Oxford PPL vs Cambridge PBS?

Can only give insights to Oxford, but hopefully this helps.

The 'scientific' and 'rigorous observation and testing' aspect does not imply a focus only on neuroscience, it's more that the course focuses on teaching you a lot about how psychology experiments work, how to do statistics, and focuses on psychology specifically as an experimental science. So you're learning much more by reading actual journal articles than textbooks, and are encouraged to develop research design skills. There is a good amount of neuroscience on the course, partly because the BPS requires accredited degrees to teach some biological psychology/neuroscience content and partly because Oxford has a lot of neuroscience research going on so there are quite a few advanced options taught by neuroscientists. But equally there is plenty of Psychology, and by doing PPL you might dodge the most difficult neuroscience content in the first year Neurophysiology paper as you'd take the Philosophy paper instead (if its still structured like my first year in 2020), and there are also lots of advanced options that have nothing to do with neuroscience. You also have the option to do a Master's year focused just on Psychology as a 4th year, or graduate with a BA after 3 years - the integrated Master's option might be useful if a career in Psychology is your ultimate aim, and I don't think Cambridge offer that right now.

Both Cambridge PBS and Oxford PPL (assuming you take the correct balance of Psychology and Philosophy to meet the requirements) are BPS accredited so you will explore broadly similar content - conceptual and historical aspects of psychology, developmental, social, biological, clinical and individual differences and cognitive psychology. I think PBS has more freedom in the possible non-Psychology modules you take, whereas with Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford you'd be limited to taking Philosophy options, so that might be something to think about. But the Psychology content at Oxford is not just or even mostly neuroscience - its a Psychology course (and if you wanted to do Neuroscience you'd take Biomedical Sciences and then specialise so there is a whole different course for that!). If you have any questions about Psychology at Oxford I'm happy to answer, although I did EP so I don't know much about the Philosophy side.

Thank you so much ! Could you tell me, as an EP, what a more general Neuroscientific, and a more Social/relationship/developmental based, lecture looked like and the experiments you did/researched with them?

In addition, what would you say the ratio (in general, not taking into account the neurophysiology course) between more Scientific (neuroscience/Biological) and more Humanitarian (social, developmental etc) Psychology topics/papers was in your EP course ? (details on what was mandatory abd what could have swapped to be more humanitarian would be lovely too!)

I believe I do love psychology, but I'm unsure whether or not I would love the neuroscience behind Psychology or EP given how scientific it is (although I may be wrong as I haven't went to one of their lectures yet, and each time I look into Psychology or Philosophy lectures I enjoy them), so more input on the general life/subjects you did would be nice to see what I can expect (courses change each year, but a general idea is nice)

Just a disclaimer that I graduated before the course format changed to 4 years, so some things might be different, but the new course structure looks pretty much the same as mine for the first 3 years.

An example of a neuroscience lecture might have been looking at the brain basis for memory - so learning in more depth about Patient HM, hippocampus-centric theories of memory, and theories with other roles of the wider medial temporal lobe and memory circuitry throughout the brain. Another might be looking at neurotransmitter models of e.g. depression by learning about rodent studies where rodent behaviour as a model for depression is assessed in rats that have certain types of neuron/neurotransmitter missing. In a neuroscience practical you might do brain dissection, learn about how MRI data is processed or write a report about behavioural data that links to a neuroscientific concept.

In my social psychology lectures we looked at things like intergroup psychology, psychology of emotions (e.g. interpreting facial expressions, Ekman's basic emotion theory etc), social psychology in young children and comparative social psychology (so looking at studies of helping in apes for example). An example lab experiment for this might be analysing data based on an experiment looking at how people's eyes might be an informative cue.

In developmental psychology there was a variety of topics, one lecture might be looking at key theories of autism, another might look at how language develops and specialises. A practical for this might be analysing and writing a report based on existing data on a behavioural task conducted in children.

Psychology at Oxford does treat Psychology as an entirely scientific discipline with a very quantitative, positivist leaning - even when something isn't neuroscience/biology based it is still very much looked at through the lens of science. I wouldn't call any of the modules humanitarian, rather they fall on a continuum from very brain based to cognition based to behaviour based. But in terms of specifically neuroscientific courses its probably like 1/6th to 1/4th minimum depending on what subject combinations you pick (for me it was a lot more, as 2 of my 3 third year advanced options were neuroscience). The majority of the course probably falls under the broad umbrella of cognitive psychology.

This is all based on compulsory modules - as far as I am aware PPL students choose a mix of lecture courses and practicals rather than taking all of them, but you have to take them across all the BPS required topics to get an accredited degree. So you could take a biological based practical to tick that box and not take the biological lecture course which is a bigger commitment. In optional modules/research project/library dissertation what you can do depends on what academics are running modules or supervising projects and dissertations, so this varies widely.

Just a disclaimer that I graduated before the course format changed to 4 years, so some things might be different, but the new course structure looks pretty much the same as mine for the first 3 years.

An example of a neuroscience lecture might have been looking at the brain basis for memory - so learning in more depth about Patient HM, hippocampus-centric theories of memory, and theories with other roles of the wider medial temporal lobe and memory circuitry throughout the brain. Another might be looking at neurotransmitter models of e.g. depression by learning about rodent studies where rodent behaviour as a model for depression is assessed in rats that have certain types of neuron/neurotransmitter missing. In a neuroscience practical you might do brain dissection, learn about how MRI data is processed or write a report about behavioural data that links to a neuroscientific concept.

In my social psychology lectures we looked at things like intergroup psychology, psychology of emotions (e.g. interpreting facial expressions, Ekman's basic emotion theory etc), social psychology in young children and comparative social psychology (so looking at studies of helping in apes for example). An example lab experiment for this might be analysing data based on an experiment looking at how people's eyes might be an informative cue.

In developmental psychology there was a variety of topics, one lecture might be looking at key theories of autism, another might look at how language develops and specialises. A practical for this might be analysing and writing a report based on existing data on a behavioural task conducted in children.

Psychology at Oxford does treat Psychology as an entirely scientific discipline with a very quantitative, positivist leaning - even when something isn't neuroscience/biology based it is still very much looked at through the lens of science. I wouldn't call any of the modules humanitarian, rather they fall on a continuum from very brain based to cognition based to behaviour based. But in terms of specifically neuroscientific courses its probably like 1/6th to 1/4th minimum depending on what subject combinations you pick (for me it was a lot more, as 2 of my 3 third year advanced options were neuroscience). The majority of the course probably falls under the broad umbrella of cognitive psychology.

This is all based on compulsory modules - as far as I am aware PPL students choose a mix of lecture courses and practicals rather than taking all of them, but you have to take them across all the BPS required topics to get an accredited degree. So you could take a biological based practical to tick that box and not take the biological lecture course which is a bigger commitment. In optional modules/research project/library dissertation what you can do depends on what academics are running modules or supervising projects and dissertations, so this varies widely.

Just a disclaimer that I graduated before the course format changed to 4 years, so some things might be different, but the new course structure looks pretty much the same as mine for the first 3 years.

An example of a neuroscience lecture might have been looking at the brain basis for memory - so learning in more depth about Patient HM, hippocampus-centric theories of memory, and theories with other roles of the wider medial temporal lobe and memory circuitry throughout the brain. Another might be looking at neurotransmitter models of e.g. depression by learning about rodent studies where rodent behaviour as a model for depression is assessed in rats that have certain types of neuron/neurotransmitter missing. In a neuroscience practical you might do brain dissection, learn about how MRI data is processed or write a report about behavioural data that links to a neuroscientific concept.

In my social psychology lectures we looked at things like intergroup psychology, psychology of emotions (e.g. interpreting facial expressions, Ekman's basic emotion theory etc), social psychology in young children and comparative social psychology (so looking at studies of helping in apes for example). An example lab experiment for this might be analysing data based on an experiment looking at how people's eyes might be an informative cue.

In developmental psychology there was a variety of topics, one lecture might be looking at key theories of autism, another might look at how language develops and specialises. A practical for this might be analysing and writing a report based on existing data on a behavioural task conducted in children.

Psychology at Oxford does treat Psychology as an entirely scientific discipline with a very quantitative, positivist leaning - even when something isn't neuroscience/biology based it is still very much looked at through the lens of science. I wouldn't call any of the modules humanitarian, rather they fall on a continuum from very brain based to cognition based to behaviour based. But in terms of specifically neuroscientific courses its probably like 1/6th to 1/4th minimum depending on what subject combinations you pick (for me it was a lot more, as 2 of my 3 third year advanced options were neuroscience). The majority of the course probably falls under the broad umbrella of cognitive psychology.

This is all based on compulsory modules - as far as I am aware PPL students choose a mix of lecture courses and practicals rather than taking all of them, but you have to take them across all the BPS required topics to get an accredited degree. So you could take a biological based practical to tick that box and not take the biological lecture course which is a bigger commitment. In optional modules/research project/library dissertation what you can do depends on what academics are running modules or supervising projects and dissertations, so this varies widely.

Hey Eeeli, I just tried to look into cognitive psychology a bit more and found a lecture on 'Cognitive Neuroscience' at MIT which basically said that they're trying to study the 'coding' between perception and the mind , and that cognitive psychology is based in an 'engineering' mind to figuring out the brain and mind, is this true for most of the cognitive psychology lectures or is that a specific type/neuroscience based? Could you give examples of types of Cogbitive lectures you did in Oxford (I know you said its vast, so an example of two opposites in the ideas could be useful)?

Sorry for all the questions, just trying to wrap my mind on whether or not EP is right for me, thank you in advance!