Why Little Albert wasn't such a great study after all

For those of you choosing to study the Little Albert case study (Watson and Rayner, 1920), you might find this link to be of interest. It's from my new blog, and it's a criticism of the study and why I don't like it. It covers evaluation points such as ethics, bias, and generalizability.

Happy revising! (Apologies for the oxymoron!)
Best wishes
Vicky

For those of you studying minority and majority influence, this might be of interest to you

What does it take to be a leader? Many people think they know the answer, but Simon Sinek's theory seems to really hit the nail on the head. Watch the video here.

Whilst it's not directly part of the syllabus, having background theory or knowledge on how people influence others is going to aid your understanding of the course material, which will help you answer your questions better.

And regardless, this video is great. Enjoy, and happy Saturday!

A quick update from me

Hi there guys, hope the revision is coming along well.

I'd just like to let you know if you need any help, I'll still be answering as many questions as I can, but unfortunately I'm not going to be writing any more full length answers (I honestly would if I had the time to spare!).

Also, I'm here to let you guys know about my new psych blog. After much deliberation, I decided to scrap Psych-Bites due to technical difficulties, and have created Sciency Posts for Sciency Folks. It's going to be about all things relevant to psychology, so if you have any general queries or things you'd like me to blog about, comment below and if I can, I'll blog about it at the next opportunity.

I hope to see you guys around on my new site, and am still humbled by how many of you keep coming back to the site.

Best wishes
Vicky

Tips for the exam and a goodbye from me!

• Read the question fully and highlight the key terms, including the question word (e.g. how/why)
• Spend 10 mins max. on part (a) questions, and 20 mins max on part (b) questions.
• Include as much relevant research as you can 
• Include details if it's relevant
• Use as many evaluative points in part (b) as you possibly can, with regards to the question
• Answer 4 questions: 2 from 1 section, 2 from another. You won't get the marks if you don't! Even if you aren't sure, do your best and don't miss out any questions. Also, don't accidentally answer 3 from one section!
• Don't panic!

Best of luck to everybody tomorrow! With regards to the site, I probably won't be answering any more comments, but I will be posting a link in the next few months about my new blog, which will be more generally about psychology, and posts based on my lectures from university (hopefully!)

So, do your best, and show the examiners what you can do. Hopefully some of you will be visiting my next blog!

Vicky

The DSM-IV and ICD-10

There are two main manuals which give details about the categories of dysfunctional behaviour and thus are manuals on how to diagnose dysfunctional behaviour. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is probably more widely used, whilst many studies conducted in the UK and US refer to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is a specific manual for psychological disorders, whilst the ICD contains one chapter on psychological disorders and is as a whole a manual on health disorders generally.

The DSM is a practical guide based on field trials and empirical research, as well as referring to past editions of both the DSM and ICD. It was produced by the APA and instructs psychiatrists to evaluate the patient in terms of five axes, although the latter two are optional. The axes are as follows: clinical disorders (such as depression), personality disorders (such as mental retardation), physical health (due to recognising that long-term illness, for example, can influence mental health), environmental factors (such as family problems), and global assessment of functioning. These axes reflect an understanding that disorders result from an interaction of biological, psychological and social factors, and thus it is necessary to look at these axes to give a thorough analysis and diagnosis.

The ICD is an international standard diagnostic classification manual, published by the World Health Organisation – it is now in its tenth revision. Chapter 5 is the only chapter relevant for mental and behavioural disorders, as it is a manual for all health disorders. It is more symptom-based than the DSM, and lists clinical and personality disorders on the same axis. There are also 5 more groups of disorders than in the DSM, with ten therefore in total. These axes include: organic mental disorders, delusional disorders, mood disorders, mental retardation, and stress-related and neurotic disorders.

EVALUATION POINTS FOR AFTER A GUILTY VERDICT

As requested, here is a list of issues and evaluation points you can use for after a guilty verdict. It isn't comprehensive, so feel free to comment and add your own or just use a couple of these. It's completely up to you; use the most relevant evaluation points you can think of.

• Ethics: obviously,  the death penalty and imprisonment are unethical. But, restorative justice is also pretty traumatic. 
• Freewill and determinism: consequences of committing a crime tend to follow the ideology that criminals choose to commit crimes, despite upbringing, cognition, and biology all being deterministic explanations of crime. Thus, you can evaluate the appropriateness of punishing someone for what they didn't choose to do - if it's relevant. 
• Situational versus dispositional: this is one most relevant to imprisonment and treatments. Both seem to adopt the ideology that criminals themselves are to blame for their behaviour, whilst research has suggested situation and environment can play a role in determining criminality. Here you can refer to reductionism. Thus, are treatments likely to be effective if they're ignoring one aspect of why people commit crime?
• Methodology of research: a lot of research is content analysis, which is inexpensive and replicable, but is of course limited by the validity and methodology of the individual studies. You can, as with all research, evaluate population validity, ecological validity (most research is done in the field, which is great), usefulness, etc.
• Effectiveness of treatments: look at reduction in aggressive/anti-social behaviour, time/cost effectiveness, as well as recidivism.
• You can also look at how well research has been applied. Haney and Zimbardo suggested that individual differences should be taken into account, prisons should be used sparingly, and that psychological knowledge should be applied to prison policy. But the actual implementation of this seems slow, and prison is still more widely spread than most of the alternatives. There is still racial bias in US prisons, too. However, research raises the issues surrounding punishment and rehabilitation of offenders, and thus you could say any discussion is beneficial. 

EVALUATION FOR MAKING A CASE

Interviewing witnesses
STUDIES: Bruce, Loftus, Fisher

Generally questions have been based on research, so here are some issues:
Evaluating research;

• ecological validity: Bruce and Loftus are poor in EV, Fisher is high
• population validity/generalisability: all fairly low, but at least Fisher uses real detectives
• all are experiments: good for control and internal validity, and allow for replicability so likely to be somewhat reliable. However, many factors influence information given in witness interviews so it's unlikely that given the same situation, that any two people would give a consistent account and thus reliability is questionable. 
• usefulness and application: knowing about the inaccuracy of e-fit identification, eyewitness accounts and effectiveness of CIT has excellent real-life implications, helps inform policy and could help to change the way that juries perceive eyewitness testimonies. However the results aren't really well known, so this is a drawback.

Interviewing Suspects

• Validity of suspect interviews: police officers only 64.5% accurate at telling truth from lies, interviews lead to social desirability and all associated issues, interrogations lead to false confessions, etc. Research in this area tends to have high EV though, which is good because generalisability of findings should be strong.
• Reliability: similar to interviewing witnesses, affected by individual differences of interviewee and interviewer.
• Ethics is an important issue
• Usefulness/applications of research: shows that police officers may need more training in identifying lies and truth, highlights the unethical nature and poor validity of confessions obtained through interrogation

Creating a Profile

• Validity, effectiveness and usefulness: Mokros and Alison suggested that top down typological profiling is inaccurate as it's too reductionist, Canter found bottom up approaches effective, and Copson found that police officers may not be aware of benefits of profiling but that many would use again for a second opinion
• Reliability: top down is more reliable as it uses pre-existing categories. 
• Qualitative and quantitative data: both approaches feature some qualitative (e.g. looking at details, not numerical data) and some quantitative (e.g. looking at numbers and patterns). Quantitative is good because it's easy to analyse, qualitative is good because it's more in-depth and more humanistic. 
• Determinism: top down assumes that similar criminals create similar crime scenes, which is fairly reductionist and deterministic. Bottom up is less deterministic in that it suggests criminal choose to act consistently, and more holistic as it looks at each characteristic in turn and builds up a picture rather than choosing for example disorganised or organised.