Monthly Archives: February 2014
Post Of The week – Thursday 27th February, 2014
1) Horizon On How You Really Make Decisions This programme looks at the way in which logic and intuition govern the decisions we make. It features the work of Daniel Kahneman from Princeton University. I’ve only managed to watch a few minutes so far but, as with the other psychological Horizons recently, it looks really […]
AS Social Influence: Does Milgram’s study really show that situational factors can be strong enough to push ordinary people to commit harmful acts?
To answer this question, you really need to break it down into sub-questions. The sub-questions which come into my mind are Is this a realistic experiment? Can it be applied to real world settings? Are his methods valid and ethical? If you wish, you can go back to the video from the lesson showing the […]
AS Social Influence: Conformity, Asch’s Study And Riots
Firstly, remind yourself of the key features of Asch’s study. You can watch a reconstruction of the original 1951 study here. You can also listen to Peter Smith talking about his work with Rod Bond on conformity across cultures here. If you want to hear more about the ethics of Asch’s study, you can listen […]
A2 Addictive Behaviour – Critical Questions
Is Dopamine Just A Pleasure Chemical? Neurological explanations of pleasure have focused on the mesolimbic pathway. This is a series of connected neurons in the brain which enable us to feel pleasure. Substances such as nicotine are supposed to be addictive because they raise the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in this pathway, making feelings of […]
Locus Of Control
The link to the Health Check programme exploring locus of control is here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00w949l The section specifically on health starts at 10 minutes and 20 seconds.
Post Of The Week – Thursday 20th February
1) Medicine Of Our Minds In Psychology, we rely on randomised controlled trials to establish the efficacy of drugs. Some people get the drug, others get a placebo but no one knows which they are getting. All might equally believe that the pill they are taking is having some effect. If the drug is really […]
Post Of The Week – Thursday 13th February 2014
1) Why Dieting Doesn’t Usually Work Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist, explains in this video why diets do not work. Along the way, she explains some of the ideas in our A2 Eating Behaviour course: neural mechanisms, dieting, evolutionary explanations, factors affecting eating behaviour. Her big idea is that eating can become mindful. That, as we’ve […]
Test For Skydrive
Here’s a link. Please can you email me back or leave a comment here to let me know if you can view this video.
Post Of The Week – Thursday 6th February 2014
1) Finishing Off Depression We are about to finish off the Depression topic in Year 13. It’s been a fascinating four or five weeks looking at competing and contradictory claims. Fundamentally, the researchers cannot agree about the effectiveness of biological therapies nor about the classification and diagnosis of depression. All of the debate really comes […]
DHSB/DHSG Psychology Research Digest 
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