1. The biological approach to psychology is to do with how our inherited genetics and the evolution of humans affect how a person thinks, feels and behaves.
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3. Albert Bandura is a Canadian psychologist who is known for his social learning theory. Bandura supports social psychology; people’s surroundings and upbringing affect their actions.
Bandura carried out an experiment involving Bobo Dolls.
The aim of the experiment was to investigate the social learning theory and to find out if young people would imitate aggressive behaviour from a role model. 72 participants took part, 36 boys and 36 girls, 2 adult models were involved in the experiment, one male and one female.
Bandura set up 3 conditions, condition 1 involved a group observing an aggressive model. Condition 2 involved a group observing a non-aggressive model and condition 3 involved a group observing a control group with no model.
Group 1 and 2 were then divided into 4 groups, so 6 boys and 6 girls both observed a same-sex model and 6 boys and 6 girls observed an opposite-sex model.
In stage 1, the children were taken to rooms individually which contained some toys, a mallet and the Bobo doll and was joined by a model. The non-aggressive model played with the toys and ignored the Bobo doll. The aggressive model acted aggressively towards the Bobo doll.
In stage 2, after 10 minutes the child was taken from the room and taken to another room containing attractive toys, the child could play with the toys for only 2 minutes.
In stage 3, the child was taken to a different room, which contained toys that were seen as aggressive, such as a Bobo doll, mallet and a dart gun, and also toys that were seen as non-aggressive, such as a tea set and plastic animals.
The children’s behaviour was observed and recorded every 5 seconds, using three categories.
The results of this experiment was that Bandura was able to see that the children who had witnessed aggressive behaviour towards the Bobo Doll imitated more aggressive behaviour towards the doll, than the children who had not witnessed the aggressive behaviour. Also the experiment showed that boys were the ones that imitated more physical aggressive acts than girls and were more likely to imitate the same-sex model.
From this experiment Bandura concluded that there is strong evidence that children are likely to copy behaviour that they see other people carrying out.
In my opinion Bandura’s findings are not applicable for today regarding media violence because many children do watch violence on tv and games, but not all of them go out and copy these actions they see.
The methods that Bandura used are ones that showed what he was aiming to show, so I don’t think there is anything that he could have done differently to make the experiment better.
4. Cognition literally means knowing, so cognitive psychologists focus their study on internal processes, such as perception, attention, language, memory and thinking.
The Multi-Store Model is the explanation that memory has 3 separate stores, sensory memory store, short-term memory and long- term memory. Each store has a specific capacity of