Opportunity to take part in Psychological study

There's another opportunity for you to take part in a Psychological study which you might be interested in - this one is to do with how our mood affects our perception of faces. It's really interesting and very relevant to a lot of things that you might study at A2, so I'd encourage you to take part if you can.

The researcher's name is Belinda Platt (it's the same lady who came in and talked one lunchtime before Christmas) and if you contact her on Belinda.Platt@psy.ox.ac.uk to let her know you're interested she can arrange a time during half term for you to go in and take part.

Think Week - Friday Psychology Talks

As part of Oxford's Think Week there are two very interesting looking free psychology events in town on Friday.

http://www.thinkweek.co.uk/events/

Facebook event for Colin Blakemore

Facebook event for Raymond Tallis and David Papineau

Half term work

Hi everyone

I'm still poorly I'm afraid, so please continue learning about the Multi-Store model as best you can using the powerpoint presentation.

Here is a second presentation which talks about how to evaluate the model using research evidence. I'd like to to have a go at the essay which is at the end of this powerpoint over half term please. Seeing as I have been away and you've had to learn this on your own I would like this handed in on the second lesson back so you have a chance to ask me questions about anything you're not sure of. (This doesn't mean you don't have to write it until we get back, it means you should have had a go at the essay over half term so that you know what you need to ask me!)

Good luck; email me if you need desperate help and I'll do my best to reply.

Work for CKe Tuesday 15th

Hi everyone - I'm afraid I'm still poorly today so am not in.

We need to start work on looking at some models of memory, so I have adapted this powerpoint presentation for you to work through yourselves. Hopefully it will make sense but if you can any questions you can email me or ask Mr Lawrence.

I've also emailed the powerpoint to you as for the study demo you need to be able to view it as a slideshow and it doesn't work properly in the Google docs slideshow.

Memory Progress Test

For anyone who missed the second progress test and would like to have a go, click here.

You can find the mark scheme here.

Abnormality - Thursday work for TLa - Cognitive and Psychodynamic Therapies

I am ill today. Read and make notes on the two remaining psychological therapies we need to cover: CBT and Psychoanalysis.

Your notes need to cover: techniques used as part of the therapy, strengths and limitations. I will look at these on Tuesday.

Psychoanalysis often uses dream analysis as a means of uncovering unconscious anxieties - keep a dream diary over the next few days, recording in as much detail as you can any dreams that you have as soon as you wake up.

Two more essays need to be written to complete our abnormality unit.

"Discuss biological treatments for psychological disorders" 6 marks AO1 + 6 marks AO2 is due in on Thursday 17th February.

"Critically consider the use of psychoanalysis, systematic desensitisation and CBT" 12 + 12 will be your next test, immediately after half-term.

Thursday 10th

I'm not feeling well so won't be in school on Thursday.

Your set work is to take one of the processes of memory that we have looked at (duration, capacity or encoding) and design a presentation to teach it to year 10 students. The presentation should obviously include an explanation of the concept, but should also include a description of a research study, and a plan to carry it out with the students (as I did with you in class). You'll need to put your instructions to your 'participants' in to the presentation, and include the results and conclusions from the original study - make sure to include an explanation of how/why the researchers came to that conclusion.

You can do this in pairs; please email it to me when you have finished it.

If you have missed lessons since Christmas I would encourage you to use the lesson time to make sure you are fully up to date on the notes so far.

Next week we will move on to looking at models of memory, starting with Atkinson and Schiffrin's multistore model.

Memory experiment - results!

Today we were able to pool results from the whole class for our memory experiment, which you can find here. The only thing this is missing is the graph, which it doesn't seem to have wanted to upload. Never mind - you can create your own using the mean scores from each group.

We also went through what to put in a results section, and what to put in a conclusion. A powerpoint with this info on can be found here - work through this stage by stage as you write it and it should come out ok.

What you need to hand in:
- Aim & hypothesis
- Method: Design, participants
- Consent form (see the previous powerpoint for this)
- Results and conclusions from this experiment

Also, please can you make sure you are totally confident with everything we have covered in memory so far ready to move on to looking at models of memory.

Abnormality: Behavioural Therapies

Behavioural therapies are those based on classical and operant conditioning. You need to know about systematic desensitisation in detail, and it's helpful to know a little about aversion therapy, flooding and token economies so you can write about the approach to therapy in general.

Click here for Behavioural Therapies presentation (you only need to know SD in detail).

Remember that most people need to prepare for the definitions and models of abnormality test tomorrow. We will cover psychoanalysis and revisit CBT on Thursday.

Progress test

This lesson we had a surprise progress test - because not enough people had done their homework and brought their experiment results to the lesson. I'm very disappointed in that, especially as I had only asked you to bring two results each - this should have taken you a maximum of 10 minutes to do.

If you missed the test and would like to have a go you can find it here.

For next lesson (Tuesday) you need to carry out the digit span experiment on two people - make sure you record their age, and the number of digits they could correctly recall.

If you missed the original lesson and don't have a clue what I'm on about, scroll down to where I've given links to all the previous powerpoints - this is in the one about capacity. Failing that, ask someone who was there or send me an email.

We can't move on to the next part of what we're doing until we've got these results in, so until you do this work and we can do the lesson that I've actually planned, I'm going to have to keep thinking up things on the spot to give you something to do, which - guess what - are going to be tests or essays. So it's in your own interest!!

Memory research project

In today's lesson we continued work for our research project.

By next lesson you should all have:

- written up your aim, hypothesis and variables

- written up your design section (4 sentences)

- written up your participants section (3 sentences)

- written a consent form for participants

- carried out the study on 2 participants each

We spent quite a bit of time talking about the ethics of Psychological research, and watched a video of a very unethical experiment which you can see here if you missed it. There's some general info on the experiment in this article.

Please make sure you bring your results to next lesson - we are going to pool results from the whole class which will give us a nice big sample.