Articles
Study guides & reading lists
In-depth guides, exam prep, and recommended literature for psychology students — mapped to university curricula and exam expectations.
Study Guides
In-depth guides and exam prep articles written for university students.
Social Psychology: Course Goals and Exam Preparation
Knowing what Milgram found is the starting point, not the destination. What KI's learning outcomes actually require: the ability to apply findings to new scenarios, evaluate methodology, and connect individual studies to broader theoretical frameworks.
Key Concepts in Social Psychology
Conformity isn't the same as obedience. Attribution errors aren't the same as the fundamental attribution error. The distinctions matter — and getting them right is half the mark. Covers social influence, attribution theory, and group dynamics with exactly that level of precision.
Five Theories, One Emotion: A Comparative Guide
What is an emotion, exactly? Depends who you ask. James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer, Lazarus, and basic emotions theory each give a different answer — and all are partial. Know where they agree, where they clash, and which studies settle the disputes.
Six Approaches to Psychology: A Comparative Guide
Structuralism gave way to functionalism, then behaviourism took over, then cognitivism pushed back. Understanding why each approach emerged is the fastest route to coherent comparison answers — and to seeing psychology as a single ongoing argument rather than a list of schools.
Memory Models and Forgetting: From the Multi-Store Model to Retrieval Failure
The multi-store model, working memory, levels of processing, interference, cue-dependence — memory research has produced more models than consensus. What you need for exams: the key studies in sequence, the live disputes between them, and the answers that score.
Understanding Other Minds: Theory of Mind, Perspective-Taking, and the Mirror Neuron System
How do you know what someone else is thinking? Theory of mind, mirror neurons, and perspective-taking each give a different answer — and the evidence behind each is more contested than most textbooks let on. Here's how to write about it without overstating the science.
Three Theories of Cognitive Development: Piaget, Vygotsky, and Baillargeon
Children aren't just small adults. Piaget showed us why, Vygotsky complicated it, and Baillargeon's research upended what we thought we knew. Here's how to keep the three frameworks straight and use them precisely in your writing.
Nervous System Organisation and Neural Communication
Every psychology topic eventually bottoms out in neural hardware. Get the divisions of the nervous system, action potentials, and synaptic transmission right — and a whole curriculum of interconnected topics starts to click into place.
The Endocrine System: Glands, Hormones & the Stress Response
Two axes, one body, endless exam questions. Get the SAM and HPA systems straight — what each releases, how fast, and what chronic activation does — and a whole cluster of adjacent topics starts to make sense.
How to Study Stress in Psychology
SAM or HPA? SRRS or Hassles Scale? Type A or hardiness? Stress research is full of competing explanations for the same outcomes. A navigation guide through the landscape — and to the studies examiners will expect you to know cold.
How to Study Language in Psychology
Where in the brain does language live? How do children crack the code without being taught? Does the language you speak change the way you think? Three contested questions, each a reliable exam topic — covered here with the studies and debates that decide them.
Recommended Reading
Curated reading lists and university literature mapped to course curricula.