Edexcel A Level Psychology Paper 1 June 2025 question paper 9PS0/01

In your studies of social psychology, you will have learned about the British Psychological Society (BPS) code of ethics and conduct (2009).

Describe two ethical guidelines from the British Psychological Society (BPS) code of ethics and conduct (2009).

Mr Jennings is a teacher who was instructing a group of 15 students to line up quietly in a queue during lunchtime in the school canteen. All of the students, except one, did as they were asked.

Using social impact theory, state two reasons why 14 out of 15 of the students followed Mr Jennings’ instruction.

Explain one weakness of social impact theory.

Evaluate realistic conflict theory as an explanation of prejudice.

In your studies of cognitive psychology, you will have learned about the multi-store model of memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968).

State two features of the short-term memory store as it is used in the multi-store model of memory.

Jenny investigated the influence of semantic similarity on the accuracy of recall from long-term memory. She gathered 20 participants and used an independent groups design:

• Condition A: Participants were shown 30 semantically similar words.

• Condition B: Participants were shown 30 semantically different words.

Both groups were given an interference task of counting backwards from 500 for two minutes, and then asked to write down as many words as they could recall.

Jenny’s results are shown in Table 1.

State the fully operationalised dependent variable (DV) from Jenny’s experiment.

Using the data in Table 1, draw a bar chart to represent the data from Jenny’s experiment.

Title

Colin wanted to investigate long-term memory damage. He decided to conduct a case study on a patient with long-term memory damage who had been involved in a motorcycle accident. The patient is no longer able to make new episodic memories but she is able to make new semantic and procedural memories.

Colin has used several experiments to test the patient’s long-term memory skills. He has also gathered qualitative data from notes he has made from observing her interactions with family and friends. Colin conducts an unstructured interview with the patient once a week.

Explain one strength and one weakness of Colin using a case study to investigate long-term memory damage.

Strength

Weakness

Leoni struggles to process information during lessons at college. She finds it difficult to note down information from the board before the teacher moves on to a new topic. Leoni gets embarrassed when she is asked a question by the teacher as she is unable to give an answer quickly.

At home, Leoni forgets to complete tasks that her parents give her. Her mum had asked her to go to the shop for ten items for making dinner, but Leoni forgot two of the items.

Leoni is also learning to drive but is finding it very hard to manage to respond to what she sees in the driving environment and change gears at the same time. Her driving instructor gives her directions about where to turn, but Leoni often misses the turn as she struggles to process the directions of left and right fast enough.

Discuss how the working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974) can explain Leoni’s processing of information.

You must make reference to the context in your answer.

You will have learned about one of the following contemporary studies in biological psychology:

• Li et al. (2013)

• Brendgen et al. (2005)

• Van den Oever et al. (2008)

State one finding of your chosen contemporary study.

Chosen study

Explain one weakness of your chosen contemporary study.

Chosen study

Mandy is investigating whether there is a relationship between time spent outdoors and quality of sleep. She used a volunteer sampling technique to gather her participants from her university campus.

The students were required to complete a questionnaire to state how many hours they had spent outdoors in the previous week. They also had to give a self-rated score for quality of sleep, with 0 being very poor sleep and 10 being excellent sleep.

Describe how Mandy could use a volunteer sampling technique to gather participants for her investigation.

Mandy analysed her results using Spearman’s rho.

State two reasons why Mandy used Spearman’s rho to analyse her data.

Explain one improvement that Mandy could make to her investigation.

In your studies of biological psychology, you will have learned about an adoption study.

Evaluate one adoption study you have learned about in biological psychology.

As a child, Petunia loved cats. One day, when she was playing in her garden a cat scratched her arm, frightening her. This caused Petunia to develop a phobia of cats.

Identify the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and the neutral stimulus (NS) for Petunia’s phobia.

Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

Neutral stimulus (NS)

Spencer is 12 years old, and his brother Mark is 16 years old. Spencer watched Mark wash their mum’s car and receive £5.00. The next time Mark was asked to wash his mum’s car, Spencer asked if he could help Mark. Mark showed Spencer how to wash one of the wheels with the sponge and soapy water, and then Spencer washed the other three wheels of the car.

Spencer helped Mark wash the car several times. One day, Spencer was asked by his mum if he would like to wash the car on his own. Spencer washed the car and received £5.00.

Describe how social learning theory could account for Spencer learning to wash the car.

Rahul conducted an observation to investigate whether car size affects driving behaviour. He collected data from observing cars on a nearby road.

Rahul stood near a sign which displayed the speed of cars approaching the sign. He recorded whether the car was driving above or below the speed limit and also whether the car was a large car (5 doors) or a small car (3 doors).

The results from Rahul’s investigation are shown in Table 2.

Complete Table 3 to calculate the chi-squared test for Rahul’s investigation. You must give your answer to two decimal places.

Chi-squared (χ²)_........

Rahul had a one-tailed (directional) hypothesis with df = 1 and used p = 0.025 as his level of significance.

Determine whether there was a significant difference between the speed at which the large and small cars were being driven.

Assess whether systematic desensitisation is an effective treatment for phobias.

Discuss the practical issues you considered in the design and implementation of your learning theories practical investigation.

Evaluate whether social and cognitive psychology can be considered scientific.