24 topics
Psychology help, starting with how the studies actually work
Ice cream sales and drowning deaths rise together every summer, and no amount of extra data will make ice cream the cause. Psychology courses look like content to memorise, but the marks concentrate in research methods and statistics, where a study you can describe perfectly still gets misread because the design does not support the claim being made about it.
Where students get stuck
I can recite "correlation is not causation" but I can't use it
Turn it into three specific challenges you run on any correlation. First, reverse causality: could the effect be the cause? Low mood and poor sleep correlate, and each genuinely drives the other. Second, the third variable: something else may be causing both, which is what summer heat is doing to ice cream and swimming. Third, coincidence in a large search space: test enough pairs of variables and some will correlate by chance. The only design that buys a causal claim is random assignment to conditions, because randomisation distributes unknown third variables evenly across groups. When a study is correlational, write your conclusion in association language and say what the confound would be.
I mislabel the variables and lose easy method marks
The independent variable is the one the researcher manipulates or selects, and the dependent variable is the one measured as an outcome — the DV depends on the IV, which is where the name comes from. The step most students skip is operationalisation: stating precisely how each variable is measured, because "aggression" is not a measurement while "number of times the participant pressed the loud-noise button in five minutes" is. Then check for confounds, meaning any variable that changes systematically with the IV. If the experimental group is tested at nine in the morning and the control group at four, time of day is a confound and the study cannot separate it from the treatment.
Classical and operant conditioning blur together
Ask where the important stimulus sits relative to the behaviour. In classical conditioning it comes before, and the learner is passive: a neutral stimulus is paired with something that already produces a reflex until the neutral stimulus produces it alone. Pavlov's bell precedes the food, and salivation is elicited. In operant conditioning the consequence comes after, and the learner is acting: behaviour that is reinforced becomes more frequent and behaviour that is punished becomes less. The single most common error is treating negative reinforcement as punishment. Negative reinforcement removes something unpleasant and therefore increases the behaviour — taking painkillers stops the headache, so you take them again.
I don't really know what p < .05 means
It is the probability of getting a result at least this extreme if the null hypothesis were true. Read that carefully, because it is not the probability that your hypothesis is correct, and it is not a measure of how large the effect is. A trivial difference will reach significance in a sample of fifty thousand, and a substantial one can miss it in a sample of twenty, which is why effect size and confidence intervals belong in your write-up next to the p-value. This is also the honest way into the replication crisis: running many analyses and reporting only the significant one makes the .05 threshold meaningless, which is what pre-registration was designed to prevent.
What's covered
Psychology topics you can work through with a tutor, generate practice on, or turn into flashcards and a study plan.
Research methods and statistics
- Experimental, correlational and observational designs
- Sampling, random assignment and control groups
- Reliability, validity and operational definitions
- Descriptive statistics, distributions and effect size
- Ethics: consent, deception and debriefing
Biological bases of behaviour
- Neurons, synapses and neurotransmitters
- Brain structures and localisation of function
- The endocrine system and the stress response
- Sleep stages and circadian rhythms
- Sensation, perception and perceptual illusions
Learning, memory and cognition
- Classical and operant conditioning
- Schedules of reinforcement and observational learning
- The multi-store and working memory models
- Forgetting, retrieval cues and eyewitness testimony
- Heuristics, biases and problem solving
Development and social psychology
- Attachment and Piaget's stages of cognitive development
- Adolescent identity and moral development
- Conformity, obedience and the bystander effect
- Attribution, attitudes and cognitive dissonance
- Prejudice, group dynamics and social identity
Disorders and treatment
- Classification systems and the limits of diagnosis
- Anxiety, mood and psychotic disorders
- Biopsychosocial explanations of disorder
- Cognitive behavioural and biomedical treatments
Psychology questions
Is this a substitute for talking to someone about my own mental health?
No, and it will not act as one. This is academic support for a psychology course — the theory, the studies, the methods and the exam answers. If you are struggling with something in your own life, talk to someone qualified: a school counsellor, your doctor, or a local crisis line. Studying disorders is not the same as being treated for one.
There are hundreds of studies and I cannot keep the names straight.
Stop learning them as names. Build flashcards keyed to what each study demonstrates, because exam questions ask you to evidence a claim, not to recall a surname in isolation. Once a study is filed under the effect it shows, the name comes back with it, and the arcade games built from your own notes make that drilling less tedious than a list.
Can it check the method section of my own research assignment?
Yes. Share the draft and it works through it against the rubric, flagging where a variable is not operationalised, where a confound is uncontrolled, or where your conclusion claims causation that the design cannot support. That last one is the most common cut on student reports.
Stuck on psychology right now?
Talk it through out loud, share your screen, and watch it worked out step by step on a whiteboard.
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