Specification

Issues and debates in Psychology

• Gender and culture in Psychology – universality and bias. Gender bias including androcentrism and alpha and beta bias; cultural bias, including ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.

• Free will and determinism: hard determinism and soft determinism; biological, environmental and psychic determinism. The scientific emphasis on causal explanations.

• The nature-nurture debate: the relative importance of heredity and environment in determining behaviour; the interactionist approach.

• Holism and reductionism: levels of explanation in Psychology. Biological reductionism and environmental (stimulus-response) reductionism.

• Idiographic and nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation.

• Ethical implications of research studies and theory, including reference to social sensitivity.

Relationships

• The evolutionary explanations for partner preferences, including the relationship between sexual selection and human reproductive behaviour.

• Factors affecting attraction in romantic relationships: self-disclosure; physical attractiveness, including the matching hypothesis; filter theory, including social demography, similarity in attitudes and complementarity.

• Theories of romantic relationships: social exchange theory, equity theory and Rusbult’s investment model of commitment, satisfaction, comparison with alternatives and investment. Duck’s phase model of relationship breakdown: intra-psychic, dyadic, social and grave dressing phases.

• Virtual relationships in social media: self-disclosure in virtual relationships; effects of absence of gating on the nature of virtual relationships.

• Parasocial relationships: levels of parasocial relationships, the absorption addiction model and the attachment theory explanation.

Schizophrenia

• Classification of schizophrenia. Positive symptoms of schizophrenia, including hallucinations and delusions. Negative symptoms of schizophrenia, including speech poverty and avolition. Reliability and validity in diagnosis and classification of schizophrenia, including reference to co-morbidity, culture and gender bias and symptom overlap.

• Biological explanations for schizophrenia: genetics and neural correlates, including the dopamine hypothesis.

• Psychological explanations for schizophrenia: family dysfunction and cognitive explanations, including dysfunctional thought processing.

• Drug therapy: typical and atypical antipsychotics.

• Cognitive behaviour therapy and family therapy as used in the treatment of schizophrenia. Token economies as used in the management of schizophrenia.

• The importance of an interactionist approach in explaining and treating schizophrenia; the diathesis-stress model.

Aggression

• Neural and hormonal mechanisms in aggression, including the roles of the limbic system, serotonin and testosterone. Genetic factors in aggression, including the MAOA gene.

• The ethological explanation of aggression, including reference to innate releasing mechanisms and fixed action patterns. Evolutionary explanations of human aggression.

• Social psychological explanations of human aggression, including the frustration-aggression hypothesis, social learning theory as applied to human aggression, and de-individuation.

• Institutional aggression in the context of prisons: dispositional and situational explanations. 

• Media influences on aggression, including the effects of computer games. The role of desensitisation, disinhibition and cognitive priming.