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Recently there has been a flurry of articles on addiction, the reasons why we become addicted and why do we continue to abuse these substances; be it alcohol, gambling or even love (there was a very interesting article about being addicted to love by Prof Mark Griffiths in a recent Psychology Review - and on [...]

In the Developmental Psychology unit of the AS we look at a longitudinal study of children who have been maternally deprived (Hodges and Tizard). Prior to the Hodges and Tizard study it was thought (mainly as a result of Bowlby’s research) that those children who were maternally deprived as children would become affectionless psychopaths.
John [...]

Here is the first of a what is going to be a weekly overview of those stories that I think are pretty interesting in psychology but don’t really apply to the OCR specification. Seems a shame to miss out on them just because I can’t get them to fit into the specifications. So, here are [...]

Studying the brain has always been problematic as there were few ways of investigating what part of the brain was functioning at a particular time. Over the last few decades many different types of brain scans have been developed (MRI, PET, MEG) which mean that we no longer have to wait for a [...]

In the Crime module in psychology of the courtroom we look at what factors influence juries decisions and one of the studies that I use is the Castello et al. study which looks at how the attractiveness of a defendant in relation to that of the plaintiff may be a variable in a guilty verdict [...]

UPDATE: If you’re wanting the Spec 2008 studies see here.
Here I will try to collate all of the full text original articles for the 20 core studies in the AS course. If you know where I can find a publicly available copy of any of the missing ones please let me know. :)
Also, I am [...]

Autism is a developmental disorder that we investigate in the first year with Simon Baron-Cohen. One of the impairments that some autistic people were thought to have was an in-ability to interpret emotions from facial expressions and many studies have provided support for this thesis. However, autistic children are able to interpret the mental state [...]

In the first year core studies we look at Bandura and his ideas on Social Learning Theory (SLT). Basically, SLT says that we learn by imitation of role models around us. In his study he exposed children to an adult role model being aggressive towards a ‘bobo’ doll and then gave that child [...]

We look at eye witness testimony in the first year looking at Loftus and Palmer and investigate the reliability of witnesses and what can effect witness recall in the Crime module of the second year. Many studies have investigated the reliability of children as witnesses and this is even a sub-topic in the course; [...]