AQA A Level Psychology Paper 2: Psychology in Context June 2024 question paper 7182/2

Describe the ego and superego according to the psychodynamic approach.

Outline Wundt’s method of introspection.

Outline one example of how neurochemistry influences behaviour.

Karishma has very low self-esteem, even though she achieved very high GCSE grades. She would like to be a lawyer. Although she is studying A-levels, she has delayed her application to university because she does not think she will receive any offers. She does not think she is clever enough to study law.

Explain why a humanistic psychologist would suggest that Karishma is not displaying congruence.

Explain how a humanistic psychologist might help Karishma to achieve congruence.

Outline how behaviourists explain learning through the process of operant conditioning.

Compare operant conditioning with social learning.

Which two of the following statements about the fight or flight response are FALSE ?

Shade two boxes only.

The fight or flight response involves:

A a decrease in the release of adrenaline.

B an increase in the rate of respiration.

C the flow of blood being diverted from the surface of the skin.

D the parasympathetic division being in control of functioning.

E the process of digestion being inhibited.

What are hormones? Give an example of a hormone other than adrenaline and outline its function.

A psychologist conducted a case study of a patient who had difficulty sleeping.

Briefly explain one ethical issue the psychologist would need to consider in this study.

Discuss research into the effects of endogenous pacemakers and exogenous zeitgebers on the sleep/wake cycle.

A researcher wanted to investigate the types of play parents engaged in with their children. Ten children and one parent of each child took part in the study. The researcher asked each parent to keep a diary for a month about the types of play their child engaged in.

Is the diary primary or secondary data? Justify your answer.

Explain how the researcher could have used content analysis to analyse the parents’ diaries.

The researcher was concerned about the reliability of the content analysis.

How might the researcher have assessed the reliability of the content analysis in this study?

The researcher decided to interview some of the parents about their child’s play.

Explain why the data collected from the interview might have improved upon the data collected from the diaries.

In the interview the researcher collected some qualitative data.

Write one question that could be used in the researcher’s interview that would produce qualitative data.

Identify one limitation of qualitative data.

The researcher noticed age-related differences in the types of play mentioned in the diary

entries. They designed an experiment to investigate the differences in play choices between 2-year-old and 4-year-old children.

The researcher carried out the study using children from two local nursery schools. There were 30 children of each age group at nursery A. There were 20 children of each age group at nursery B. All parents gave informed consent for their children to take part in the study. The researcher used stratified sampling of the nurseries. Ten 2-year-olds and ten 4-year-olds took part in the study.

Each child was observed for 15 minutes during playtime in an area of the nursery where they could choose to play with building blocks, a sandpit and a slide. The researcher recorded how long each child spent playing with each activity.

Explain how the researcher could have obtained informed consent from the parents for this study.

Identify the type of experiment used in this study. Justify your answer.

Explain how a pilot study could be carried out to improve this study.

There were 30 4-year-old children at nursery A and 20 4-year-old children at nursery B. The researcher used a stratified sample of 10 4-year-old children for the study.

Explain how the researcher might have obtained the stratified sample of 4-year-old children from the two different nursery schools.

The researcher calculated averages for the time (in minutes) spent in the sandpit for each

age group. The results are shown in the table below.

Table 1 Average time in minutes spent in the sandpit for the two age groups

Identify the type of distribution shown in the data in Table 1 for each age group. In each case justify your answer.

What do the mean values in Table 1 suggest about play preferences in 2-year-old and 4-year-old children? Justify your answer.

The researcher decided to use an unrelated t-test to analyse the raw data from the study on sandpit play.

Explain three reasons for this choice in the context of this study.

The calculated value of t was 3.576

For this study degrees of freedom (df) = 18

Table 2 Extract from table of critical values of t

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

With reference to the critical values in Table 2 above, explain whether or not there was a significant difference between the two age groups at the 5% level of significance.

Referring to the critical values in Table 2, explain why the researcher is very unlikely to have made a Type I error.