Lesson 1  – Housekeeping  – each of you told me what and how you had revised over the half term holiday. We then discussed the necessity of staying ahead as we pile through the Sz topic. You should have already looked at the material on the blog for the Dopamine Hypothesis and Neural Correlates explanation for Sz.

I always assume that you know you are expected to read the PHG text book and visit the links etc from the digital version. I should not need to remind you to do this for every topic we cover.       If you have not done this I suggest you do so ASAP. 

This lesson we recapped Rosenhan’s study as well as the CNS, Endocrine System and the neuron and synaptic transmission.

Your drug boxes were excellent …well done for taking the time to do this activity 🙂

Ensure you have read the relevant section of the PHG by tomorrow as we will work through at a cracking pace 🙂

Lesson 2 and Lesson 3 – We went through the dopamine and neural correlates explanations for Sz. See power points on previous blog. These explanations are not complex, however there are a few brain areas you need to learn the names of.

Check you have completed the activities in your PHG study pack exercises 8.1-8.6

Check you have also read your course companion too (useful for evaluation and wider understanding). I also emailed you a Sz pack which you may be finding helpful too.

At this point in the year I suggest you start to think about how you can ‘work smart rather than working hard’. You know by now that you may well be required to evaluate the biological explanation for topics like offending behaviour; Sz;  OCD; and Gender.

TOP TIP: When you evaluate a biological explanation you can develop a generic argument that can be tailored to the specific topic. If you stick to evaluating the methodology – using twin studies, brain scans, animal research, drug research etc you can apply this to nearly everything.

Likewise, you can evaluate the biological explanation using issues and debates like: determinism vs freewill; reductionism vs holism; nomothetic vs idiographic; nature vs nurture.

Once you have created an effective argument for taking or not taking a biologiccal approach to explaining behaviour, you will have massively improved your chances of getting into the top marking level 🙂

Lesson 4-5  – Psychological explanations for Sz and psychological treatments. IMO, this is more complicated than the biological explanation. This measn you will need to simplify the explanations so they make sense to you.

Here is an interesting article to read about mothers and Sz

Psychological explanations 2019

Prep

Prepare for this timed question for next Tuesday. I will be taking in your answer to this question on Tuesday, but I am also asking that additionally, you reduce the answer to some bullet points (no more than 5). I will then allow you to use the bullet points to support you during the timed activity. In other words you are going to write this essay twice. Once for prep and once in timed conditions.

Discuss biological explanations for schizophrenia.

 (16 marks)

Additionally  – you will need to read ahead to the Psychological treatments for Sz. I will be asking you to prepare and make a presentation on these next week. We will do this on Monday because we can all use the computers that lesson.:)