Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

What mark would you give these essays (A2 Unit4)?

I'm having a lot of problems writing the 12 mark essays for unit 4, I get the content but I haven't got the hang of the writing style yet, I think I put down too many point and don't analyse, anyway here are two essays:

Discuss the view that children’s understanding of friendship is largely determined by age. Refer to evidence in your answer.

As children develop their relationship with peers takes increasing importance over the bond that they have formed with their parents, however there is a debate surrounding whether the understanding of friendship changes as it becomes more important.

A study conducted by Selman and Jaquette suggests that the understanding of friendship does develop with age. Selman and Jaquette interviewed 225 participants aged 4 to 32 about their friendships and identified 5 overlapping stages, they found that as age increased focus shifted from satisfying needs such as entertainment to a focus on reciprocity sharing and interdependence. A focus on sharing and interdependence can be seen through disclosing information, talking to friends to resolve personal conflicts, and also helping to resolve the conflicts of friends. On the other hand the information gathered in this study is subjective as participants are interpreting their own behaviour, it could be that the older participants are more affected by social pressures which encourage them to avoid talking about the selfish aspects of friendship, such as having someone to be around.

Bigelow and LaGaipa’s study also supports the idea that friendship develops in age related stages. In the study 960 children aged between 6 and 14 years were asked to write essays about friendship, the essays were then analysed. Bigelow and LaGaipa found that the development of friendship can be divided into 3 stages, reward –cost, normative and empathetic. This suggests that children’s understanding of friendship is determined by age however it could also be argued that it is the communicational skills of the child which increase with age, younger children may have the same ideas about friendship but don’t yet possess the vocabulary or style of writing to express their views.

The view that children’s understanding of friendship is determined by age is supported by the way in which attitudes towards genders also change with age. For 4 year olds the gender of friends is less important, which coincides with the idea that friends are for play rather than sharing and resolving conflicts, whereas older children show a gender preference when selecting friends.

We should note that it is very difficult to operationalize a childs understanding of friendship as any information gathered is subjective, therefore it is difficult to draw comparisons between different children and age groups. In conclusion, despite problems with studying understanding of friendship, studies suggest this understanding does develop with age and cognitive development.

Discuss Psychological explanations of face recognition, refer to evidence in your answer

Face recognition refers to the ability to recognise a familiar face, but doesn’t necessarily mean you will be able to identify it. There are two main theories which explain how we recognise faces; the holistic and feature analysis model.

The holistic theory proposes that we view the proportions and configuration of features as important as well as the features themselves. Bruce and Young developed the holistic model of face recognition. In this model the face is first structurally encoded, meaning that information about the features on the face is gathered, this structurally encoded information is then compared to faces already present in the FRU, or facial recognition units, if the face is familiar the Personal identification node (PIN) is activated which provides semantic information about the individual such as their occupation, in the final stage the PIN activates name generation.

Feature analysis theory is known as the bottom up theory, it suggests that individual features are important in face recognition and that each feature doesn’t necessarily have the same importance.

According to feature analysis theory the configuration of features on a face shouldn’t affect recognition time however, Sergent found that it takes longer to identify faces when they are inverted this can be explained using the holistic theory as the faces are in a different orientation therefore it is more difficult to structurally encode information which will continue to activate the appropriate FRU. Similarly Young and Hay found it was more difficult to recognise halves of faces put together to create a composite rather than the faces alone. If we processed features individually there should be no difference in the time taken, however the time lag can be explained by the holistic theory as the combination of the faces confuses the viewer.

The aspect of feature analysis theory where each feature doesn’t have the same importance is supported by a study by Sadr which found that eyebrows are the most important feature in face recognition. On the other hand it could be that altering eyebrows has more of an effect of the configuration of the face thus affecting recognition by the holistic theory. Sheperd found that when asked to recall unfamiliar faces people wold recall them using the main features however it could also be that participants did this as a way of conveying what they saw and in their recall they are actually seeing something else.

According to the holistic model we must know other semantic information about an individual before we recall their name, Young tested this theory by asking 22 volunteers to record any incidences when they had difficulty with face recognition. There were no reports of naming someone without knowing other information about them but 190 cases of being able to recall information about someone but not their name, therefore Young’s findings support the holistic theory. Further support for Bruce and Young’s model comes from the case study of Flude a patient with brain damage who could identify occupations of 85% of people but only name 15%, indicating that he was able to encode information but the activation of the PIN led to name generation less frequently.

A holistic theory of facial recognition is supported by the presence of a disorder called prosopagnosia where faces are recognised however no semantic or emotional information is produced, this could be explained as a break in the link between the FRU and PIN. On the other hand recent studies have found that a GSR is produced in response to images despite there being no conscious recognition, this suggests that a different model is involved. As a consequence Bruce and Young redeveloped their original model and produced the interactive activation and competition model.

Both models of recognition have been applied to the development of composite systems. Photo-fit and E-fit involve the witness selecting individual features and building up a face from these hence is based on the feature analysis theory whereas EvoFit produces a selection of similar faces from which the witness selects the closest faces are then generated from the selected face and the process continues until an accurate face is produced.

It could be argued that both the holistic and feature analysis theories can be used to explain different aspects of face recognition, for example faces could normally be recognised in a holistic way, however where features are presented in an unusual orientation we use feature analysis to process the face which is slower. In conclusion it is best to use both theories in conjunction with one another.

What would you give them (honestly)?
Any tips would be appreciated...

Thankyou :smile: