What do students need to know about the biology of schizophrenia? – dopamine hypothesis and neural correlates

Revised textbook pages

There does seem to be some confusion over what students need to know about the biology of schizophrenia and whether the ‘dopamine hypothesis’ and ‘neural correlates’ are separate topics. AQA have decided that they are and should be taught separately. We have now amended the text for the one relevant spread in the Complete Companion (Dog book) […]

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What we did on our holidays

Evie with puppy

The summer is generally a quiet time in A level psychology after the hectic academic year that’s just finished but this year is different. At OUP we are feverishly working on high-quality resources for the new specification and now even our cover stars are producing their own ‘resources’. Yes, the big news is that Evie, […]

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Results Day…

We hope it all went well and you got the results you wanted. Remember, its all because of your ability and effort. Mind you, if it didn’t…well, you can always blame your parents, after all you are a product of their genes!

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How to be an exam superhero

Crazy as it sounds, psychologists have found that wearing a Superman t-shirt or a white coat can improve exam performance.  Professor Karen Pine, author of ‘Mind What You Wear’ suggests that what we wear can change the way we think and feel, a phenomenon known as ‘enclothed cognition’. If you have studied aggression, you may […]

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CBT under challenge

  Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) became part of the mainstream treatment for psychoses in 2002, when the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) endorsed it as the main psychological treatment for schizophrenia. In 2009, they further recommended that CBT be offered ‘to all people with schizophrenia’, repeating this endorsement in the latest 2014 […]

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Have a happy (or meaningful) Christmas

As someone why generally gets a little embarrassed receiving presents at Christmas, yet loves to give them, I was interested to read Baumeister et al.’s recent article ‘Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life’, published in the Journal of Positive Psychology. Baumeister and colleagues conducted an online survey with 397 adults […]

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