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need help in understanding sleep division of PSYA3 AQA Psychology

im really confused on what to include in the following essay questions;
1, Discuss the nature of sleep
2, Discuss lifespan changes in sleep
3,outline and evaluate stages of sleep
can someone please give me a idea as i have no clue, iv been trying to figure out what A01 and A02 points to include the last hour.
Original post by haseebi82
im really confused on what to include in the following essay questions;
1, Discuss the nature of sleep
2, Discuss lifespan changes in sleep
3,outline and evaluate stages of sleep
can someone please give me a idea as i have no clue, iv been trying to figure out what A01 and A02 points to include the last hour.


"Discuss" questions call for an outline and evaluation of whatever the topic/research is but with a focus on "commentary" (MAID).

The nature of sleep is basically what sleep is - cycles, duration, content.
If you want to include research I'd do Dement and Kleitman who used the ECG machines to measure brain activity during sleep.
But, what's bad about this is it's reductionist, trying to simplify sleep down to your biology only. But it's great because it's scientific and is objective, more reliable and well measured, what Psychology aims to be, a science.
However, is your sleep really going to be what it would be at home in a lab? So, it lacks ecological validity because of the artificial environment your being placed in (look up "sleep labs" to see).

Lifespan changes are how the above change over time through the different ages, for example, children have around 60% REM sleep but this reduces down to 40% when they reach adulthood.
Your only real AO2 here is just saying that there is a clear difference but maybe you can't establish cause and effect as to age and the kind of sleep you have because of individual differences - sleep research has a habit to generalize to all...

Stages of sleep I'm not sure is a proper exam question though.

Hope this helps, if not let me know! : )

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