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Flashcards · 9685 · A Level Topic 3

Unit 3 – Advanced Topics and Research Methods 2 (A Level) flashcards

26 cards on A Level Topic 3, subtopics 3.3.1 to 3.3.3. Pick a subtopic or study them all.

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3.3.1 Psychology of Sleep

Circadian vs infradian vs ultradian rhythm
Circadian: about 24 hours (sleep/wake cycle). Infradian: longer than 24 hours (menstrual cycle). Ultradian: shorter than 24 hours (the roughly 90-minute cycle of sleep stages).
Endogenous pacemaker
Internal clock; mainly the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus.
Exogenous zeitgeber
External cue that resets the clock; mainly light, also meals and social routines.
What did Siffre (1962) find in a cave?
Alone in a cave for about two months without time cues, his sleep/wake cycle continued but free-ran slightly over 24 hours.
Why is flying east harder than flying west?
Flying east needs a phase advance (making the clock earlier), which is harder; flying west needs a phase delay, which is easier. Recht et al. (1995) found baseball teams flying east did worse.
Slow-wave sleep vs REM sleep
SWS (NREM stages 3 and 4): deep sleep with delta waves, linked to body restoration. REM: rapid eye movements, waking-like EEG, muscle paralysis and vivid dreams.
Evolutionary vs restoration explanations of sleep
Evolutionary accounts explain why sleep evolved (safety, saving energy). Restoration theory explains what sleep does, e.g. Shapiro et al. (1981) found more SWS after runners completed a 92 km race.
What did Plihal and Born (1997) find about memory consolidation?
SWS-rich early-night sleep helped memory for facts, while REM-rich late-night sleep helped a motor skill.
Narcolepsy and cataplexy
Narcolepsy is a disorder of sudden, uncontrollable sleep episodes. Cataplexy is a sudden loss of muscle tone, often after strong emotion. Narcolepsy with cataplexy is linked to reduced hypocretin (orexin).
How do personality and genetics explain insomnia?
Personality factors such as neuroticism and worry act through hyperarousal, which blocks sleep. Genetic factors are many small-effect variants shown by family, twin and genome-wide studies.

3.3.2 Schizophrenia

Positive vs negative symptoms of schizophrenia
Positive: experiences added to normal experience, such as hallucinations and delusions. Negative: normal abilities reduced or lost, such as speech poverty and avolition.
Avolition
Severe loss of motivation to start and sustain goal-directed activity.
Reliability vs validity of diagnosis
Reliability: consistency of diagnosis between clinicians or over time. Validity: whether the diagnosis identifies a real, distinct condition. Cheniaux et al. (2009) found schizophrenia diagnosed more often under ICD-10 than DSM-IV.
What did Hilker et al. (2018) find in Danish twins?
Concordance for schizophrenia was 33% for MZ twins and 7% for DZ twins, with heritability estimated at 79%. MZ concordance far below 100% shows environment also matters.
Original vs revised dopamine hypothesis
Original: excess dopamine activity (hyperdopaminergia) causes symptoms. Revised (Davis et al., 1991): low prefrontal dopamine (negative symptoms) plus high mesolimbic dopamine (positive symptoms).
What is Frith's dysfunctional thought processing explanation?
Faulty metarepresentation (failing to recognise thoughts and actions as one's own, e.g. hearing voices) and faulty willed action / central control (difficulty starting and monitoring deliberate behaviour).
Typical vs atypical anti-psychotics
Typical (e.g. chlorpromazine): first-generation D2 blockers, mainly for positive symptoms, risk of tardive dyskinesia. Atypical (e.g. clozapine): act on dopamine and serotonin, generally fewer movement side effects; clozapine risks agranulocytosis.
What did Kane et al. (1988) and Jauhar et al. (2014) find about treatments?
Kane et al.: 30% of treatment-resistant patients responded to clozapine against 4% to chlorpromazine. Jauhar et al.: CBT had a small effect overall, very small on negative symptoms.

3.3.3 Research Methods 2

Content analysis
Indirect study of behaviour through material people produce, by coding it into categories.
Test-retest vs inter-observer reliability
Test-retest: the same test given to the same people on two occasions and the scores correlated. Inter-observer: two observers record the same behaviour separately and their tallies are correlated.
Face vs concurrent vs predictive vs ecological validity
Face: the measure looks right. Concurrent: agrees with an established measure taken at the same time. Predictive: scores predict a later outcome. Ecological: findings generalise to real-life settings.
Type I vs Type II error
Type I: the null hypothesis is rejected when it is true (false positive), more likely with too lenient a level. Type II: the null is accepted when it is false (false negative), more likely with too strict a level.
Which test: unrelated design, interval data? Related design, ordinal data?
Unrelated design, interval data: unrelated t-test. Related design, ordinal data: Wilcoxon. (Matched pairs count as related.)
Which test: related design, nominal data? Correlation, ordinal data?
Related design, nominal data: Sign test. Correlation, ordinal data: Spearman's rho. (Rating scales are ordinal.)
When must the calculated value be ≤ the critical value to be significant?
For Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon and the Sign test. For tests with an "r" in their name (Spearman's rho, Pearson's r, chi-squared, t-tests), the calculated value must be ≥ the critical value.
What are the sections of a scientific report?
Abstract (short summary at the start), introduction, method, results, discussion (interpretation, limitations, applications) and referencing.

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