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Speaking of nature and nurture, there is a three part series starting this week on BBC 1, called The Making of Me. It looks at three well known people - the hurdler Colin Jackson, the violin virtuoso Vanessa Mae and the gay star of Torchwood, John Barrowman - and asks ‘What made these people, was it their genes or was it events during their childhood which determined their unusual skills and attributes’? The first programme is on Thursday 25 July. If you are reading this in September you might still be able to pick the programmes up on BBCi or try psychclips.

Nature - the great outdoors, trees, sky, flowers, water - has a psychological and physiological effect which can help lower stress levels; at least that is what researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated. They had student participants who completed quite difficult mental tests. During these tests some had a view of trees and grass through the window, whilst others had the same view but on a huge plasma screen. The students were also linked up to heart monitors. All the students glanced up at the real life or televised view, but those with the real view through windows lowered their heart rates, which relate to their stress levels, the most.

So why don’t we all try and get a glimpse of the natural world, especially if we are working hard, anxious or worried, generally stressed, and see if this can help us manage our stress better?

As you are probably aware, there’s always been a debate concerning whether or not psychology is a science - indeed this has been a topic on second year essay papers for years -  but a while back the QCA messed up everyone’s chances of getting any discussion points on that question, by making a declaration that yes, psychology was a proper science after all …..

I got quite excited about this for a while - at last I could look at  ’hard’ scientists in the chemistry department with my head held high… but being a real scientist has got a bit boring lately. It turned out all it meant was a new A03 skill on the exam papers :- criticising research methods, which was something we’d all been doing for years anyway.

However, I cheered up when a few days back I got an email about this site, which has everything I need to kit myself out with a proper psychological scientific research lab: sinister one-way mirrors, lie-detectors, goggles that make your perception go all wonky, weird little roller things that measure your sensitivity to pain and…. best of all…. a bobo doll:

No fake electric shock generators yet…. but I’m sure they’ll get some back in stock soon…

I just noticed there’s a Freud quiz appeared in the digital resources section of this site. On the surface it appears to be a straightforward tickbox exercise encouraging contemplation of the strengths and weaknesses of his  approach to the treatment of mental disorders - however, like all good psychoanalytic research, there’s more to it than that: Like the psychodynamic model of the mind, it works on two levels, and the seemingly random or pointless aspects of the task are often the most insightful:  In this case, once you’ve answered the questions and thus completed the rational ’surface’ or ‘manifest’ aspect of the activity, you can then click on the handy drawing tool and scrawl pictures of Batman all over the page - thus allowing a valuable insight into the darker hidden thoughts and wishes of your unconscious mind…. this being , of course, where all the true action takes place in Freudian theory…

 Tell you what, save the pics (press ‘print screen’ on your keyboard and paste into a document) send ‘em in and maybe we’ll have ourselves a little online psychodynamic gallery / therapy session….?

I feel less stressed already…. you can tell I’m supposed to be doing something else can’t you? ….. (I think this is what Freud termed ’displacement‘ …)

We contacted Donald Meichenbaum, the man who developed Stress Inoculation Training (SIT), to get permission to use his photograph in the latest edition of The Complete Companion. He asked to receive a copy of the finished book and has written to use saying ‘Please send my congratulations to the authors Mike and Cara. The book is engaging and informative. I appreciate the attention they have devoted to my work on Stress Inoculation Training (SIT).’ However he did also point out that one of our criticisms might be a tad unjustified. We suggest that one disadvantage of SIT is that the treatment takes a long time. He says, in fact, it has been applied successfullty in as short as one hour in helping medical patients prepare for surgery and for cardiac catherization examinations. He further points out that one of the streghts of SIT is its adapatability to meet the varying demands of populations. Finally he mentions his own website which you may find interesting.

I know this is supposed to be about the new exam and all that….. but my new ‘Advice on Approaches Questions’ podcast is now up… with added backbeats (heh..)

(More podcasts for paper 5 here….. sadly lacking in beats though )

 Good luck if you’ve got an exam next week!

We are getting lots of visitors to this site and would really like to make it as useful as possible (within the bounds of our capabilities!). So tell us what kind of things you’d like to see in this blog - more news-type items? More activities for students? Exam-focused stuff? Things for teachers? Things for students? You can write a comment here or send an email to us psychcompanion@folensblogs.com

Check out the sample (free) digital resources to go with the AS book - click on the tab for digital resources. The full set of resources will be available in the coming academic year.

Since Stanley Milgram first published his classic study on obedience an enormous number of people have offered comments and reinterpretations of his work. Perhaps the most recent come from Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher (famous for their adaptation of Zimbardo’s prison study). Haslam and Reicher suggest that there are several problems with the concept of the agentic shift. For example, how does this explain why subjects were less likely to obey in the run down office? Logically we might expect an increased agentic state (and higher obedience) because the relative authority of the experimenter was greater in a less prestigious environment.  

Haslam and Reicher use a different explanation – social identity theory. They argue that the degree to which we obey someone depends on the extent to which we identify with them. The more you identify, the more you obey. They use this to explain Zimbardo’s experiment and also the obedience of guards in the Second World War. They may have been ordinary people (as Hannah Arendt proposed) but the reason for obedience was less to do with an agentic shift and more because they identified with the Nazi movement and believed it to be right.

The importance of this interpretation is that it may lead us to understand obedience to unjust authority better, in terms of identification rather than lack of autonomy.