PSYC30022: Trends in Personality & Social Psychology

15% short paper, 35% lab report and 50% exam.

I'd say this is the second most difficult subject I've done in completing my psych major. Nick Haslam (coordinator) mentioned how he's changed the name of the subject before in a bid to increase the number of students signing up for it but still, it remains the least popular 3rd year psych elective (approx. 50 students!). Not sure if it has anything to do with the perceived difficulty, but I know someone who swapped to Applications of Psychology after failing to understand the first two lectures. That said, it's a highly enjoyable subject that covers very interesting (and downright odd) concepts. I'd definitely not recommend it for those after a relaxing breadth though. Applications in Psychology is an easier alternative.

Nick Haslam takes the first three lectures. He covers personality disorders and their various conceptions as mapped onto different sorts of models (categorical vs dimensional vs prototypical), psychological essentialism and its implications for prejudice in various domains, and dehumanization, as captured in various forms (animalistic vs mechanistic, experience vs agency denial etc). I found his part easily the most interesting, especially since I've long recognized the validity of having animal/robot forms of dehumanization and it's nice that his research provides an empirical basis for my rather absurd theory.

Elise Holland takes the fourth lecture. She does research on objectification, and her lecture covers what is meant and denied by objectifying women. It's a fairly new area that's informed by work done in other aspects of social psychology.

For the fifth lecture, we had IIona McNeill, who covered human decision making as involving cognitive biases/processes and emotions. She also went on to describe unconscious thought theory, the idea that thinking without attention on the decision at hand results in more satisfactory outcomes. So yeah, cool stuff.

Jennifer Boldero takes the sixth lecture. You learn about how standards and goals govern self-regulation and also, get a more in-depth understanding of regulatory focus/mode that builds on the second year social/personality psych stuff.

Finally, Luke Smillie is in charge of all the personality part of the subject, thus, the last six lectures. He has an excellent sense of humour and you'll soon forgive the 4.15-6.15pm lecture timing. In general, you'll learn all about the Big 5 trait model in describing personality, its various forms of stability (ipsative, individual, mean-level and rank order), the neurobiological substrates/mechanisms of these traits and how motivation and emotions work together in determining goal progress through feedback loops. His lectures definitely require quite a bit of effort to 'get' the cohesive big picture, so I'd recommend attending and understanding every segment well.

Our 750 words short paper was on comparing and contrasting two approaches in conceptualizing personality disorders. This was due quite early in the semester and quite manageable overall. There's a slight challenge of having to use (a maximum of) five references, which requires you to suss out only the good stuff for referencing.

The 1750 words lab report was extremely challenging, nightmarish even. Very little guidance was provided, even though the method and results section were already written up for us (thank god!). We were required to understand 8 ethnic/racial group stereotypes in terms of a list of descriptors and their relationships as mapped onto the Stereotype Content Model and to see if the animalistic and mechanistic forms of dehumanization offered incremental validity beyond the SCM. Also, there was an Ascent scale measure of blatant dehumanization that we were required to interpret in tandem with our findings. The real challenge was in making sense of the (very puzzling) correlation and multiple regression statistics and then deriving suitable hypotheses from them! If not for the fact we didn't have to do the typical method/results sections, I'd say this is too challenging as a third year assignment.

The 2 hours exam consisted of 48 MCQs (4 from each week) and 2 compulsory short answer questions (set by Nick and Luke). As if to make up for the difficult subject matter and atrocious lab report, the exam questions were reasonably straightforward. There were much worse that could have come up but did not, and I'm thankful for that. Know the major concepts/theories well and do the practice questions and you should have no problem here.
Overall, a very interesting but difficult subject, and definitely worth it if you're after learning some pretty novel/cool stuff that expands on what's covered in 2nd year personality/social psych. Steer clear if you're after an easy breadth or easy elective as a psych major!

Yes, with screen capture.

Nick Haslam, Luke Smillie, Jennifer Boldero, Elise Holland and IIona McNeill

Nope, but sample short answer and MCQ questions provided closer to exam.

5 of 5

None.

1 X 2 hours of lectures each week and 6 X 2 hours of tutorials (as a hurdle requirement, you can only miss one) across the semester.

2015, Semester 2

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