On Being Sane in Insane Places

David Rosenhan’s “pseudopatient experiment” is a classic study for both sociologists and psychologists, that raises a range of interesting questions relating to areas like mental illness, labelling theory and ethics. Rosenhan’s research was designed to discover if doctors could correctly diagnose mental illness. If they couldn’t, this would tell us something very important about the […]

Psychology: Attachment and Child Development

Three short teaching films, now available On Demand, covering different aspects of attachment and child development: 1. Bowlby: Attachment and Maternal Deprivation [4.33] In the 1930s a young psychiatrist noticed how many of the disturbed children he saw had been separated from their parents in early life. This was John Bowlby whose work had a […]

Psychology: Aspects of Sleep

Four short teaching films, now available On Demand, covering different aspects of sleep research: 1. Why Do We Sleep? [4.20] We’ll spend about a third of our lives asleep. But why?  Why do we need to sleep? Filmed at a University Sleep Laboratory, this short film demonstrates the effect of lack of sleep and why […]

Criminal Profiling: The Movie

While you might be surprised to learn that some forms of criminal (or offender) profiling have been around for a very long time – from profiles of witches in the Middle Ages to “Jack the Ripper” in the late 19th century – criminal profiling really developed into a systematic attempt to identify key features of […]

A Cage and Freezing Water: One Woman’s Journey Through Depression

Our latest Psychology offering is a bit of a departure from the norm in that it’s focused on giving students an impression of what it’s actually like to suffer from depression through one woman’s experience of the condition – the fatigue, the feeling of being trapped and the continual voices in her head that told […]

Psychology Students YouTube Channel

I came across this Channel after following a Twitter link to one of its videos (Experimental Design in Psychology – well worth a watch if you’re interested in knowing more about Independent Groups, Repeated Measures or Matched Pairs designs). Overall, the Channel offers three types of video: 1. “To Camera” video lectures, which although quite […]

Are You What Your Mother Ate?

Randy Jirtle and Rob Waterland’s Agouti Mouse Study has been called one of the most important study’s of the 21st century, not only for its significance for our understanding of the relationship between our genetic Nature and environmental Nurture but, most importantly, for our understanding of the epigenetic mechanisms that change gene expression in both […]

Maths in Psychology

Three more documents, authored by Dr. Julia Russell and salvaged by yours-truly from the Uniview archive, these focus on the Maths in Psychology component recently introduced into the a-level the Psychology Specification. The basic format for each document is a brief outline of a specific study followed by exam-style questions and answers to these questions. […]

Exploring the Nurture in Our Nature?

The Nature-Nurture debate in both sociology and psychology at a-level has, historically, generally been framed in terms of an either / or approach to understanding the relationship between genes and social / environmental influences. In short, either our behaviour is fundamentally a product of our genetic inheritance (biological determinism) or it is a product of […]

Behind the Statistics

Now available On-Demand, the third in a trilogy of related psychology research methods films (the first and second look at Experimental and Non-Experimental Research Methods respectively) examines how statistical data are collected, compared and explained through an examination of three key issues in this process: