Resources for A-level teachers and students following the AQA spec B syllabus

This post is for students and teachers following the AQA spec B, 2008 specification for psychology. It provides a selection of links to material from the Research Digest blog and The Psychologist magazine (marked with a 'P') that ties in with the AS/A2 syllabus for this exam board. This list is far from comprehensive: students and teachers looking for more material are urged to use the Digest blog's search facility (see box to the right) and The Psychologist magazine's search facility (see box in top left-hand corner), and remember that new material is being added all the time.

AS topics

Biopsychology

• Scanning techniques: Neuroimaging reveals brain's memory bouncer.
• Genetics: Why psychologists study twins. Twin study investigates the genetics of reading and maths ability. Behavioural genetics (P).
• Localisation of function: Left and right brain, Insights from neural networks (P).

Gender

• Influence of hormones on behaviour: Testosterone fuels entrepreneurship.
• Sex-role stereotypes: Women need female role models. Gender stereotypes can distort our memories. The trouble with doing boy (P).
• Cultural variations in gender related behaviour: Daughters of tradition (P).

Research Methods

• Just how representative are the people who volunteer for psychology experiments?
• Special issue on Research Methods (P).

Social Psychology

• Defiance of authority: Milgram reproduced in virtual reality. Questioning the banality of evil (P).
• Prejudice: seeing others as less than human. Intergroup contact, a panacea for prejudice (P)?

Cognitive Psychology

• Autobiographical memories: Tapping into people's earliest memories. Infantile amnesia: Where did all the memories go? Autobiographical memory and depression (P).
• Forgetting: How remembering can lead to forgetting. How to improve your memory (P). Collaborative memory (P).

Individual differences

• Autism: Children with autism are immune to contagious yawning. The way children with autism draw people. A new therapy for autism (P). Theories of the autistic mind (P).
• Phobias: More evidence that fear of snakes is hardwired.

A2 topics

Cognition and the law

• The false memory debate: Fresh doubt cast on memories of abuse recovered in therapy. Recovered and false memories (P).
• Eyewitness testimony: Identifying people caught on video (P).
• Children as eye witnesses: Adults are unable to tell when children are lying.

Schizophrenia and mood disorders

• Socio-cultural and cognitive explanations for schizophrenia: Who doesn't suffer from paranoia? Shadow illusion casts light on psychotic experiences.
• Special issue on mental illness and diagnosis.

Stress

• The health costs of a hostile disposition.
• Stress management: Protection from the stress of being a long-term carer. Coping with stress in the workplace (P).
• Noise increases the risk of having a heart attack.

Substance abuse

• Treatment: Alternative rewards could help the battle against addiction. Action plan - illegal drug problems and their treatment (P).
• Smokers ignore "what might have been".

Forensic psychology

• Treatments: Turning bad boys good. Helping yobs.
• Special issue: Nipping criminality in the bud (P).

Debates in psychology

• Free will: Libet redux: free will takes another hammering.
• Animal experiments: Why perform experiments on rats?

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