Psychology and English with Foundation Year

This module will introduce you to core areas and methods integral to the discipline and study of psychology. It will provide a historical and contextual backdrop to psychology as a scientific discipline, as well as a focus on research methodologies. This module will introduce you to the wonderful world of numberland, where you will embark on a quantitative journey through research methods and statistical techniques. It will equip you with the tools necessary to investigate questions you may have about human psychology, and to do it in a robust and scientific manner. It will explore aspects of research design, underpinnings of statistical theory, as well as core statistical techniques such as t-tests and correlation. It will analyse data using statistical software and interpret related output appropriately. This module will also provide an introduction to qualitative research methods, where you will be introduced to a range of applied qualitative methods in psychology, the core philosophical underpinnings of such techniques, as well as its relation to quantitative methods.

The module will provide you with an understanding of developmental psychology across the lifespan, exploring physical development, cognitive development, social and emotional development throughout childhood and later into maturity. You will gain a deeper understanding of the theories, themes and concepts in developmental psychology and appreciate that development continues throughout the lifespan and is influenced by a range of factors including class, culture, gender, ethnicity and heredity. In addition, you will learn about the current issues and methods involved in lifespan research, together with specific empirical studies that address developmental research questions and contemporary and cross-cultural developments that have emerged in the field.

This module will immerse you in the origins of psychology, with respect to early understandings of what psychology is (Plato; Aristotle), as well as the development and establishment of Psychology as a discipline in its own right. You will be introduced to the history of science and the Scientific Revolution, as well as corresponding developments in metaphysics and epistemology as manifested in The Enlightenment, and how this contributed to the emergence and shaping of psychology as an experimental science from which behaviourism and the cognitive revolution later emerged. This context will enable you to understand debates within psychology that concern it’s standing as a science and the differences in psychological research methodologies that accompany those debates. Focus on the historicisation of psychology will prompt you to evaluate your perceptions of Psychology and how you, and society understand and identify with it in both professional and personal settings. Furthermore, “classic” studies in psychology will be explored in reference to recent research that demonstrates issues with their findings, especially in the context of the current replicability crisis in Psychology.

This module introduces you to the literary-critical skills and approaches that are fundamental to the study of English. It will equip you with specialist analytical terminology and techniques while reinforcing and developing your existing skills of analysis. You will consider the construction of a range of texts drawn from different genres and literary-historical periods. Particular attention will be paid in taught sessions to the subject-specific research, planning and writing skills that you will need throughout your degree. Teaching will also support the development of digital skills in advance of the final assessment. You will develop your knowledge and skills through in-class discussion, directed research tasks and independent study. Some sessions will be explicitly student-led: you will be encouraged to read beyond the texts specified and asked to contribute questions for class discussion. University-level research skills will be embedded in taught sessions, with support from the Hub.

This module is an introduction to Gothic effects, such as suspense, mood, eeriness, the weird, fantasy and horror. It covers texts from the eighteenth century to the present to build students’ knowledge of the rise of the Gothic as well as its different manifestations in different genres and creative outputs, such as the novel, poetry and film. It also contextualises the Gothic by identifying its conventions, themes and motifs, such as the graveyard, the supernatural and monsters. Because of this module’s focus on Gothic as evoking effects, this module lends itself to psychological and sociological approaches and as well as links to key concepts and ideas explored on subsequent genre and period modules. Teaching pays special attention to the close reading of primary texts and the development of written skills in advance of the final assessment.

This module will equip you with the necessary skills to analyse and evaluate poetry. It empowers you to read, analyse, and discuss poems and lyrics by giving you the tools to express your responses to poetry by understanding technical features of poetic form and language. It will give you an idea of the breath and range of poetry in English by developing intertextual connections and recognising its relation to changing contexts. It engages in current debates about the nature and function of poetry, developing three main emphases: skills development, literary knowledge, and theoretical awareness. The module provides an introductory survey of poetry written in English that crosses centuries, poetic genres and forms, metre and rhythm. Its range embraces performance and political poetry, and musical lyrics, as well as written poetry, testing your knowledge through a practical form of assessment that connects visual, digital, and presentation skills.

This module studies Shakespeare’s timeless work and investigates the ways his texts are repeatedly rewritten and performed today. Over 400 years from his death the popularity of his work is not weakened; on the contrary his plays are read, studied, and performed all over the world both in English and in translation. His work is as relevant as ever and it is to be found in the richness of language expressions which still permeate the English language, and in intertextual connections found in multiple, diverse cultural, literary and artistic contexts all over the world. This module provides an introduction to Shakespeare’s range of work and its reception in his time, and a foundation in the use of plays as texts. You will engage in current debates about the nature and function of Shakespeare’s work by reading the work of the Elizabethan bard in relation to changing contexts through a range of production instances. This module emphases skills development, literary knowledge, and internationalisation. It assumes no prior knowledge or engagement with Shakespeare’s work. It provides an introductory survey of his oeuvre and a range of specific case studies by focusing on his plays, ranging from tragedy to comedy. You will reflect on the ways in which his humour, themes, and dramatic twists bridge the difference between age groups and cultures.

Personality and Individual Differences is a multifaceted module that covers the history, cornerstone theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches of personality research. The structure of human personality is examined using a trait-based approach, which is applied in a variety of sub-topics leading to a comprehensive understanding of how personality and individual differences influence thought and behaviour in different settings. The contributions of biological and environmental factors in the development of personality and individual differences, as well as associated controversies are also explored. You will consolidate your learning by utilising psychometric methods to design and run a quantitative study in an area of personality research of your choosing. Accordingly, this module helps to prepare you for your third-year dissertation module in providing experience of the research process, from design, gaining ethical approval, data collection and analysis to reporting and discussing findings.

This module will develop your knowledge and understanding of social psychology, one of the core areas of psychology introduced in Researching Psychology I. Social Psychology will engage you with the breadth and diversity of social psychology as a discipline from social constructionism and group processes through to social cognition, collective behaviour, and social interactions. The purpose is to help you gain a detailed understanding of how people think, feel and act in relation to others and the world around them. Key topics will engage you with the indexical nature of the discipline locating historical and contemporary research and theory within its broader socio-economic and cultural context.

This module will build and extend on core methods and statistical techniques acquired at level 4 in Researching Psychology I. You will develop knowledge and skills integral to advanced psychological research designs, including the use of quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques. Specifically, this module covers three research methods strands including experimental, psychometric, and qualitative methods. Statistical underpinnings and application of techniques relevant to experimental (e.g., One-way ANOVA, Factorial ANOVA) and psychometric-based research (e.g., Regression, Multiple Regression) are covered and directly extend methods learnt in Researching Psychology I. Additionally, you will develop applied methods skills by utilising specialist software such as SPSS for the analysis of quantitative data. A variety of qualitative approaches, methods and analyses will also be considered such as interviewing skills, diaries and photo elicitation, discourse analysis, polytextual thematic analysis and descriptive phenomenology.

This module is organised around key frameworks for the understanding of human and cultural identity; likely to include gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, subculture and social class. The exploration of such frameworks is supported by theoretical materials designed to introduce students to key literary and cultural concepts (such as ideology, patriarchy, heteronormativity, performativity, otherness, diaspora, and hybridity). Literary texts will be drawn from a variety of genres, periods, and cultures, and students will be required to identify, and reflect upon, the correlations between identity and its literary and/or aesthetic expression. Through both seminar discussion and the assignment tasks, students will be encouraged to adopt a pluralistic and comparative approach to the topic, crossing textual and discipline boundaries in their exploration of the interlaced operations of cultural classification and individual self-definition.

This module is organised around key frameworks for the understanding of human and cultural identity; likely to include gender, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, subculture and social class. The exploration of such frameworks is supported by theoretical materials designed to introduce students to key literary and cultural concepts (such as ideology, patriarchy, heteronormativity, performativity, otherness, diaspora, and hybridity). Literary texts will be drawn from a variety of genres, periods, and cultures, and students will be required to identify, and reflect upon, the correlations between identity and its literary and/or aesthetic expression. Through both seminar discussion and the assignment tasks, students will be encouraged to adopt a pluralistic and comparative approach to the topic, crossing textual and discipline boundaries in their exploration of the interlaced operations of cultural classification and individual self-definition.

This module offers you the opportunity to study popular literature as a specific field of literary and cultural production. It examines key concepts and theoretical issues relating to the popular, including its definition and relationship to genre writing, and the significance of production and distribution practices. The module addresses a sample of illustrative texts drawn from popular literary genres such as action-adventure, travel and life writing, romance, crime, sensation and historical fiction, fantasy, horror, and fan fiction. In addition to analysing the distinctive features of selected popular genres, you will examine the social and cultural contexts informing illustrative texts and evaluate their connections to, and articulations of, relevant cultural issues and debates.

This module examines literature written for children and young adults. It engages you with its history and recent successes and transformations and explores its diverse range of genres, such as fairy tales, fables, picture books, poetry, fantasy, and non-fiction. It provides knowledge and understanding of cultural and social contexts, origins of literary form as well as constructions and representations of childhood and youth. 

Teaching will pay particular attention to themes, such as suitability and creativity, gender and sexuality, childhood and adolescence, as well as a range of different theoretical approaches that deepens the study of literature written for children and young adults and about childhood and youth.

In recent years, women’s writing has emerged as a major influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. This module examines the impact of women in literature through a variety of literary forms and transnational parallels and contrasts. It highlights identity politics and the ways in which women have fought to change discriminations based on race, gender, class, age, and sexuality. By bringing together several themes other modules have introduced, this module strengthens your confidence in undertaking independent research. It equips you with increased research skills and resourcefulness in choosing their areas of specialist literary knowledge by exploring women’s writing by weaving a thread of critical enquiry determined by the significance of women’s contributions to literature. In doing so, it follows a chronologic trajectory, which acknowledges the origins of feminism, and an international perspective that encompasses a variety of diverse authors. It tests your knowledge through coursework that facilitates students’ choice and independent research skills.

This module offers a survey of the development of western drama from the late 19th century to the present day. You will be introduced to dramatists such as Ibsen, Brecht, Williams and Beckett, alongside key developments and debates in dramaturgical theory and practice. You will be required to think comparatively about theatrical style and ideological expression, relating approaches such as realism, expressionism and absurdism to thematic structures of cultural dissidence, moral subversion and political engagement. Individual plays will be considered as theatrical events as well as written texts so attention will also be paid to the specific theatrical and institutional contexts of individual works, and you will be examine visual and video materials relating to staged performances. Specialist workshop sessions will be scheduled to introduce and enhance the digital literacies required for the practical assessment.

The Dissertation requires you to work independently in producing a substantial piece of research that demonstrates mastery of academic knowledge and research skills commensurate with Level 6. You will draw on your existing repertoire of experience garnered over the course of the degree in the development of a report akin to a journal style article, representative of the discipline. You will initiate your research protocol as defined in the first semester module, Research Project Design, and subsequently manage participant recruitment, data collection, and data analysis in accordance with the BPS Code of Ethics and Conduct. The Dissertation should aspire to produce published articles in the discipline (corresponding to the subject topic). The design of the study should successfully address the research question such that data collection and data analysis provide meaningful insight into the identified gap in the literature. You are expected to thoroughly scrutinise the findings in relation to relevant theoretical and methodological issues and in doing so, produce a meaningful contribution to the literature.

This module focuses upon the BPS Core domain Biopsychology, covering aspects of the biological basis of behaviours, emotions and mental health. The module aims to provide an overview of how the sub-disciplines within biopsychology (e.g., neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience) approach psychological research questions. The module will support development of an in-depth understanding of neural conductance and major brain structures/systems to particular neurotransmitter systems as explanations of how the brain affects behaviour. The module aims to develop your understanding of the anatomical and physiological processes that underpin psychological experience whilst exploring the methodologies used to examine contemporary issues in biopsychology. To achieve these aims, the module will enable you to critically examine how contemporary biopsychological models are developed and evaluate these as explanations for behaviour using key examples (e.g., emotions, memory and learning, drugs and addiction and mental health disorders). This module promotes the application of multiple perspectives (including knowledge gained of other domains in previous years) to critique biopsychological theory and to critically appraise information, using evidenced based reasoning.

This module develops knowledge and understanding of the BPS core domain of Cognitive Psychology which you will have been introduced to at level 4 in Researching Psychology I. Throughout this module, there will be discussion and critical evaluation of a range of different cognitive psychological constructs (e.g., processing resources, attention, memory, language) as a toolkit for theorising mental functioning. You will critically engage with core constructs in cognitive psychology, associated methodologies and key perspectives (for example cognitive neuropsychology, neuroscience, fundamentals of the experimental method). Throughout the module, the use of computerised experimental paradigms will be explored, which underpin theories. For example, you will have the opportunity to engage with classical experimental paradigms or paradigms with a cognitive basis such learning, memory and problem-solving computerised tasks, within workshop sessions. The module aims to showcase the breadth of approaches to understand cognitive processes whilst critically engaging you with relevant associated methodologies. You will have opportunities to engage in a variety of cognitive experiments to facilitate your understanding of key topics and experimental approaches.

The module provides an opportunity for you to build upon and apply the key intellectual, transferable and practical skills gained at Levels 4 and 5 of the programme in order to design an appropriate research project for your Psychology dissertation. Throughout the module a series of lectures, seminars and workshops will further develop your research design skills in experimental, quasi-experimental, surveys and/or qualitative research methods. In addition, you will develop a critical understanding of ethical challenges associated with carrying out psychological research leading to the development of a research project that adheres to the British Psychological Society’s Code of Ethics and Conduct (2018) and Lincoln Bishop's Research Ethics Committee standards.

This module offers a final opportunity for you to extend your critical engagement with modern writing through an examination of some of the most significant writers, movements, and innovations in literature since the end of the second world war. Through a variety of genres and literary forms, the module will examine divergent representations and responses to this unsettling period, from disillusioned expressions of national or political decline to progressive visions of renewal through cultural hybridity and reinvention. Central strands of investigation will likely include: challenges to realism and aesthetic experimentation; the rise of apocalyptic imaginaries and the arrival of the Anthropocene; multiculturalism and globalisation; and the deconstruction of self and subjectivity. Lectures and seminars will test and enhance the literary-critical skills acquired in your first and second through an engagement with relatively complex literary works, contexts and theoretical frameworks, paying particular attention to the development of independent critical argument in advance of the final assessment. The inclusion of different national literatures within the module acknowledges the significant impact of international exchanges during the period as well as providing a means of investigating the increasingly global contexts and concerns of late 20^th and 21^st century literature.

This module promotes detailed knowledge of the major developments in English Literature occurring during the Romantic period. With its emphasis on the cultural contexts of literary, poetic and dramatic language this module enables you to discuss critically changing modes of expression in relation to political, philosophical, aesthetic and social contexts. It includes some consideration of visual art and print culture, building upon your exposure to other instances of this on other period or genre modules. The teaching pays particular attention to primary resources in terms of social, cultural and literary contexts, by examining texts written in response to idea championed by revolutionaries, reformers and Enlightenment thinkers. In view of the final assessment the module facilitates the building of research context and skills.

This module explores a range of literary and other texts associated with the cultural and artistic developments of Modernism during the early decades of the twentieth-century. It will introduce you to the diverse strands of Modernism, as exemplified by writers such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Ernst Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and William Faulkner. In addition, it will contextualise these literary achievements amidst the cultural and historical contexts of modernity, examining areas such as colonialism, the artistic avant-garde, modern alienation & the metropolis, gender and sexuality, and the impact of the First World War. Workshops and seminars will pay particular attention to the relationship between cultural transition and aesthetic innovation, further enhancing your close reading skills and historicist methodologies. There will be specific sessions dedicated to the introduction and enhancement of digital literacies to help you prepare for the hypertext assessment.

At a time of climate emergency, this module asks how literature reimagines the environment and our relationship to it. You will begin by studying literatures produced in the early stages of the industrial revolution in order to understand some of the causes of our current environmental crisis, including fossil fuel production, major transport networks and other infrastructures, urbanisation, and global food supply chains. Literature not only represents these developments, but also imaginatively responds to the environmental changes that result from them. Poetry and fiction, in particular, call attention to alternative ways of conceiving of and responding to our surroundings, from evoking nostalgia for pastoral lands unaffected by industry to presenting utopian visions of environments for the future. This module will develop your understanding of the range of literary forms that imaginatively respond to environmental change. You will examine elegies that express despair at environmental change, creative essay prose that fosters environmentalist action, and speculative fiction that promotes ecological utopias. Teaching will focus on enhancing knowledge and understanding of key literary texts and environmental debates and issues from the eighteenth century until today. The assignment will ask you to develop critical arguments that bring your understanding of environmental literatures to bear on pressing ecological and environmental questions in the environmental humanities today.