Sadaf- Psychology: Unit 3 and 4

These notes include every point of the 2023 study design explained in great detail, accompanied with explanatory images and diagrams that upcoming students will find very helpful in understanding, breaking down and making use of the information needed for both these assessments and exams. Includes: Nervous system functioning: • Roles of different subdivisions of the central and peripheral nervous system (in responding to, and processing and coordinating with sensory stimuli received by the body to enable conscious and unconscious responses, including spinal reflexes) • Role of neurotransmitters in the transmission of neural information across a neural synapse to produce excitatory effects (as with glutamate) or inhibitory effects (as with GABA) compared to neuromodulators (dopamine and serotonin) that have a range of effects on brain activity • Synaptic plasticity- resulting from long term-potential and long-term depression, which together act to modify connections between neurons (sprouting, rerouting and pruning) as the fundamental mechanism of memory formation that leads to learning Stress as an example of psychobiological process: • Internal and external stressors causing psychological/physiological stress response, including flight-fight-freeze response in acute stress and role of cortisol in chronic stress • Gun-brain axis (emerging research with reference to interaction of gut microbiota with stress and nervous system in control of psychological processes and behaviour) • Explanatory power of General Adaptation Syndrome as biological model of stress (alarm reaction- shock/countershock, resistance and exhaustion) • Lazarus and Folkman’s Transactional Model of Stress and Coping to explain stress as a psychological process (primary and secondary appraisal only) • Strategies (approach and avoidance) for coping with stress and improving mental wellbeing, including context specific effectiveness and coping flexibility.  How do people learn and remember? Approaches to understand learning: • Behaviourist approaches to learning (classical conditioning- before, during after) that results in involuntary association between NS and UCS to produce CS + Operant conditioning (antecedent, behaviour and consequence) involving reinforcement (positive/negative) and punishment (positive/negative) • Social-cognitive approach to learning- observational learning (attention, retention, reproduction, motivation and reinforcement) • Approaches to learning that situate learner within the system (Aboriginal ways of knowing where learning is viewed as being embedded in relationships where the learner is part of the multimodal system of knowledge patterned on country) Psychobiological process of memory: • Atkinson-Shiffrin multi store model of memory (encoding, storage and retrieval of stored memory information in sensory, short term and long term memory stores • Brain- hippocampus, amygdala, neocortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum in long erm implicit and explicit memory • Role of episodic and semantic memory in retrieving autobiographical events and in constructing possible imagined future, including evidence from brain imaging and post mortem studies of brain lesions in people with Alzheimer’s disease and aphantasia. • Use of mnemonics (acronym, acrostics, method of loci) by written culture to increase the encoding, storage and retrieval of information as compared to use of mnemonics such as sung narratives used by oral cultures including aboriginal people’s song lines)