IB Revision Psych

IB HIGHER Level May 2003 Psychology Notes Learning Perspective A. Development and Cultural Contexts Historical Context: A. Very early influence - Aristotle suggested that learning occurs by association between things - French philosopher, Compte, founded positivism, the belief that only definite/positive things are valid (18th Cent.). This became part of the scientific zeitgeist - Jaques Coeb (worked on plant tropisms), was interested in the responses of plants, focusing on stimulus-response relationships. - Cognitive psychologists decided they needed to understand the black box but behaviourists ignored it. B. Other historical conditions (zeitgeist) - Behaviourism emerged in the 1st two decades of the 20th century. - In the early 20th century there was a very positive zeitgeist in USA, shown by the social, educational and intellectual history of the 20th Cent. It came out of the optimistic and materialistic culture of the time. - Development of Behaviourism was in response to psychoanalysis, i.e. Freudian psychology, which dealt with the unconscious repressions, and subconscious. Behaviourism rejected this, thinking it was unscientific. - Psychology born in 1879 when Wundt set up the first psychology labs in Leipzig. C. Watson's reaction against introspection - Watson, an American and father of Behaviourism rejected introspection as unscientific, since it is a

  • Word count: 20191
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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Psychology IB Abnormality Notes

ABNORMAL NOTES Discuss the extent to which biological, cognitive, and sociocultural influence abnormal behavior Introduction . What is abnormal behavior, and how it can be looked at under biological, cognitive, and sociocultural viewpoints . Its hard to diagnose and fully diagnose a person as there may be: cultural differences, different cultural beliefs, cultural bound syndromes 2. Hard to classify abnormal, some say abnormal is something away from the normal, so someone who is 2 meters tall is abnormal? . Picture is still mysterious 2. In order to diagnose and treat a person with mental health issues we need to better understand the causes or etiologies of those issues. There are many different explanations for conditions like, for example, depression and eating disorders. Despite the variety of theories and the conflicting evidence that exists about what causes certain illnesses, there are a number of successful, tried and tested treatments based on certain theories. An example of this would be drug treatments, including SSRIs like Prozac for the treatment of major depression. However, not only do many of these treatments spark controversy, there is also no one simple explanation for any type of mental health issue and psychologists/psychiatrists need to take a multi-axial approach to diagnosing and treating people who need help. This multi-axial approach has

  • Word count: 16728
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah--A Psychological Analysis

A LONG WAY GONE: MEMOIRS OF A BOY SOLDIER Book Summary A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier is a heart touching biography of an amazing young man, Ishmael Beah, during his years of growing up as a child of war in Sierra Leone, Africa. His story begins in 1993 while in his hometown village of Mogbewemo. Ishmael, his brother Junior, and his childhood friend Talloi had started a hip-hop dance and music group. They had left their village one day to travel by foot to a neighboring city to perform in their friend’s talent show. During their absence their village is attacked by rebel forces and destroyed. Ishmael and his friends never make to their friend’s talent show; they hear the news that their village had been attacked and quickly make the decision to return and find their families. Ishmael was ten years old when the horrors of war became his only reality. By the age of thirteen the Sierra Leone’s government army drafted him. Then at sixteen he was placed in a rehabilitation program by UNICEF, a program dedicated to returning war-stricken children back to mainstream society. Ishmael’s memoirs are essentially divided into three periods and during Ishmael’s accounts he is a very different person in each one of these periods. The first period was his life before he had to literally fight to stay alive—before he became a soldier. This time is marked by

  • Word count: 5657
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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To what extent is positive education in classroom settings successful in enhancing students happiness?

To what extent is positive education in classroom settings successful in enhancing students’ happiness? Session: May 2013 Name: Kasper Djernæs Candidate number: 000040-072 Psychology Extended essay Jane Graham Word Count: 3998 Content page Introduction…………………………………………………………… page 4 Defining and understanding happiness…………………………....page 4-5 The Penn Resilience program (PRP)…………………………………………..page 6-7 The Geelong Grammar School Project (GGS)……………………………..page 7-8 Positive education put into practice…………………………………………..page 8-9 Summary of evaluation point’s……………………………………………………page 9 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..page 9-10 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….page 11-13 Appendices………………………………………………………………………….page 14-15 Introduction Abraham Maslow ended his book Motivation and personality with the chapter Towards a Positive Psychology in which he argues that psychology to a higher extent should be focusing on the sides of life, which makes it worth living. Approximately 50 years

  • Word count: 5095
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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An experiment to investigate whether word connotation truly does have an effect on memory

Internal Assessment Psychology HL An experiment to investigate whether word connotation truly does have an effect on memory Bobae Choi May 2012 897 words Abstract This replication of Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) experiment has the aim to investigate if word connotation truly does have an effect on memory and was experimented on twenty (ten males, ten females) grade twelve history students in a high school in Langley, B.C. The research hypothesis is that speed estimates will be statistically significant depending on the aggressiveness or passiveness of the word. As a result of being an experiment, the independent variable is the connotation of the word (smashed or contacted) and the dependent variable is the speed estimate from the train when crashing into the school bus. The numerical descriptive statistics used range and median because ordinal data was present. Two results were produced from the median, with the range produced 71 for smashed and 51 for contacted and the verb smashed being 40 and 50 for the word contacted. Using the Mann Whitney U test for inferential statistics, the critical value of U was found to be less than both the smallest values of U1 and U2; as a result the null hypothesis shall be accepted therefore concluding that there is no significant statistical difference on memory through positive and negative connotations in this experiment. For this

  • Word count: 5047
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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To What Extent Can Music Improve a Child's Intelligence?

Psychology Extended Essay: To What Extent Can Music Improve and Develop Intelligence in Children? Tanya Z. Waqanika City and Islington Sixth Form College Psychology The Effect Music has on the Brain Word Count: 3781 Date: February 27th 2014 Abstract This essay consists of an investigation of To What Extent Can Music Improve and Develop Intelligence in Children. As the ‘Mozart Effect’ suggested the notion that music could improve spatial intelligence temporarily, it also brought into question whether music could also improve and develop other types of intelligence. The focus of this essay was therefore to determine if music did improve intelligence in children at all, which specific types of intelligence it improved and the extent to which it made an improvement. This investigation looked at how music affected linguistic intelligence, mathematical intelligence and IQ in children. I have used a combination of scientific and psychological journals, psychology textbooks and online resources in order to determine the ways in which music could improve each area of intelligence. I will also be investigating whether music actively causes these intelligences to develop and improve or if a predisposition to higher intelligences causes a child to be more inclined to take up and persist with music instruction instead. Throughout the research of this investigation, I was

  • Word count: 4908
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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Testing the effect of different types of music on memory.

. Design .1 Focus Question Listening to music is a technique that many students use to relax and/or improve their concentration. However, many students 'fall into the trap' of listening to music while they study. But are they really traps? Does listening to music while studying create distractions which weaken memorization, or is it an effective method for memorization? This leads us to the focus question: Does the type of background music (rock, jazz, orchestral, strings and no music) played during the memorization and recollection processes have an effect on students' ability to memorize and recall a list of words? .2 Hypothesis The more dissonant the background music is, the more it weakens the student's ability to memorize and thus, the less number of words are recalled. Therefore, no music will have the highest memory recall; followed by strings, orchestral, jazz and rock (lowest memory recall). In other words, yes, music does create distractions which weaken memorization during memorization and recollection processes. .3 Background Information .3.1 Dissonance In music, the term dissonance means a combination of notes that sound harsh or unpleasant to most people. Dissonance is based on beating and roughness. These conditions are caused due to sound signal's amplitude fluctuations which describe variations in the maximum amplitude to a reference point due to

  • Word count: 4678
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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Is eyewitness testimony reliable?

Eyewitness Testimony as a source of reliable evidence In relation to cognitive psychology, is eyewitness testimony reliable in today’s judicial system? Word Count: 3944 ABSTRACT Is eyewitness testimony a reliable source of evidence in today’s judicial system? Many jurors tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony assuming that what they hear is exactly as it happened. They ignore the psychology behind remembering an event. Our brain is a complex structure and it is difficult to absorb every stimulus in our surrounding. We pay great attention to some aspects of a situation while completely ignoring others. It is advisable for expert psychologists to be present during a court case that involves eyewitness testimony, as they are more aware of its flaws. We store information in schemas and when we gain new knowledge it is altered in order to fit these schemas. Leading psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus, Neil Bartlett and Yullie & Cutshall have carried out research in order to demonstrate how our memory can be altered by psychological factors such as leading questions, reconstructive memory and weapon focus. This research paper contains a vast number of experiments and studies done in order to illustrate the unreliability of our memory and whether courts should rely on eyewitness testimony as a prime source. Age and gender also serve as factors that influence

  • Word count: 4655
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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Anger and Aggression in Males and Females

EXTENDED ESSAY CANDIDATE NAME: Michaela Stovicková CANDIDATE NUMBER: 000771 - 030 SUBJECT: Psychology RESEARCH QUESTION: The link between anger and aggression : do they feed one another? WORDCOUNT: YEAR: 2005/2006 CANDIDATE NUMBER: 000771 - 030 ABSTRACT Anger and aggression, though at the first glance similar issues, are two distinctive phenomena. What is the link between them and is it legitimate to claim that they feed one another? Anger is an internal state, a negative emotion. Aggression is a negative behavior intended to hurt others. One link is when anger motivates aggressive act or when aggressive act provokes anger in a victim. Another association is that aggressive act is often mislead with the expression of anger: Behavior driven by anger does not need to be intended to hurt but may seem so, and subsequently, act can be only called aggressive if having the intention to hurt. Factors managing the expression of anger and aggression turn out to be biological determinants and social norms. In conclusion, social norms in the given society have much greater influence on expressions of anger and aggression. For better examination of these norms, gender differences are of interest. The most pervasive norm claims that men are more angered and more aggressive than women. This stereotype turns out to be a myth. However, this mythic stereotype, as

  • Word count: 4566
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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EE PSYCHOLOGY

The Importance of Positive Reinforcement in Animal Training Extended Essay Psychology HL May 2009 Erika Pärn Candidate code: 1292019 Tikkurilan Lukio Word Count: 4009 ? Abstract The research question of this essay is that to what extent is positive reinforcement effective in animal training? Animal training has for a long time been known for its simple concepts on conditioning animal responses through the use of reinforcement and punishment. However with the recent fascination and exploration of animal intelligence we may be able to adapt better means of reaching cooperation with animals. Concentration of this essay is specifically the use of positive reinforcement as an enhancement in the relationship between the trainee and trainer. The idea being explored in this essay is the notion of positive reinforcement and its impact. In attempt to understand positive reinforcement and its effects on the trainee. Positive reinforcement can be seen as the most effective of reinforcements. It can be defined as immediate consequence after a given behavior that increases the likelihood of being repeated when the similar situation is encountered. The notion of animal intelligence has continued to marvel mans imagination for centuries. The innovation of higher cognitive capabilities in non-human animals has proved to be a very successful field of study in recent times. Novel

  • Word count: 4368
  • Level: International Baccalaureate
  • Subject: Psychology
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