Specification

Social influence

• Types of conformity: internalisation, identification and compliance.  Explanations for conformity: informational social influence and normative social influence, and variables affecting conformity including group size, unanimity and task difficulty as investigated by Asch.

• Conformity to social roles as investigated by Zimbardo.

• Explanations for obedience: agentic state and legitimacy of authority, and situational variables affecting obedience including proximity and location, as investigated by Milgram, and uniform. Dispositional explanation for obedience: the Authoritarian Personality.

• Explanations of resistance to social influence, including social support and locus of control.

• Minority influence including reference to consistency, commitment and flexibility.

• The role of social influence processes in social change.

Memory

• The multi-store model of memory: sensory register, short-term memory and long-term memory. Features of each store: coding, capacity and duration.

• Types of long-term memory: episodic, semantic, procedural.

• The working memory model: central executive, phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad and episodic buffer. Features of the model: coding and capacity.

• Explanations for forgetting: proactive and retroactive interference and retrieval failure due to absence of cues.

• Factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: misleading information, including leading questions and post-event discussion; anxiety.

• Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, including the use of the cognitive interview.

Attachment

• Caregiver-infant interactions in humans: reciprocity and interactional synchrony. Stages of attachment identified by Schaffer. Multiple attachments and the role of the father.

• Animal studies of attachment: Lorenz and Harlow.

• Explanations of attachment: learning theory and Bowlby’s monotropic theory. The concepts of a critical period and an internal working model.

• Ainsworth’s ‘Strange Situation’. Types of attachment: secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant. Cultural variations in attachment, including van Ijzendoorn.

• Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation. Romanian orphan studies: effects of institutionalisation.

• The influence of early attachment on childhood and adult relationships, including the role of an internal working model.

Psychopathology

• Definitions of abnormality, including deviation from social norms, failure to function adequately, statistical infrequency and deviation from ideal mental health.

• The behavioural, emotional and cognitive characteristics of phobias, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

• The behavioural approach to explaining and treating phobias: the two-process model, including classical and operant conditioning; systematic desensitisation, including relaxation and use of hierarchy; flooding.

• The cognitive approach to explaining and treating depression: Beck’s negative triad and Ellis’s ABC model; cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), including challenging irrational thoughts.

• The biological approach to explaining and treating OCD: genetic and neural explanations; drug therapy.