AQA A2 Psychology PSYA3/PSYA4 Revision Thread 2016

This is in response to anyone who did SCHIZOPHRENIA and ADDICTION.

Here are the questions (in terms of how I remember them) and the brief points I made / studies I used. (Note not all the stuff I wrote may be right!)

SCHIZOPHRENIA

1.) Outline and evaluate one or more biological therapies of schizophrenia. (8 + 16)

POINT #1 – DRUGS

(AO1)

☻ Typical drugs, Atypical drugs
☻ Amphetamines and Antipsychotics

(AO2)

☻ Davis et al. (Relapse rates compared to placebo, 55% vs 19%)
☻ Ross and Read (Misleading figures)
☻ Ross and Read (Not a fair comparison, placebo patients in drug withdrawal state)


POINT #2 – ECT

(AO1)

☻ Anaesthetic, Unilateral ECT
☻ Nerve-blocking agent
☻ 0.6 amps, 1 min seizure

(AO2)

☻ Tharyan and Adams (Sham / Simulated ECT)
☻ Read (ECT has significant risks, e.g. Brain damage, death + Decline in use in UK)


ADDICTION

1.) Media Influences of Tony, in terms of Initiation, Maintenance and/or Reduction (10 marks)

☻ STEM: Addiction to both smoking and gambling; watched a lot of film and TV; smoked the brands endorsed by his idols; went into debt; stopped smoking since a month but still has gambling addiction.

☻ SLT - Models in the films (Bandura, Waylen et al)
☻ Campaigns
☻ Prevention - Youth gambling (Deverensky and Gupta??)


2.) Outline one biological approach to the initiation of smoking. (4 marks)

☻ Genetics; Vink et al.


3.) Outline and evaluate one psychological intervention for reducing addictive behaviour. (4 + 6)

☻ Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - Faulty maladaptive thinking
☻ AO2: Ladoucer et al. - Shows effectiveness of CBT; 66 pathological gamblers; 2 conditions; 86% no longer fulfilled DSM criteria for gambling.


Hope this helps

I wrote basically the same thing but instead of discussing CBT I discussed the monetary rewards intervention stuff with Sindelair et al.. Hopefully that should be full marks!

RM questions, hopefully this uploads right!

Heyyy I did anomalistic you may get some credit if you managed to explain it fully and detailed enough and could give enough evaluation

how did you get that???

I don't see how coincidence have anything to do with superstitions

It's clearly not a main explanation used but I suppose they could atleast give one or two marks if it's well explained. For example I suppose they could argue that a certain behaviour occurs and by coincidence it results in a certain favourable outcome so that, even though these two events occurred by coincidence, the person didn't appreciate the role of coincidence and thus mistakingly linked the two behaviours.
Dunno I suppose it depends how lenient the examiner is.
I put behaviourist explanation though

How did you evaluate behavioural explanation?. I used Skinner pigeon study, but I thought they sang to get food, instead of moving a particular way, so that was wrong. Then I said that this was an animal study so it can't be generalised to humans. Then I made some random crap about other alternative explanations which the behavioural explanation failed to consider. Probably got 3 marks in the evaluation area.

How did people apply the pro- social question on media???

I included skinner as the main study too I described it in detail then went on to say how we cannot generalise to humans and stuff, I then used the study by saddon which replicated skinners but didn't find evidence for superstitious behaviour and then outlined the study by matute and the computer as this study used humans and so overcame the problems with generalisability that was attributed to skinners study.
If you went into enough detail with skinners then you probs got quite a few marks

Basically PSYA4 and PSYA3 went awful for me.. As the new alevels are coming into place, am i able to do redo them next year??