Edexcel Psychology Unit 4

Yeah but do you have two edexcel books? One big and small by christine brain? I dont know which one to make notes on cos the big book has loads of information and i will be here for ages.

I am only doing unit 4 for this exam. But are we suppose to revise all units as well for Issues and debates??

Yeah pretty much! You're expected to have a common knowledge on everything you've learnt in the course, and you're expected to draw on your knowledge on some questions. They can also ask you questions on specific studies, last year I think Little Hans came up for instance!

How would you approach this question :
Assess how ethnocentrism may influence the conclusions of psychological research ?

I am only starting revising today (and I have to do a 2 and a half hour mock for another subject). There is so much in Unit 4, I feel like I'm going to fail! Especially as I switched exam board this year, I haven't done the psychodynamic approach or learning approach as a whole topic, biological we did things about stressors, so again everything is completely different, half of social is different too. My teacher also hasn't set a single 18 mark essay/ essay on the issues and debates. I know I'm not going to learn everything in the detail needed by the exam, does anyone have any tips on the most important things to focus on?

Also does anyone have anything on anorexia nervosa, I'm also a bit confused - the booklet my teacher gave me just had about AN, but the revision thing someone posted here wasn't very clear if Anorexia nervosa and bulimia counted as one disorder to the exam board as it said 'and'.

*Panic, panic, panic*

Im doing anorexia nervosa too ! i dont think bulimia is , however i did have to learn the Mumford and Whitehouse study which does look at bulima , but we learned anorexia nervosa in detail with 2 explanations and 2 treatments , not bulimia.

How would you approach this question :
Assess how ethnocentrism may influence the conclusions of psychological research ?

What is alpha and beta bias?

Thanks for the reply I haven't learned a single study yet, not sure if I was supposed to cover that one!
What treatments have you done?
One of the treatments on my thing from my teacher is just like medical treatment which looks a bit ****e. Just saying stuff like they can be treated in a hospital as an inpatient or an outpatient.... Not sure if there's a better one? The other one I have is psychotherapy.

Is it a 12 or 18 marker? I don't know how to do 18 markers?! I would firstly define ethnocentrism include the things like alpha and beta bias, basically if it's a 12 marks worth of description, then include about 3 studies, I would use two that were on carried out in culture and explain how they were ethnocentric and then I would use Ainsworth's to point out how cross-cultural research can still be ethnocentric (those Japansese and German kids were still categorised as one of the insecure attachment types despite the...)

Thanks , is alpha and beta bias to do with gender bias exaggeration or to with being minimal ?

These are my definitions:

Alpha Bias: A tendancy to exaggerate differences between cultures, usually used to show one culture is superior to another.

An example: Yerkes 1917 looked at army recruits, ww1 – mental age of soliders, they found that the average black solider mental age was 10.4 years that was compared to the average mental age of a white US solider which was 13 years. (not sure if this is right as my teacher tends to leave out units when mentioning studies and so I asked and she presumed it was years but then why weren't people more concerned at how low the mental age was? )

Beta Bias: Ignores/minimise differences between cultures.
Example: Freud claims the Oedipus complex is universal.

Anyone got acopy/link to the June 2011 paper? It'd be really useful



Also, I've never heard the words alpha or beta bias... is this important :/

Does anyone have any notes of strengths and weaknesses of the therapies (CBT , DREAMANALYSIS , TOKEN ECONOMY , DRUG THERAPY, FAMILY THERAPY ) ?