EDITH COWAN UNIVERSITY
School of Arts and Humanities
PSY3350 Biological Psychology, Sensation & PerceptionEssay Assignment 2017

The aim of the essay is to encourage the student to provide his or her own point of view on some of the important issues in biological psychology. As always, it is necessary to back up your views with evidence. This evidence should come from the psychological literature as well as examples from the popular press.

PSY3350 Biological Psychology, Sensation & PerceptionEssay Assignment

The topic for this essay relates to how various biological determinants of behaviour are described and reported in the popular press:

“Often you will see short popular press items that briefly summarise research findings relating to topics in biological psychology. Choose two general topic areas in biological psychology. Discuss how accurate are these brief popular press summaries in describing these general topic areas. In what way are these brief articles reductionistic in trying to get their point across? Finally, would readers – that is, the consumers of these popular press articles – lead happier, more fulfilling lives if they knew more about the psychobiological underpinnings of behaviour?”

PSY3350 Biological Psychology, Sensation & PerceptionEssay Assignment

A few clarifications:

• The popular press, otherwise known as the media, includes newspaper articles,

  magazine articles, or articles from any freely available webpage source. Do not

  include any stories from broadcast media such as television or radio.

• To ascertain how accurate some of these popular press articles are, you need to

  examine the actual research article(s) from which the summary was derived.

• While this essay requires you to think about reductionism, the essay itself is not about

  reductionism, so do not turn the essay into a long discussion about reductionism.

• In choosing your two areas, think about what is covered in PSY3350. For example,

  stress, sleeping patterns, psychological disorders, memory, and many other topic areas may be examined. Choose two topic areas. Virtually anything goes, so long as you can relate the topic back to its biological determinants. PSY3350 Biological Psychology, Sensation & PerceptionEssay Assignment

• As a general rule, one third of the marks relate to your discussion of how accurate the popular press articles are with respect to the actual research from which the press articles are derived, one third of the marks relate to whether or not the descriptions in the popular press are reductionistic, and about one third of the marks relate to a discussion of whether or not people would lead happier lives if they knew more about biological determinants of behaviour.
• The most common question about this assignment is “how many references do I need to use?” The answer is, you should use as many as you need to answer the question and to get your point across.
• You should include at least six small screen-grabs or pictures of press items (e.g., the headlines or actual pictures of the articles) that cover the two general topic areas you have selected. These figures are to be embedded into your essay to help get your points across. At least five of your references should be (formal) journal articles. PSY3350 Biological Psychology, Sensation & PerceptionEssay Assignment

PSY3350 Biological Psychology, Sensation & PerceptionEssay Assignment

The essay assignment is worth 50% of your overall mark. The assignment must be uploaded into Turnitin by 12 Noon on Tuesday, 10 October 2017 (Week 10).

Please adhere to the following instructions:

• The page size must be A4. All essays must be typed; no handwritten assignments will be accepted.
• The assignment must be submitted into Turnitin. No hardcopy, faxed, or emailed assignments will be accepted.
• Please make sure your formatting is how you intend it to be when you upload your assignment into Turnitin. It is extremely unlikely that Turnitin alters the formatting of an uploaded document, so the version of the essay that is uploaded will be marked. Hence, upload your assignment as a pdf file. Furthermore, you must check your pdf file after you have uploaded it into Turnitin, to check if you have successfully uploaded your file and that the formatting is how you intended it to be.
• Use Times or Times New Roman 12-point font (Times is the font used in this document) with 2.54-cm margins left and right, top and bottom for the entire document. The body of the essay should be double-spaced; the abstract and the reference section may be single-spaced. If you follow these instructions, you should have a maximum of 25 lines per A4 page for the body of the essay. In other words, do not include more than 25 lines per A4 page.

Need Help in your PSY3350 Essay Assignment?

• Include the ECU Assignment Cover Sheet, a title page, an abstract, and a references section. The title page and abstract should be on their own page. Begin the reference section on a separate page. The body of the essay (excluding the title page, abstract, and references section) should be no more than 9 pages. This, however, does not mean that you have to fill up to 9 pages of writing. If you are tempted to hand in much longer papers, remember that book and journal editors often penalise excessively long submissions by sending the manuscript back for editing, or by refusing to read the submission.
• If you go over the 9-page limit or format your essay in a way that looks like it goes over the 9-page limit, then the lines you write in excess of the 9-page limit will not be read or considered. In addition, you will be automatically penalised a minimum of 5 points (out of 50). No appeals – none whatsoever, for any possible reason – to this automatic 5-point penalty will be accepted.
• To be clear and unambiguous: Everything you write in your essay – excluding the title page, abstract, and references section – must be within the 9-page limit.
• Your essay must be formatted in APA style. This includes the title page, abstract, and references section. You should also apply the correct APA formatting style to any newspaper articles, magazine articles, or webpages referenced in your essay.
• All screen-grabs or pictures of press items embedded in your essay must have an appropriate APA-formatted figure caption, just like it would appear in a journal article published by the APA.
• Around 10% of the marks will be allocated to APA formatting.
• Do not include an Appendix.
• Do not include Footnotes.
• PSY3350 Biological Psychology, Sensation & PerceptionEssay Assignment