Revision Tips For Aqa "a" As, Unit 2, Chapter 8: Biological Psychology

At the request of my students, I have decided to dedicate the next few blogs for tips and tricks in revising for exams. We're all done with our lessons and now there are only a few short weeks before their exams are administered and all hopes hang on passing them with flying colours.

To which I must confess, studying has personally never been one of my strongest study tips. I learned how to study very late in my academic career. It wasn't until my final year of university and through my post-graduate studies I really had to work hard at remembering information. Up until that, for me, it was as easy as remembering things you like anyway. Like how a football fanatic can remember the off-sides rule, I just remembered social psychology like a sponge. I didn't have to study until. biology.

Which is where we are today. Today I am going to focus on AS level and next week on A2.

1. How do nerves communicate stress-related information to the brain?

This can be tricky. It's a process that exists in the nervous system that is firstly hard to remember and then hard to explain.

First, an electrical impulse, begins on the dendrite. This becomes the action potential. The action potential then travels along the axon where it reaches the end of the cell. There it finds the axon terminal button. The action potential pushes out of the button a Neurotransmitter that jumps the synaptic gap where it is received by the post-synaptic receptor. This changes the chemical nature of the post-synaptic membrane, recreating the action potential, and sending the electrical charge onto the next neuron. Information carries on like this from nerves, to the spinal cord and finally to the brain.

That's a mouthful! So how can you remember all that? Remember, use pneumonic devices. This is where you create sentences that help you recall the information more easily. Because this answer happens to have a lot of key required vocabulary, I remembered it this way:

Do All Acting Bears Not Give Perfect Performances?

The first letter of each word is the keyword of the process:

Dendrite Action Potential Axon Button (Terminal) Neurotransmitter Gap (Synaptic) Post-synaptic receptor Post-synaptic membrane

Using silly sentences is a great way to remember long, complicated processes that need to be explained later. Remember, being able to recall all the key words accounts for several marks in itself! Then if you can use them together, you're all set for a top score. Use this technique every time you have a process or large amount of information you need to recall later.

2. Explain Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS; 1956).

Again, this is easy because of the acronym which Selye used for his stages: ARE.

Stage 1: Alarm - A stressor is preceived by the pituitary-adrenal system and the sympathomedullary pathways are activated. Activates fight-or-flight.

Stage 2: Resistance - If the stressor persists, the body`s response systems maintains activation with levels of stress-related hormones and bodily arousal remaining high.

Stage 3: Exhaustion - Long periods of stress (chronic stress) eventually exhausts the body`d defence systems. This is the stage stress-related illnesses develop.

It might be trickier remembering the details of the stages rather than the stages themselves. Practice with flashcards or mind-mapping/brainstorms to remember the details. Also, don't forget to always list the year of the study!

3. Outline and evaluate research into the effects of stress on the immune system.

There is a lot of research out there! I recommend two things when it comes to recalling random research; first, learn the easiest and second, learn 3 studies for a B and 5 for an A (it's a bit like presenting food, things look best in odd numbers). Sound hard? Not really. I just said you had to learn five. I never said they couldn't be five researchers who all report the same results.

i. Kiecolt-Glaser et al. (1984) found that exam stress reduced immune function, making medical students potentially more vulnerable to illness and infection. The effects are more noticeable in students who are isolated. Kiecolt-Glaser et al. repeated these results on carers of Alzheimer's patients, showing that this group takes longer to heal (1995) and has reduced immune function (1991). The same can also be said for women currently in divorce proceedings (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 1994).

Did you just see that? I just cited four studies, and all with the same name. It really is that easy. That being said, if you double-up on studies, have three distinctly different ones to balance it out.

ii. Cohen et al. (1993) concluded life stress and negative emotions reduces the immune system, leaving people less able to resist viral infection. iii. However, meta-analysis by Segerstrom and Miller (2004) disagrees with Kiecolt-Glser and Cohen, suggesting instead that only chronic stress affects immune function, not acute stress in their exploration of global immunosuppression.

While these studies will definitely see you through your exam question, it is also worth remembering that full marks will go if you remember weaknesses in the studies.

iv. It is worth mentioning though, that all of these studies measured used correlational analysis. Because correlation is not causation, a general weakness regarding downrelulation studies is that it is impossible to tell if high levels of stress causes downregulation or if downregulation attributes to high levels of stress. Moreover, there is inconsistency in whether stress should be measured against illness outcomes or killer T-cell counts. Last, results from one specific career like medical students, nurses or carers, cannot be generalised as relevant for the whole population.

Remember, there are general tricks to studying for the exams. I recommend mind-mapping to all my students, using both acronyms and pneumonic devices to remember lists and processes.

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