Click on a year group at the top for all AP3 revision information.
Psychology
7182/1 Paper 1 Introductory topics in Psychology
4.1.1 Social Influence
• 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
4.1.2 Memory
• The multi-store model of memory: sensory register, short-term memory and long-term memory. Features of each store: coding, capacity and duration.
• The working memory model: central executive, phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad and episodic buffer. Features of the model: coding and capacity.
• Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, including the use of the cognitive interview.
4.1.3 Attachment
• 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.
4.1.4 Psychopathology
• Definitions of abnormality, including deviation from social norms, failure to function adequately, statistical infrequency and deviation from ideal mental health.
• 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 biological approach to explaining and treating OCD: genetic and neural explanations; drug therapy.
7182/2 Paper 2 Psychology in context
4.2.1 Approaches in Psychology
The basic assumptions of the following approaches:
• Learning approaches: i) the behaviourist approach, including classical conditioning and Pavlov’s research, operant conditioning, types of reinforcement and Skinner’s research; ii) social learning theory including imitation, identification, modelling, vicarious reinforcement, the role of mediational processes and Bandura’s research.
• The psychodynamic approach: the role of the unconscious, the structure of personality, that is Id, Ego and Superego, defence mechanisms including repression, denial and displacement, psychosexual stages.
• Humanistic Psychology: free will, self-actualisation and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, focus on the self, congruence, the role of conditions of worth. The influence on counselling Psychology.
4.2.2 Biopsychology
• The divisions of the nervous system: central and peripheral (somatic and autonomic).
• The structure and function of sensory, relay and motor neurons. The process of synaptic transmission, including reference to neurotransmitters, excitation and inhibition.
• Localisation of function in the brain and hemispheric lateralisation: motor, somatosensory, visual, auditory and language centres; Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, split brain research.
Plasticity and functional recovery of the brain after trauma.
• Ways of studying the brain: scanning techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); electroencephalogram (EEGs) and event-related potentials (ERPs); post-mortem examinations.
4.2.3 Research Methods – No advance information provided
7182/3 Paper 3 Issues and options in Psychology
4.3.1 Issues and debates in Psychology
• Free will and determinism: hard determinism and soft determinism; biological, environmental and psychic determinism. The scientific emphasis on causal explanations.
• Idiographic and nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation.
• Ethical implications of research studies and theory, including reference to social sensitivity.
Relationships, Gender or Cognition and Development
4.3.3 Gender
• The role of chromosomes and hormones (testosterone, oestrogen and oxytocin) in sex and gender. Atypical sex chromosome patterns: Klinefelter’s syndrome and Turner’s syndrome.
• Cognitive explanations of gender development, Kohlberg’s theory, gender identity, gender stability and gender constancy; gender schema theory.
Schizophrenia, Eating behaviour or Stress
4.3.5 Schizophrenia
• 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, Forensic Psychology or Addiction
4.3.9 Forensic Psychology
• Offender profiling: the top-down approach, including organised and disorganised types of offender; the bottom-up approach, including investigative Psychology; geographical profiling.
• Psychological explanations of offending behaviour: Eysenck’s theory of the criminal personality; cognitive explanations; level of moral reasoning and cognitive distortions, including hostile attribution bias and minimalisation; differential association theory; psychodynamic explanations.
Economics