Free GCSE Psychology Questions and Answers

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Short-term memory has a limited capacity of about seven items , give or take two ( between five and nine items in Miller’s review). Information lasts only about 15 to 30 seconds unless it is rehearsed; in Peterson and Peterson’s study, recall of three-letter trigrams was about 80% of the trigrams after 3 seconds but only about 10% after 18 seconds .

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Assimilation is fitting new information into an existing schema without changing the schema. Accommodation is changing an existing schema, or creating a new one, when new information does not fit.

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Incidence is the number of new cases of a given disease during a given period in a specified population : how many people develop the problem in, for example, a year. 36 ÷ 120 000 = 0.0003, and 0.0003 × 100 000 = 30, so the incidence is 30 new cases per 100 000 people.

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Conformity is changing your behaviour or opinions to match those of a group, usually the majority.

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Normally in reuptake the neurotransmitter is pumped back into the neuron that released it , which clears the synapse. If a drug blocks reuptake, less neurotransmitter is removed, so more of it stays in the synapse for longer. It continues to bind to receptors on the next neuron, so that neuron is stimulated more and is more likely to fire.

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Alternative hypothesis: students who learn words in silence will recall more words than students who learn them with music playing. Null hypothesis: there will be no difference in the number of words recalled by students who learn in silence and students who learn with music playing.

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Social Learning Theory says that criminal behaviour is learned, in the same way as other behaviour: people acquire new behaviours by observing and imitating others . A person identifies with a role model, such as an older sibling or a friend they admire, observes the model offending and later imitates it. Whether they copy depends on what they see happen to the model: learning also happens by observing the rewards and punishments others receive, which is vicarious reinforcement . If the model is seen to gain money or status from crime, the observer is more likely to imitate it. One criticism is that the theory ignores nature. Many people grow up seeing crime modelled and never offend, so biological factors, such as personality, may also decide who does.

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Piaget argued that language depends on thought : thinking develops first, and language comes later as a way of expressing it. For example, a baby has object permanence, the understanding that something out of sight still exists, by around 8 months , long before it can use words; in the preoperational stage, from about age 2, children use words and images to represent things . The thinking is in place before there are words for it. Language therefore reflects the stage a child’s thinking has reached. It follows that teaching a child a word, such as ‘more’ in a conservation task, will not help if the child does not yet have the concept behind it.

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Sensation is the detection of information by a sensory receptor , as when light reaches the eye. Perception is the way sensory information is organised, interpreted and consciously experienced , as when the shapes are recognised as a friend’s face. The two can come apart: because top-down processing is knowledge and expectancy driving perception , two people can receive the same sensation and perceive it differently.

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Sleep runs in cycles of about 90 minutes , and a night of seven to eight hours includes about five cycles . Each cycle passes through non-REM stages and then REM. First, stage 1 is a transitional phase between wakefulness and sleep : breathing and heart rate slow . Next, in stage 2 the body goes into deep relaxation, with bursts called sleep spindles . Stage 3 is deep, slow-wave sleep, with low-frequency, high-amplitude delta waves , and it is much harder to wake someone in stage 3 than in earlier stages . Last comes REM sleep: in REM sleep brain waves are very similar to those when awake, and this is when dreaming occurs , and the voluntary muscles do not move during REM sleep . Then a new cycle begins.

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Trait theory describes personality as a set of traits, seen as relatively stable over time and consistent across situations . Allport listed thousands of English words that describe people , which he grouped as cardinal, central and secondary traits ; Cattell identified 16 factors of personality , measured by Cattell’s 16PF questionnaire . A strength is that a questionnaire turns personality into scores, so people can be compared and the results checked, and self-report questionnaires are easy to give and cost-effective . However, people may answer in ways that are more socially desirable, on purpose or not : a job applicant may present themselves as better than they are, so the scores lose validity. Trait scores also describe without explaining; traits can be treated as descriptions of behaviour that do not explain its cause . Even the number of traits is disputed: Cattell’s 16 factors may be too broad and Eysenck’s system too narrow . Trait questionnaires are useful for describing and comparing people, but should be used alongside other evidence.

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Reductionism is explaining something in terms of simpler or more fundamental parts : for example, explaining depression by neurotransmitters, or memory by separate stores. Holism is the view that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts , so behaviour has to be studied in the whole person, including their thoughts, relationships and culture, because a system has properties as a whole that its parts do not have .