Some Ideas for Coursework Projects

Some ideas for coursework projects

Relationships

·  Analyse personal adverts: male/female

·  Analyse personal adverts: gay vs straight

·  Body shape and ideals for men and women

·  Are team sport players more outgoing than individual sport players?

·  Gender differences in estimates of attractiveness of male and female clothing

Biopsychology

·  Music beats and pulse rates or perception of room temperature

Conformity

·  Smarties into a jar. Guess the number of Smarties and see whether the estimate changes when the average is known. Conformity effect.

·  Position in classroom and interaction with teacher observation.

·  Questionnaire with ticks already added or not. To see whether knowing most people believe one thing you are likely to also agree. Conformity

·  Men and women drivers going through amber/red traffic lights

·  Conformity – estimating the price of a car with other estimates on the sheet

Obedience

·  Obedience and surroundings psychology office vs. canteen. Give a maths test with a large area on the question paper labelled do not write in this space

Perception

·  Changing a single descriptive word and perception of a person

·  Criminal profile with picture (scruffy ugly vs neat beautiful) and length of sentence.

·  Two sports teams rate each other’s play. Tajfel

·  Emotional language on questionnaire to see whether this causes a change in attitude. Ties in with leading questions as in Loftus & Palmer.

·  Contextualising title and ambiguous passage.

Rewards

·  Sport offering extrinsic rewards vs intrinsic to see whether this affects performance

Memory

·  Colour of background and memory

·  Music and study, to see whether music distracts you when you study

·  Emotional language on questionnaire to see whether this causes a change in attitude. Ties in with leading questions as in Loftus & Palmer.

·  Memory for pictures made out of shapes. Coloured in or not.

·  acoustically similar or dissimilar words lists when testing short-term memory

·  Leading question “when Darth Vader severed/removed Luke’s hand did you see any blood?” Show movie clip.

·  Cue dependent learning two different rooms

·  Noticing a gorilla during a foottball match whilst concentrating on passing or not

·  Memory for everyday coins – gender differences

Emotion

·  Identification of emotional facial expressions males vs. females

Motivation

·  Self esteem/locus of control and motivation Internet tests

Abnormality

·  Gender differences and attitudes towards abnormality

Stress

·  Differences in stress smokers vs. non-smokers

·  Differences in stress and sleep

·  Correlation stress levels and exercise

The Stroop Test

·  The Stroop Test using numbers. Also using words associated with colours. Colour backgrounds with colour words in black (name colour) or neutral words

·  Age and Stroop