Unit Four Syllabus

Developmental psychology

 * stages and characteristics of developmental theories
 * Piaget’s theory of cognitive development
 * Kohlberg’s theory of moral development
 * Erikson’s stage theory of identity
 * features of Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
 * the role of observational learning and modelling

Personality

 * features and limitations of contemporary personality theories
 * trait theories – McCrae and Costa
 * humanistic theories – Rogers and Maslow
 * social-cognitive theory – Mischel and Bandura

Social psychology

 * the influence of groups on behaviour
 * group polarisation
 * conformity and obedience – Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo
 * impact of the presence of others on individual behaviour – social facilitation and inhibition
 * theories of social psychology
 * attribution theory – Heider, Kelley
 * cognitive dissonance theory – Festinger

Culture and values

 * sense of community as defined by McMillan and Chavis
 * membership
 * influence
 * integration and the fulfilment of needs
 * shared emotional connection
 * impact of significant events on individuals and communities
 * positive responses – resilience and post traumatic growth
 * negative responses – post traumatic stress disorder
 * event characteristics contributing to stress – predictability; controllability; experience of threat or loss

Planning and conducting psychological research

 * research terminology
 * experimental, non-experimental
 * scientific, non-scientific
 * sample
 * population
 * ethics in psychology research
 * role of the experimenter
 * participants’ rights – privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, voluntary participation and withdrawal rights
 * informed consent procedures
 * deception in research
 * professional conduct
 * practical issues associated with planning and conducting research
 * difference between sample and population data
 * features of experimental research methods
 * independent and dependent variables
 * operational hypotheses
 * controlled and uncontrolled variables
 * experimental and control groups
 * placebo and experimenter effects
 * reliability and validity
 * longitudinal and cross-sectional designs
 * features of non-experimental (descriptive) research methods
 * case studies, surveys, correlational studies and archival research
 * behavioural variables (not dependent and independent variables) in correlational studies
 * qualitative methods of data collection
 * objective quantitative measures in research – physiological measures
 * subjective quantitative measures in research – checklists and rating scales, such as Likert scales

Processing and evaluating psychological research

 * methods of displaying quantitative data – tables, graphs and diagrams
 * data interpretation
 * measures of central tendency – mode, mean and median
 * measures of dispersion – normal curve, range, variance and standard deviation
 * role of probability
 * use of correlation to establish association between variables
 * sources of error in data and ways of reducing these
 * the concept of statistical significance
 * evaluation of and ways of improving research