Social influence on Gender - studies

Here is the presentation from this lesson.

¡Litton and Romney (1991) – Meta-analysis of parental treatment of boys and girls aged 6 found girls more encouraged to do household chores, boys outdoor tasks.

¡Seagel (1987) – fathers more likely to react negatively when sons carried out feminine behaviour.

¡Smith and Lloyd (1978) – babies in unisex snow-suits given different names are treated differently by carers (reinforcement of play etc).

¡Fagot (1985) – boys more likely to be criticised by peers for feminine activities.

¡Morgan (1982) – more TV correlates with stronger sex-typed identity.

¡Fagot et al (1982) – parents how show the clearest patterns of differential reinforcement have children who are quickest to develop strong gender preferences.

For each of these track it down in a textbook or online (search by name and date and you should be able to find all of them) and add some more detail to the brief outline of method and findings here. For our next lesson, whenever that may be!

The Evolutionary Approach - holiday work for Mr Lawrence

Answer the following questions, either in the form of a single essay, short answers or a presentation, in time for our first lesson in September.

• What are the assumptions made by the evolutionary approach to psychology?
• What did Clark and Hatfield (1989) find out about casual sex?
• How does the evolutionary approach explain these findings?
• Why is the approach so controversial?

Statistics - The Third Kind of Lie

On Thursday we will have a Unit 4 Exam-style test on the statistics work we have been doing this term. Here is what you need to be able to do:

• How to tell if data is ordinal or nominal.
• What means, medians, modes, ranges and standard deviations are and what they show.
• What independent groups, repeated measures and matched pairs designs are.
• How to choose and justify the choice of a statistical test for a set of data.
• What a level of significance is and how to justify a choice of the 5% level.
• How to decide whether a result is significant using a statistical table.
• How to state the result of a statistical test.

Here is the flow-chart for choosing a statistical test - stating the decisions you make when working through this is what 'justifying your choice of test' means.

Here are the instructions for the write-up of the 'finger-tapping' experiment we did, and here is the data. I want to take this work in on Thursday.

More practice statistics problems:
Four more tests to do.
Significant or not significant?

Unit 2 Revision Map

http://popplet.com/app/#/24311

I've made mind maps for the Unit 2 topics which I've taught, attempting to clarify what I recommend you focus your revision on. If you're aiming for an A or B grade you will need a bit more detail than is here, e.g. brief details of some additional research which you can find in your textbook which will be useful for evaluation in your longer answers.

Popplet is a fairly new website for mind mapping - it's in beta development meaning that the programming isn't quite finished and they're looking for feedback on how it works, but it's really easy to use and might make this kind of revising painless if you don't enjoy doing it on paper. Give it a try (e.g. by making a detailed mind-map for one topic e.g. 'independent behaviour' or 'stress management').

Exam preparation

Here is a powerpoint from AQA that contains lots useful guidance on how to approach the exam. One useful point is that you must clearly label any work that is outside of the allocated space for your answer.
Take this slide for example - the candidate has not indicated that the answer is continued so the marker has no reason to believe the answer is continued:

BUT see this next picture:

It's REALLY important that you indicate that you have gone onto extra pages or have continued elsewhere. The papers are scanned and then marked online so the examiner doesn't have a paper copy of your paper in front of them.

Revision questions used today - Thurs 26th

Here is the question on eyewitness testimony (containing lots of RM).
The two questions on memory improvement strategies are here.
Do keep handing in questions attempted for me to mark and give feedback. 

Individual differences in independent behaviour, Social Change and REVISION

In addition to situational explanations for independent behaviour (that is, factors in the situation which encourage people to do what they think is right, rather than conforming or obeying) you need to know personality factors which explain why some people disobey while most obey.
09 Individual Differences in Independent Behaviour 2012

You need to be able to apply findings from social psychology research to changes in society e.g. the smoking ban, gay marriage, votes for women - minority influence is the most useful idea here, but it's useful to have some other ideas at the ready.
10 Social Change 2010

We will be revising Social Psychology in the first week back, Abnormality in the second and Stress in the third, leaving the fourth week for a Unit 2 mock paper and its analysis. As for Mrs Watson's lessons, your task is to come to these with the topics fully revised - we will be using the lessons for exam practice rather than reviewing content.