Sociocultural factors influence the etiology of abnormal behaviour to a significant extent, particularly for disorders such as depression, but they are rarely sufficient as a complete explanation on their own. In psychology, etiology refers to the causes or origins of a disorder, and a sociocultural explanation focuses

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change its structure or function in response to experience, learning, injury or environmental demands. One clear example is spatial learning in the hippocampus: repeated use of certain cognitive skills appears to strengthen the neural networks involved in those skills. T

One cognitive process whose reliability has been widely debated is memory. In psychology, reliability refers to the extent to which a cognitive process produces accurate and consistent representations of events. Memory is often treated as unreliable because it is reconstructive rather than reproductive: people do not r

Childhood trauma can be defined broadly as adverse experiences such as abuse, neglect, deprivation or institutionalisation that overwhelm a child’s capacity to cope. Psychological research suggests that such trauma can affect both cognitive development, for example memory, language and IQ, and social development, for e

Cultural factors have a major impact on both the reliability and the validity of diagnosis, because diagnosis is not simply the detection of symptoms but the interpretation of behaviour through a diagnostic framework. Reliability refers to consistency, for example whether different clinicians would give the same diagno

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a brain-imaging technique used to investigate how biological factors are related to behaviour by measuring changes in blood oxygenation in the brain. More specifically, it detects the BOLD signal, or blood-oxygen-level-dependent response, on the assumption that more activ

Cultural dimensions influence human behaviour to a significant extent because they provide shared value systems that shape what people see as appropriate, desirable and socially rewarded. In psychology, culture can be understood as the set of norms, beliefs and practices shared by a group and transmitted across generat

Stereotyping can be defined as the assignment of generalised beliefs about the characteristics or behaviour of members of a social group. In the sociocultural approach, stereotypes matter not simply because they are beliefs, but because they can shape what people actually do. One important effect is that negative stere

Emotion influences memory to a considerable extent, but not in the simple sense that emotional memories are more accurate. In cognitive psychology, the key distinction is between the subjective reliability of memory and its objective reliability. Emotional events are often remembered with greater vividness, confide

Memory models are simplified representations of how information is encoded, stored and retrieved. Two influential models are the Multi-Store Model (MSM) proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin and Baddeley and Hitch’s Working Memory Model (WMM). Although both attempt to explain short-term remembering, they differ sharply in

A stereotype is a generalised belief about the characteristics of members of a social group. In sociocultural psychology, stereotypes matter because they do not simply describe groups; once activated, they can shape how people think, remember and perform. One important effect of stereotyping on behaviour is stereotype

Biological factors influence the understanding of social responsibility to a significant extent, but they do not provide a complete explanation. Social responsibility here includes both prosocial behaviour, such as helping and sharing, and bystanderism, where people fail to help. The debate is therefore not whether bio

Emotion can be defined as a complex psychological state involving physiological arousal, cognitive appraisal and subjective feeling. One cognitive process strongly influenced by emotion is memory, especially the encoding and retrieval of autobiographical events. A common claim is that highly emotional experiences produ

Cognitive biases reduce the reliability of thinking and decision-making because they create systematic, predictable errors in judgement. In psychology, thinking refers to the mental processes involved in manipulating information, while decision-making involves selecting between alternatives. A cognitive bias is therefo

Social cognitive theory (SCT) explains human behaviour as the result of an interaction between cognitive factors, behaviour itself, and the social environment. Rather than seeing people as passive products of reinforcement, Bandura argued that individuals learn by observing models and by mentally representing what they

Biological and sociocultural factors interact to a considerable extent in the etiology of disorders, and depression is one of the clearest examples of this interaction. A purely biological account is reductionist because it assumes that genes or neurochemistry are sufficient causes. Equally, a purely sociocultural expl

Stereotyping can be defined as the cognitive process of assigning beliefs or expectations to people on the basis of group membership. Although stereotypes may appear to be simply mental shortcuts, they can have clear effects on human behaviour. Two especially important effects are, first, that stereotypes can impair th

Cultural dimensions are broad value patterns that vary across societies and shape behaviour, cognition and social interaction. In psychology, the best-known framework is Hofstede’s model, including dimensions such as individualism versus collectivism and power distance. Research on cultural dimensions is valuable becau

Enculturation is the process by which individuals learn and internalise the norms, values and behaviours of their culture. In psychology, studies of enculturation are often concerned with how cultural practices are transmitted across generations and how this shapes cognition and behaviour. Two useful studies are Odden

One cognitive process whose reliability has been widely debated is memory. In psychology, reliability refers to the extent to which a memory is accurate, consistent and resistant to distortion. The cognitive approach generally does not treat memory as a literal recording of the past; rather, it is often reconstructive,

Research on the prevalence of psychological disorders is valuable because it shows how common a disorder is in a population, but it is also difficult to interpret straightforwardly. Prevalence is not simply “how many people have a disorder”: researchers may measure point prevalence, period prevalence or lifetime preval

Altruism is difficult to explain because it appears to involve helping another person at a cost to oneself, yet many behaviours that look altruistic may still contain hidden benefits. This creates a central debate between biological explanations, which see altruism as ultimately adaptive, and psychological explanations

Cognitive biases are systematic errors in thinking that affect judgement and decision-making. They are often linked to the use of heuristics, which are mental shortcuts that allow people to make fast judgements with limited cognitive effort. This can be explained by dual-process models of thinking: System 1 is fast, au

Biological and cognitive factors both offer important explanations for altruistic behaviour, but neither on its own is sufficient. The key issue is that altruism appears, on the surface, to involve helping others at a cost to oneself, yet psychologists debate whether such helping is ever truly “purely” altruistic. Biol