PSYC30012: The Unconscious Mind

10% Take Home Short Answer Questions, 45% Essay, 45% Final Exam.

Overall I did enjoy this subject, I took it as my breadth which was probably not the best choice considering most people choose bludgey breadths whilst I chose a third year subject (silly me). But the topic really interested me, and I think the teaching approach of the subject was quite interesting. Each lecturer focussed on a different aspect of the unconscious mind, e.g. neuroscience, history/freudian theories, neuropsychology, social psychology, marketing, clinical psychology and ethics. No topic was taught for more than 2 weeks, the lecturers regularly rotated which was good. I really enjoyed Dr. Fine's lectures on marketing and ethics, as well as Dr. Carter's neuroscience lectures and also Assoc Prof. Boldero's lectures on social psychology.

The coordinator Prof Haslam is a top bloke and was constantly answering questions on the discussion board and was really approachable. He was just filling in for Prof. Kashima, who normally coordinates the subject and you're lucky he does because he gives out the short answer questions before the exam! My year wasn't as lucky, as Prof Haslam didn't think it was appropriate to give them out before the exam, which is fair enough I also thought it was kinda strange but heck I wasn't gonna complain. Although I do see why they were given out beforehand, I felt like most of the short answer questions could have been better answered by researching proper research articles.

A major disadvantage was that we had no practice questions whatsoever, all we knew is that there would be 48 multiple choice questions (4 per lecture) and 6 short answer questions. The exam ended up being quite fair I thought, there were a few tricky multiple choice but the hardest part was definitely short answer as the questions were quite broad so it was hard to know exactly what they wanted you to discuss.

The tutorials were completely pointless, I think it's hard though to run tutorials for a subject like this because every week the topic is completely different and the tutors were generally only experts in one field (mostly social psych). So they didn't really know that much when it came to advanced neuroscience, clinical, history and marketing lectures. There was also a lot of assigned journal articles and each tutorial we would need to go through them, these were extremely difficult to read as they were describing quite advanced concepts and ideas.

The final essay was worth 45% and is 2000 words, so if you did poorly it'd be a real uphill battle to salvage a good mark. This was really worrying because psych tutors are generally quite frugal with giving out high scores on essays, they'll take marks off wherever they can. There's two topics provided by each lecturer so there's 14 topics to choose from. I chose to do mine on the marketing topic as the lecturer was great and I think there was heaps to discuss. The topics did vary in difficulty but it was good to have the option of writing on whatever area you liked best.
I would recommend this subject to others but I will say that you definitely need to have some prior experience with psychology otherwise it will require a lot of work to keep up. I did like the fact that many different specialities were combined to give you many different perspectives on the role of the unconscious mind. Some I enjoyed more than others but I think this approach was quite good. If you're looking for an easy subject then definitely stay away, it requires quite a bit of work as the concepts described are quite advanced and it's not all multiple choice assessment in the final exam like second year subjects. All in all, a rewarding subject that definitely gives you a new perspective on how our mind operates.

Yes, with screen capture.

Prof Haslam, Dr. Carter, Prof Macmillan, Prof. Saling, Assoc Prof. Boldero, Dr. Fine, Assoc Prof. Hulbert.

No past exams and no practice questions were given beforehand!

4 Out of 5

There is no textbook.

1 X 2-hour lecture per week, 1 X 2-hour tutorial per fortnight.

2012 Semester 1

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