How Can A-Level Psychology Improve Your Other Subjects?

Emma is a qualified Psychologist and A-Level Psychology tutor with a First-Class Honours degree in Psychology and real-world professional experience as a psychotherapist. Having taught hundreds of students to understand and actively apply psychological principles to their own thinking and performance, she brings a depth of subject knowledge to her tutoring that goes well beyond the specification.

Here, she reveals how four areas of the AQA Psychology course contain practical strategies that can transform the way any student approaches revision and exams.

Applying Psychology Content to Help Boost Exam Performance

By Emma | Psychologist and A-Level Psychology Tutor | Sherpa Tutor

Hidden in plain sight within the AQA A Level psychology specification are all the tools you need to maximise your chances of achieving success (in all your exams and in life).  

As a Psychology student, you have an advantage if you actually apply the content you learn to your revision and exam techniques, effectively removing the psychological traps that hold people back and trip them up in exams.

If you’re preparing for the AQA course, working with an experienced A-Level Psychology tutor can help you apply these ideas effectively. 

As an actual psychologist as well as a psychology tutor with Sherpa, I have taught hundreds of people to understand how to actively control their brains to direct outcomes in their lives instead of being a passive passenger. 

Where to look in the Psychology spec:

1. Social Influence

Locus of Control (Rotter, 1954) is discussed in relation to resistance to social influence and is a concept that measures how much a person believes they are in control of their life or how much they believe their life is influenced by external factors. 

Take IQ, for example: someone with an external Locus of Control (LoC) may believe that there isn’t much they can do about their exam results; it will depend on their IQ and ‘successful, intelligent’ people have high IQs. 

People with an internal LoC believe that how hard and smart they work and how they apply themselves are bigger influences than an IQ number. 

The reality is LoC is not an internal vs. external dichotomy; it’s measured on a continuum, with you in control of the slider. You can choose to take control of your destiny - read on to learn exactly how you can do that.

2. Memory

It’s no surprise that the topic of memory holds a couple of ‘keys’ to doing well, but it might be a surprise that it’s not necessarily about making things stick in long-term memory.

A. Context-dependent cues

There are both external (environment) cues and internal (emotional state) cues that, when matched in rehearsal and recall, give you the best chance of remembering what you’ve revised when it matters. 

However, students often mismatch these states. They study and revise in their bedroom, relaxed and perhaps listening to music, but when it comes to the exam, they’re expecting their brains to recall in a hall, with other people around, under pressure.

As the exams get closer, you can recreate exam conditions by putting yourself in a formal environment such as a library and completing exam papers in timed conditions - familiarise your brain with the conditions it will encounter when it’s expected to recall, whether you’re revising for GCSE Psychology or A-Level.

B. The effects of anxiety on eyewitness testimony

Yerkes-Dodson law’s inverted-U hypothesis argues that some anxiety is the optimal internal state for both memory and recall, so don’t fear anxiety - use it. The argument is based on attention: if your attention is too low - for example, you’re not really that bothered - then your brain doesn’t necessarily put whatever you’re learning high enough on the priority list to become consolidated into long-term memory. 

You know how this works; the more you’re interested in something, the easier it is to learn about it. At the other end of the scale is, again, attention. If you have so much anxiety, your attention is grabbed by whatever your brain thinks is the crisis, emergency, or danger, making you hypervigilant to any perceived threat. This time, instead of your exam content not making the priority list, it becomes swamped by threats. 

So, the secret here is to create enough importance around your subjects to care, but not so much that anxiety takes over and becomes fixated on things irrelevant to your exams. Understanding more about how anxiety affects your exams can be viewed through the lens of biopsychology, which overlaps with topics you may meet in A-Level Biology.

3. Clinical Psychology & Mental Health

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality (brain scanning technology has helped establish this fact), so what you decide to believe will shape your reality. 

Henry Ford (of cars) famously said, “If you think you can or you think you can’t - you’re right”. You need to consider the cognitive explanation for depression to understand this further. Beck’s Triad Theory proposes that negative self-schemas, cognitive distortions, and the negative triad (negative thoughts about yourself, the world, and the future) are causes of depression. 

Typically, people with depression will believe ‘they can’t’, so they don’t; friends are fed up with them, so they socially withdraw; they don’t feel like it, so they procrastinate - self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words:

How you think → determines how you feel → which determines how you behave

Furthermore, your brain will only listen to the object in question, so if you tell it: “I’m going to panic” or “I can’t fail” - guess what? Your brain will hear ‘panic’ and ‘fail’, so you must understand the importance of only focusing on the object in question and aim high. When you give your brain an instruction without any ambiguity or doubt, your actions will automatically follow those instructions. You MUST tell your brain what you want and not what you don’t want.

So, if you want to achieve a B, decide you’re going to get an A. If you miss the A and get a B, you will still be OK, but if you tell yourself you want a B and you miss that, then there’s no safety net. Aim for the stars.

4. Biopsychology

Finally, in biopsychology you learn all about the fight-or-flight response, but people rarely connect it with their own response and even less so recognise that it is a positive response intended to put you in the best possible physiological state for optimal performance. 

The fight-or-flight response begins with how you think and, although it is entirely natural to have some nerves on the day of your exam, how you respond when you feel the adrenaline kick in will direct how your brain performs. Top sportspeople and performers know this and use it to give themselves an advantage.

Adrenaline is a good thing - not least because it sharpens your focus and concentration. That’s a good thing in an exam situation, so when you feel it - those butterflies in the pit of your stomach - welcome it, lean into it, be excited, and channel it in a positive way because it is there to help you. Do not be scared of it, or the fear will overwhelm you and affect recall. So, smile when you feel it - you’re ready.

I am living proof this works; these strategies became part of my life when I learned how the brain works as a psychotherapist and, as a result, I have been able to achieve whatever I’ve set my mind on. 

In particular, when I was studying for my bachelor’s degree in psychology as a mature student, I would sit on the top step outside my front door whenever I took a break from studying and imagine opening the envelope with my results, stepping into the emotion and feeling the pride in achieving a first-class honours degree - guess what result I achieved.

Apart from how fascinating Psychology is, if you’re open to listening beyond what it teaches you, you can learn skills that will take you in any direction you choose.