 lessons over the next two weeks:

Wednesday 5th - 2 (TLa)
Thursday 6th - 4 & 5 (RWa)
Friday 7th - 3 (RWa)
Monday 10th 1&2 - (RWa)
Tuesday 11th - 5 (TLa)
Wednesday 12th - 2 (TLa)
Thursday 13th - 3,4&5 (TLa)
Friday 14th - 3&4 (RWa)

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

During the last half term we've covered four statistical tests in some detail, and if you've completed all the work set then you will be fully prepared for any questions on stats in the unit 4 exam. You won't be asked to complete a test from start to finish starting with raw data; past questions have focused on one section of the process eg comparing obtained vs critical values or looking or critical values or ranking data.

A common question on the paper is to ask which test should be used for a particular set of data. This sheet gives a summary of each test and when to use them. This sort of question is often worth 2 or 3 marks - meaning that it isn't enough to state that the data is correlational (or independent groups or whatever) - you also need to match the type of data to the test. This sheet is a good summary of different data types (nominal, ordinal, ratio & interval).

Resources by test:

Spearman's rho:

• Used for correlational data, when the two sets of data are pairs of scores from one person, and when the data are ordinal or interval.
• Intro ppt
• Step-by-step worksheet
• Worksheet 2

Chi-squared test:

• Used when the hypothesis predicts a difference or an association - is membership of one category associated with  membership of another category? Used for categorical data and for comparing frequencies. The data must be unrelated - you can't be in more than one category.
• Intro ppt
• Step-by-step worksheet
• Worksheet 2

Mann-Whitney test:

• Used for independent groups design, when the hypothesis predicts a difference between two sets of data. The data must be interval or ordinal. 
• Intro ppt
• Step-by-step worksheet
• Worksheet 2

Wilcoxon T test:

• Used in repeated measures or matched pairs design, for ordinal or interval data,
• Intro ppt
• Step-by-step worksheet
• Worksheet 2

Unit 4 mock

Your unit 4 mock exam will take place on Friday 17th May during P3 and P4.

The questions will on the following topics:

Schizophrenia: Biological and Psychological therapies
Anomalistic: Science vs Pseudoscience, magical thinking and psychic mediumship
RM: Revise everything as the paper covers a wide range of RM topics

The paper is 2 hours long. 

The Scientific Method in Psychology and Validating New Knowledge

Today we looked at the first part of the research methods specification, linking this to a look-back over the anomalistic psychology topic.

You need to know the 'major features of science, including:

• replicability 
• objectivity 
• theory construction 
• hypothesis testing (falsifiability) 
• the use of empirical methods'

We defined these and wrote an example of 'good...' and 'bad...' from psychology / parapsychology.

We then looked at 'validating new knowledge and the role of peer review'.

Essentially, scientists make each other aware of their theoretical and experimental research through scientific journals. Most of these have a small circulation so are very expensive and are bought by university libraries. Journal articles on research studies typically have the following structure (which you may be tested on in your unit 4 exam):

• Abstract - a summary of the rest of the article, to allow researchers to quickly decide if it is relevant to them.
• Introduction including a literature review - the background to the study, including theories and previous research findings.
• Method - details of participants and how they were sampled, procedures including standardised instructions, materials used (e.g. questionnaires used) and ethical concerns. This should allow a full replication.
• Results - summary graphs and tables (full data usually available on request) and statements of the results of statistical tests.
• Discussion - of what the findings mean, of issues with the research and recommendations for future research.

Most journals operate a system for checking that research meets high standards of methodology (e.g. good control of variables) and has accurate statistical testing through a process called 'peer review'. The editors will select a panel of experts in the relevant research (the 'peers' of the researcher submitting the article) to make this decision.

Make sure you can answer these questions:

1. What does it mean to ‘validate new knowledge’? 
2. How does peer review work? 
3. Give an example of pseudoscientific research where new knowledge is not validated or subject to peer review. 
4. What are the drawbacks of peer review?

Near Death Experiences and Out Of Body Experiences

Around one in five people who are declared clinically dead (because their heart has stopped beating) but who are then revived (resuscitated) report some kind of 'Near Death Experience'. Often this involves the sensation of leaving their body, and these 'Out Of Body Experiences' can occur at other times. NDEs often involve a tunnel with a bright light at the end, a feeling of intense calm, reduced fear of death, increased belief in an afterlife, a 'life review' and meetings with dead loved-ones and religious figures.

Most psychologists explain these as interpretations of hallucinations created by changes in the brain as it is starved of oxygen. Your textbook gives quite a lot of detail on this - you don't need to know this much but a couple of examples would be useful. Believers in an 'immortal soul' - the idea that 'we' continue to exist once our body is dead - point to NDEs and OOBEs, especially when they involve people seeing and hearing things that they otherwise couldn't have - as strong evidence for these beliefs.

Make sure you can describe the case study of Maria's 'tennis shoe' OOBE and the criticism of this as a piece of evidence. Read about this in detail here.

Here is an article in the Daily Mail about a very recent piece of scientific research into NDEs.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-89926/Scientists-discover-near-death-evidence.html
These researchers claim that the fact not all the patients who were clinically dead then revived which they studied had NDEs is evidence that the explanation was not physiological, and instead supports the idea of an immortal soul.

You should also be able to describe Ehrsson's research (in your textbook) into artificially induced OOBEs - the point here is that the sense that we are inside our own bodies is actually created by the brain. This research suggests that it isn't that surprising that people can have a vivid experience of leaving their bodies when their brain is undergoing big changes.

Psychic Mediumship

Here is a link to Derren Brown Investigates - The Man Who Talks To The Dead:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-investigates/episode-guide/series-12/episode-2
Well worth a watch, especially for Richard Wiseman's explanation of 'cold reading' - a rational explanation for the impressive feats of mediums.

Make sure you can:
- define mediumship
- explain how 'cold reading' can explain what mediums are capable of
- describe and evaluate controlled research in mediumship - Schwartz (2001)

The presentation is in an earlier post below.

Exceptional Experiences - Psychic Healing

Here is the presentation for the final 'exceptional experiences' section of Anomalistic Psychology.

The specification says:
Research into exceptional experience
-Psychological research into and explanations for psychic healing, near death and out of body experiences, and psychic mediumship
Today we looked at psychic healing, in particular three studies which appear to show evidence of psychic healing working in placebo-controlled (single-blind) trials, but with reason to doubt the findings of each one.

Read more about Sicher and Targ's study here.

Here is more detail on the 'miracle study' into prayer and infertility.

I set this exam question for next Wednesday:
“Discuss what research into exceptional experience has shown us about psychic healing” – 4 + 6 marks

Prepare it for as long as you like, then spend no more than 20 minutes writing it.

Unit 3 Exam Questions, and studies to learn for gender and relationships

Here are all the Unit 3 exam questions for Biological Rhythms & Sleep, Relationships and Gender. I have adjusted the AO1 marks for the older questions (there used to be 9 per section, now there are 8) and have noted where changes to the spec mean that a question wouldn't come up any more, or would be worded differently.

Here is my list of theories and studies for relationships in case you can't track it down - I plan to update this some more, but have added one study since I printed this and gave it to you a while ago. It's an interesting update to the Clark & Hatfield and Buss evidence which questions the claims of evolutionary theories. Alexander and Fisher (2003) had men and women answer surveys about how many sexual partners they had had and how many they wanted (amongst other things). They got typical responses suggesting that men were far keener on casual sex, but then repeated the experiment with participants connected to a fake lie-detector (known as a 'bogus pipeline'). When they thought that their lies would be detected, women and men answered in much the same way! This is a very nice bit of supporting evidence for a criticism we did briefly discuss - the idea that differences between men and women which arise in surveys may be due to differences in social desirability rather than real differences in what they actually do or want to do... Read more on this article or the actual journal article.

Here is my list of theories and studies for gender. Learning these, using active revision techniques like cue cards with key words or questions on one side and details on the other, would be a very good place to focus your revision over the holiday.

Resources update

Herein is a long blog post containing links to all the resources we have used this half term.

I posted last about psychological explanations of schizophrenia. We then moved on to the biological therapies. We focused on drugs & ECT. You need to know how the drugs work and the pros and cons of using them - do look back at the criticisms of biological therapies in general from your abnormality work last year. ECT isn't used for schizophrenia nowadays but has been in the past and so you should be able to evaluate why not. The ppt is here.

We then moved on to the psychological therapies for schizophrenia. We looked at why Freud said that psychoanalysis was unsuitable (this involved some Freudian theory that should come in handy across the spec), uses of psychoanalysis nowadays, and then cognitive behavioural therapies. The ppt on psychoanalysis is here and the CBT one is here.

It is really important that you are able to evaluate both biological and psychological therapies in terms of their appropriateness (are they ethical? are they suitable?) and their effectiveness (do they work?), as this is how the spec divides up the evaluative material.

We then moved on to the research methods section of the unit 4 spec. I provided booklets to work through at your own pace for a large chunk and a copy is here. A lot is revision from AS. I have taught the trickier bits of the research methods. The ppt on reliability is here and the one on validity is here. It is important that you know the difference between internal and external reliability and validity, and also ways to improve all of these. This is more complex than work done last year on these topics. Finally we looked at probability and significance in preparation for our work on the statistical tests and the ppt is here.

Paranormal action - psychokinesis

I am ill today - here is the work.

Here is what we started yesterday:

Psychokinesis is moving objects with paranormal mental activity. If this is on the scale of objects that can be seen, e.g. moving small objects like pencils or bending spoons, it is known as 'Macro PK'. 'Micro PK' involves influencing computer circuitry, usually to cause a 'random event generator' to produce a less random string of events.

James Hydrick is an interesting character and a good example of a Micro PK psychic. Here he demonstrates his powers on American TV show 'That's Incredible!' before failing to do so when sceptical stage magician James Randi puts some 'controls' in place (there is a longer Youtube clip of this same episode if you prefer):

Far more famous is Uri Geller - famous for bending spoons and performing a range of other psychic feats. Geller was studied by a number of parapsychologists who were convinced that his powers were genuine. Randi narrates this video, giving some useful background and explaining his roll in another prime-time TV failure of psychic power:

Randi's Project Alpha is not a piece of research, but a publicity stunt aimed at exposing the flawed nature of research carried out at Washington University in St Louis (the lead researcher was Shafer). The quality of this video is horrible but it gives a good overview (again there is a longer documentary on Youtube if you are interested):

Ganzfeld research into ESP - 'paranormal cognition'

Although our results when Kona acted as a 'receiver' were unimpressive, numerous studies using the ganzfeld technique have produced 'hit rates' well above chance - apparently evidence for the existence of Extra Sensory Perception (or 'paranormal cognition').

Below are questions to make notes on for next Tuesday's lesson. Here is the sheet with the six key characters / researchers.

·    What is the ganzfeld evidence for the existence of ESP?
·         What is the counter-evidence?
·         How have positive results been explained by the sceptics?
·         How have the believers responded?
·         Does ganzfeld research deserve to be labelled 'pseudoscience'?
·         What is your conclusion?

Here is a presentation which covers the introduction to anomalistic psychology and pseudoscience. Here is one for ganzfeld and psychokinesis research (which we'll move onto next week).

On Tuesday 12th we will be doing a timed essay test on the influence of culture on romantic relationships (revise this) and hearing about your qualitative interview research.

Psychological explanations for schizophrenia

We've now finished our look at the psychological explations for schizophrenia. There are lots but we focused on the following, and you should make sure you have notes on these:

• The psychodynamic explanation
• The cognitive explanation - there are lots of these but we only looked at the attention-processing explanation. You only need one.
• Family dysfunction models - we looked at expressed emotion (EE) and double binds
• Labelling theory including a look at Rosenhan's study ('Being sane in insane places')

As the biological explanations for schizophrenia (particularly the dopamine hypothesis) are so strong, the diathesis-stress model is crucial in incorporating any psychological explanations. The adoption study by Tienari et al (1994) is a really nice study in demonstrating the mix of nature and nurture involved in 'causing' schizophrenia. This is found in the middle of this big ppt containing all the above explanations. s.

Introduction to Anomalistic Psychology

Yesterday we looked at what we mean by the following terms:

• The paranormal 
• Psi / Psychic 
• Parapsychology 
• Anomalistic psychology 
• Pseudoscience

Essentially, parapsychologists study people with psi or psychic abilities - those that are paranormal, meaning they cannot be explained with our scientific understanding of the universe / brain - with an open mind as to whether such abilities exist. Sometimes they actively seek to find evidence which shows that such abilities are real.

This kind of search for supporting evidence, rather than attempting to falsify a hypothesis, is one of the reasons that parapsychology is often accused of being a pseudoscience - a 'false science'.

Anomalistic psychologists are generally more skeptical, mainstream psychologists, who assume that psi abilities don't actually exist, but who are interested in why so many people believe in them, and in why parapsychologists often produce positive findings in their studies.

While we are covering the Anomalistic content we will also be dealing with a section of the Unit 4 research methods spec, on the scientific method and on the process of validating research through peer reviews and journals. Your homework was to make notes on five features of science, relating each one to some study or theory you have encountered in AS or A2 psychology:

• Replicability 
• Falsifiability 
• Objectivity 
• Experimental method 
• Consistent paradigm

The influence of culture on romantic relationships

I will post some resources here for the finishing-off of our relationships topic later today.

More on childhood and romantic relationships...

Here is a further presentation relating to research on the connection between childhood experiences and adult relationships.

A key issue in this topic is that different approaches can explain the findings of studies such as the Love Quiz - in particular there is a Nature vs Nurture debate angle, as the temperament (genes) hypothesis and continuity (early experience) hypothesis both explain why securely attached babies grow into securely attached adults etc.

There is a good opportunity for a methodological discussion too. Questionnaires like the Love Quiz allow a lot of data to be collected, but samples generally end up being quite biased anyway (readers of the same paper, and a volunteer bias - what type of person responds to this kind of thing?). Structured interviews allow more valid judgements of childhood attachment type to be made, because it's harder for participants motivated by social desirability bias to 'cheat'. The Adult Attachment Interview uses body language and the consistency of answers to different questions to judge how truthful participants are being.

The results of such studies support the original findings - but it could still all be temperament, or social learning for that matter. An even bigger problem for psychologists in this field is that properly scientific testing of these hypotheses isn't possible. Why not? What would be necessary??

How does childhood influence adult romantic relationships?

Sorry it's taken me so long to post this one...

There is some fairly strong evidence for children with secure attachments with their primary care givers growing into adults with secure romantic relationships, with less happy futures ahead of infants who form insecure avoidant or resisntant/ambivalent attachments. The debate is essentially nature vs nurture - the 'continuity hypothesis' is on the nurture side; it is Bowlby's view that infants learn an Internal Working Model of relationships during the critical period in the first two years of their life. However, it could be that they were born that way - the 'temperament hypothesis'.

Here is the presentation, but we only really used the first slide on Monday - your homework is to complete your notes on these and bring them along next Tuesday:

1. Outline Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment. (two sentences max) 
2. Describe the procedures and findings of the strange situation. (two sentences max) 
3. Describe the procedures, findings and conclusions of the ‘Love Quiz’. 
4. What is the ‘continuity’ explanation for this? 
5. What alternative explanations exist? 
6. How strong is the evidence for continuity overall?

Breakdown of romantic relationships

Today we discussed Duck's (also known as Rollie & Duck's) stage-model for the dissolution (or breakdown) of romantic relationships.

Here is the presentation on theories of maintenance (which can also be used to explain breakdown) and Duck's breakdown theory.

Here is a sheet giving more detail on Duck's theory with some questions relating to its evaluation.

We looked at an example answer for this question:
"Discuss one theory of the maintenance of romantic relationships and one theory of the breakdown of romantic relationships." (8 marks + 16 marks).

Homework is to complete this for Wednesday next week.

We will also have a 'wall game' on Friday next week - all studies / theories covered so far could come up!

Theories of the Formation and Maintenance of Relationships

What factors lead people to form relationships, or not? We have looked at two theories here - the Filter Model (a 'field of availables' is filtered, in three stages, to a 'field of desirables' - people you actually want to go out with) and Reward / Need theory (relationships get going if both parties are rewarded for being with each other, and certain needs - including self-disclosure - are met).

Reward / Need can also be used to explain why some relationships are maintained while others break down. We have also considered 'Economic' theories based on Social Exchange - the trade-off of benefits and costs of being in a relationship.

Here is the presentation for theories of the formation of relationships, and here is the one for maintenance and  breakdown of relationships.

Bring your notes on these, including how they are supported by research, to Friday's lesson please.

Psychology book club

Psychology book club meets next on Monday 21st Jan (postponed from Mon 14th). We have been reading 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre - I have a few copies left so see me if you want to join in this week.

Our next book will be 'Opening Skinner's Box' by Lauren Slater, an investigation of the twentieth century through a series of ten fascinating, witty and sometimes shocking accounts of its key psychological experiments. These include classics from the AS and A2 course, Milgram, Zimbardo, Harlow & Rosenhan, and many more. Well worth a read for any A'level psychologist.

1.30pm, Monday 21st Jan, R23, tea & cake provided.

Mrs Watson

Schizophrenia essay

A reminder of the current homework essay on schizophrenia: 


'Discuss issues associated with the classification and diagnosis of schizophrenia' (8+16 marks)

I know that lots of people have exams at the moment but this still needs to be done - deadlines have been extended. I think this is the trickiest area of the schizophrenia spec so it will be well worth your while preparing this essay.

Neurochemical and neuroanatomical explanations of schizophrenia

Today we continued our examination of the biological explanations of schizophrenia with a look at the dopamine hypothesis and the neuroanatomical theories. The ppt is here (scroll down).
Bear in mind that no one theory is going to be satisfactory. Schizophrenia has large between-patient and within-patient differences, virtually all schizophrenics are on long-term antipsychotic medication, and there are big questions over cause and effect - does the increased dopamine (or increased ventricle size) lead to the schizophrenia? Or vice versa?
Please make sure you catch up if you were absent due to exams. I won't be covering the material again in class.