Students will develop an in-depth understanding of the issues and debates within psychology: gender bias; culture bias; determinism vs free-will; nature vs nurture; reductionism vs holism; idiographic vs nomothetic; ethical implications and social sensitivity. Furthermore, students will be able to apply the issues and debates to the various other topics studied with the A level course as discussion and evaluation points.
Understanding the different issues and debates will allow students to develop balanced arguments in relation to behaviour they experience or witness in others.
Students will understand that differing views exist in society and develop a tolerance of these.
This is a continuation of the topics studied within Year 12 biopsychology. Students will study the following topics in Year 13: localisation of function in the brain and hemispheric lateralisation; plasticity and functional recovery; ways of studying the brain; and biological rhythms, including the sleep-wake cycle. The ability to outline and evaluate each of these topics will be developed and enhanced.
Students will learn about:
• 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.
Students will understand the different explanations for schizophrenia, allowing them to form individual opinions of this behaviour.
Developing an understanding of the different explanations of schizophrenia will enable students to be tolerant of some forms of aggressive behaviour.
Students will learn about:
• Offender profiling: the top-down approach, including organised and disorganised types of offender; the bottom-up approach, including investigative Psychology; geographical profiling.
• Biological explanations of offending behaviour: an historical approach (atavistic form); genetics and neural explanations.
• 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.
• Dealing with offending behaviour: the aims of custodial sentencing and the psychological effects of custodial sentencing. Recidivism. Behaviour modification in custody. Anger management and restorative justice programmes.
Students will learn about:
• Sex and gender. Sex-role stereotypes. Androgyny and measuring androgyny including the Bem Sex Role Inventory.
• 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.
• Psychodynamic explanation of gender development, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Oedipus complex; Electra complex; identification and internalisation.
• Social learning theory as applied to gender development. The influence of culture and media on gender roles.
• Atypical gender development: gender dysphoria; biological and social explanations for gender dysphoria.
Students will follow a scheme of work based on their mock exam and assessment results.