Mind Changers is a recent series exploring the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century. More information available from the BBC Radio 4 website. Four excellent episodes for you to listen to. Enjoy. The Pseudo-Patient Study Claudia Hammond revisits David Rosenhan’s Pseudo-Patient Study The Hawthorne Effect The 1920s experiment in a Chicago [...]

“… Rational choice theory predicts that people will not gamble, thus it is theorised that regular gamblers gamble because they make the wrong decisions – that cognitive bias (irrational thinking) distorts their reasoning. The aim of this study was to increase understanding of the cognitive processes and behaviour of persistent fruit machine gamblers.” Almost 18 [...]

Probably one of the most iconic tests that jump to mind when a person starts talking about going to a psychologist (or ‘shrink’) is the inkblot tests.  These tests, correctly referred to as the Rorschach Inkblot tests were surrounded in ‘secrecy’ as practicing psychologists who used them thought that the tests would be invalid if [...]

Well after a brief hiatus preparing for an Ofsted inspection (which has thankfully passed) it’s back to normal posting … well as normal as possible with only 7 teaching weeks until AS exams and 9 until A2! After returning from a ‘Getting Started’ conference I found an email from OCR letting me know about some [...]

Hodder Education presents OCR Psychology for AS a brand new text for the 2008 OCR AS Psychology specification, covering all 15 core studies, contextualising, presenting and evaluating each study in full, in order to make it relevant to the student. The textbook is highly accessible and readable, with useful guidance on comparing studies, applying themes, [...]

Over the next few weeks I am going to cover the five new studies on the 2008 specification and see what resources are around for them already. I was lucky enough to go the the OCR inset in Leeds on Wednesday where both Griffiths and Richer & Haslam were speaking. It was a good day [...]

In the Individual Differences module of the AS we look at the Gould review of Yerkes’ work at the beginning of the century in relation to IQ testing and race titled ‘A Nation of Morons‘. A big issue that is raised is the reliability and validity of psychometric tests – do these tests (like IQ [...]

A good while back I compiled a list of references and more importantly full text links for all of the core studies. Well now the new 2008 spec has been finalised it’s time for the updated references. If you’re looking for the ‘old’ (2000-2007) spec studies see this page. All of the files are being [...]

One study in the AS which always raises debate is that of Hraba & Grant who were replicating the research of Clark and Clark from the late 1930′s. The study is investigating racial preference, awareness and self-identification in both white and black children. Stumbling around the internet I found a very powerful video that has [...]

“… the term intelligence designates a complexly interrelated assemblage of functions, no one of which is completely or accurately known in man” (Yerkes, 1929, p. 524) In the Gould study (which is actually a review of the work conducted by Yerkes) a big issue that is raised is the reliability and validity of psychometric tests [...]