AQA A Level Psychology Paper 2: Psychology in Context June 2017 question paper 7182/2

A recent study showed that Alzheimer’s disease may be partly inherited.

John’s father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. John is keen to get genetically tested to see if he will develop Alzheimer’s disease.

Explain why John’s genotype will not reveal whether he will suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.

Describe the structure of the personality according to the psychodynamic approach.

Tatiana’s parents are concerned about her mobile phone use. She is an anxious child and has low self-esteem. Tatiana only feels good about herself when she receives messages or positive comments on social media. She feels safe when she has her phone and socially isolated without it.

Tatiana’s parents worry that her dependence on her mobile phone is starting to affect her well-being and achievement at school.

Outline and evaluate the humanistic approach. Refer to Tatiana’s behaviour in your answer.

Explain the process of synaptic transmission.

Lotta’s grandmother suffered a stroke to the left hemisphere, damaging Broca’s area and the motor cortex.

Using your knowledge of the functions of Broca’s area and the motor cortex, describe the problems that Lotta’s grandmother is likely to experience.

Lotta worries that because of her grandmother’s age she will not be able to make any recovery.

Using your knowledge of plasticity and functional recovery of the brain after trauma, explain why Lotta might be wrong.

A researcher wants to investigate the effectiveness of physiotherapy in the recovery of stroke patients with brain damage. Carers of stroke patients will be sent questionnaires to produce quantitative data.

Explain one disadvantage of obtaining quantitative data in this study.

Write one question that could be used in the researcher’s questionnaire to produce quantitative data and one question that could be used in the researcher’s questionnaire to produce qualitative data.

Quantitative question:

Qualitative question:

Outline and evaluate one or more ways of studying the brain.

A psychologist wanted to test whether listening to music improves running performance.

The psychologist conducted a study using 10 volunteers from a local gym. The psychologist used a repeated measures design. Half of the participants were assigned to condition A (without music) and half to condition B (with music).

All participants were asked to run 400 metres as fast as they could on a treadmill in the psychology department. All participants were given standardised instructions. All participants wore headphones in both conditions. The psychologist recorded their running times in seconds. The participants returned to the psychology department the following week and repeated the test in the other condition.

Identify the type of experiment used in this study. Shade one box only.

A Laboratory

B Natural

C Quasi

D Research

Identify the operationalised dependent variable in this study.

The results of the study are given in Table 1 below.

Table 1 Mean number of seconds taken to complete the 400m run and the

Explain why a histogram would not be an appropriate way of displaying the means shown in Table 1.

Name a more appropriate graph to display the means shown in Table 1. Suggest appropriate X (horizontal) and Y (vertical) axis labels for your graph choice.

What do the mean and standard deviation values in Table 1 suggest about the participants’ performances with and without music? Justify your answer.

Calculate the percentage decrease in the mean time it took participants to run 400 metres when listening to music. Show your workings. Give your answer to three significant figures.

The researcher used a directional hypothesis and analysed the data using a related t-test. The calculated value of t where degrees of freedom (df) = 9 was 1.4377. He decided to use the 5% level of significance.

Table 2 Table of critical values of t

Calculated value of t must be equal to or greater than the critical value in this table for significance to be shown.

Give three reasons why the researcher used a related t-test in this study and, using Table 2, explain whether or not the results are significant.

What is meant by a Type II error? Explain why psychologists normally use the 5% level of significance in their research.

Identify one extraneous variable that could have affected the results of this study. Suggest why it would have been important to control this extraneous variable and how it could have been controlled in this study.

The report was submitted for peer review and a number of recommendations were advised.

Describe the process and purposes of peer review.

People’s perception of how they spend their time at the gym is often not very accurate. Some spend more time chatting than on the treadmill. A psychologist decides to observe the actual behaviour of an opportunity sample of gym users at a local gym.

Explain why it is more appropriate for the psychologist to use an observation than a questionnaire in this case.

Design an observational study to investigate how people spend their time at the gym.

In your answer you will be awarded credit for providing appropriate details of:

type of observation with justification

operationalised behavioural categories

use of time and/or event sampling with justification

how reliability of data collection could be assessed.