AQA A-Level Psychology: Approaches in Psychology — Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, in the style and at the standard of the examination. They are not reproduced past-paper questions — examination boards hold copyright in their own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available free from your board.

Related: Approaches in Psychology revision notes

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Section A — Short answer

1. Outline the key difference between classical and operant conditioning. [3]

2. Explain what is meant by “vicarious reinforcement” in social learning theory. [2]

3. State the three parts of personality proposed by the psychodynamic approach, in the order they develop. [3]

4. Identify one defence mechanism and briefly describe how it protects the ego from anxiety. [2]

5. What is meant by “self-actualisation” in the humanistic approach? [2]

Section B — Application

6. A young child sees an older sibling praised by their parents for sharing a toy, and the child begins sharing toys more often afterwards, even though the child was never directly rewarded. (a) Identify the approach that best explains this behaviour. [1] (b) Using the four mediational processes, explain how the child’s behaviour changed. [6]

7. A researcher wants to compare the cognitive approach and the biological approach as explanations for why some people are more vulnerable to depression than others. (a) Outline what each approach would highlight as the likely cause. [4] (b) Explain one way the two approaches differ in terms of the nature–nurture debate. [3]

Section C — Extended writing

8. “Discuss the extent to which the humanistic approach can be considered a genuinely scientific approach to psychology, using at least one other approach as a point of comparison.” [12]

9. Compare the behaviourist approach and the psychodynamic approach in terms of determinism and the type of evidence each relies on. [8]

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Worked answers

1. Classical conditioning is learning through association — an unconditioned stimulus is repeatedly paired with a neutral stimulus until the neutral stimulus alone produces the response [1]. Operant conditioning is learning through consequences — behaviour is shaped by reinforcement (positive or negative) and punishment [1]. The key difference is that classical conditioning creates an automatic association between stimuli, while operant conditioning is driven by the outcome that follows a voluntary behaviour [1].

2. Vicarious reinforcement is when an observer sees a model’s behaviour being rewarded [1], and this increases the likelihood that the observer will imitate that behaviour themselves, without having been personally reinforced for it [1].

3. Id (present from birth) [1], Ego (develops in early childhood) [1], Superego (develops around age 5) [1].

4. Repression — pushing a distressing memory or thought out of conscious awareness entirely so the person is not consciously aware of it [2]. (Denial or displacement, correctly described, would also gain full marks.)

5. Self-actualisation is reaching one’s full potential [1], the innermost layer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which can only be reached once more basic needs (such as physiological, safety, and esteem needs) have been met [1].

6. (a) Social learning theory [1]. (b) Attention — the child must have attended to and noticed the sibling’s behaviour and its consequence [1–2]. Retention — the child must have stored a mental representation of the sharing behaviour and the praise that followed [1–2]. Motor reproduction — the child must be physically capable of performing the sharing behaviour themselves [1]. Motivation — seeing the sibling praised (vicarious reinforcement) gives the child an expectation of similar reward, motivating them to imitate the behaviour [1–2]. Full marks require all four processes named and applied specifically to the sibling scenario, not defined generically.

7. (a) The cognitive approach would highlight faulty or negatively biased information processing — for example, distorted thinking patterns or maladaptive schemas that make some people interpret events more negatively [2]. The biological approach would highlight genetic vulnerability or neurochemical imbalance — for example, lower levels of serotonin, or genes inherited from a parent with depression [2]. (b) The cognitive approach leans more towards nurture, since thinking patterns and schemas are seen as learned from experience over a person’s life [1–2], whereas the biological approach leans towards nature, since it explains vulnerability through inherited genes and innate neurochemistry that exist independently of a person’s experiences [1].

8. A strong answer defines “scientific” (objective, falsifiable, using controlled and replicable methods) and applies this standard directly to the humanistic approach: it deliberately rejects lab-based and reductionist methods in favour of studying the whole, subjective person, making its central concepts (self-actualisation, congruence) difficult to operationalise or test directly — a weakness from a strictly scientific standpoint, though humanistic psychologists would argue this trade-off is justified by the richness and real-world relevance of the resulting insight. Comparing this explicitly against the biological approach (highly scientific: uses brain scans, twin studies, controlled experiments, produces falsifiable and replicable findings) earns the strongest marks, since the question specifically asks for a point of comparison rather than an isolated evaluation of humanistic psychology alone. A balanced conclusion should weigh the trade-off between scientific rigour and holistic, meaningful insight rather than dismissing the humanistic approach outright.

9. Behaviourism is hard determinist — all behaviour is the product of prior reinforcement history, with no role for choice — and relies on controlled laboratory evidence, largely from animal studies (Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats and pigeons), generalised to humans. The psychodynamic approach is also broadly determinist (psychic determinism — behaviour is driven by unconscious conflicts the person cannot control), but relies on very different evidence: case studies of individual patients (such as Freud’s case studies), which are rich in qualitative detail but difficult to generalise or test scientifically. Both approaches therefore agree that behaviour is not a matter of free will, but disagree sharply on evidence type — one favours objective, replicable experimental data, the other favours idiographic, in-depth case material that is harder to verify or generalise. A strong answer states this shared determinism explicitly before contrasting the evidence types, since the question rewards an explicit comparison on both named dimensions rather than two separate descriptions.