MRCPsych on the Go: Revision Essentials

Have you ever known something was bad for you and done it anyway? That tension has a name, and understanding it could change how you think about human behaviour. In this episode, we explore cognitive dissonance and achievement motivation, two powerful forces that shape why we act the way we do. We cover Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, the strategies people use to reduce psychological...

Why do some people thrive under pressure while others freeze? And why does a reward sometimes make us less motivated, not more? In this episode, we explore intrinsic motivation and the forces that drive us from within. We cover the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the overjustification effect, Berlyne's theory of curiosity and the Yerkes-Dodson Law. We also introduce sel...

Why do you reach for food when you are hungry, or feel restless when you have been sitting still too long? The answer lies deep inside your brain, in a region the size of a pea. In this episode, we explore the biology of motivation, covering primary and secondary drives, Hull's drive reduction theory and the concept of homeostasis. We also examine the role of the hypothalamus in regulating hu...

Is personality written in your biology? Hans Eysenck believed so, and he spent decades building a scientific case for it. In this episode, we explore Eysenck's biological theory of personality and his PEN model, covering the three dimensions of psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism. We explain the biological basis of each dimension, including cortical arousal and limbic reactivity, the r...

What if the stories, myths and symbols that appear across all human cultures are not a coincidence? Carl Jung thought they revealed something profound about the structure of the human mind. In this episode, we explore Jung's theory of personality, including his psychological types, the personal and collective unconscious, and the archetypes he believed we all share: the shadow, the persona, t...

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Conscientious or spontaneous? The way we answer these questions reveals a lot about how psychologists have tried to map the human personality for over a century. In this episode, we explore trait and type approaches to personality, introducing key figures including Carl Jung, Gordon Allport, Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck. We trace how modern personality res...

Can personality be measured like height or weight? Or is every person so unique that general rules simply do not apply? In this episode, we explore two fundamentally different ways of studying personality. The nomothetic approach looks for patterns across large groups. The idiographic approach focuses on the individual in depth. We also cover early theories of personality, including Hippocrates&ap...

Why do smart people make bad decisions? The answer often comes down to the mental shortcuts our brains rely on without us even realising it. In this episode, we explore how we reason and solve problems, and where we go wrong. We cover deductive and inductive reasoning, the difference between algorithms and heuristics, and the cognitive biases that lead to systematic errors in thinking. These ideas...

If you do not have a word for something, can you still think about it? This is one of the most debated questions in cognitive psychology, and the answer might surprise you. In this episode, we explore the relationship between language and thought. We cover the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, mental categories known as concepts, prototype theory as described by Eleanor Rosch, and the idea of core defining...

Eyewitness testimony has sent innocent people to prison. Memory is not a recording. It is a story we tell ourselves, and that story can be wrong. In this episode, we explore why forgetting happens and how memories become distorted. We cover Hermann Ebbinghaus and the forgetting curve, proactive and retroactive interference, and the role of schemas in shaping and distorting what we remember. These...

Memory is not like a hard drive. It is a reconstructive process that is far more complex, and far more fascinating, than simply saving and replaying information. In this episode, we explore how memory works in psychology and neuroscience. We cover encoding, storage and retrieval, the role of chunking in improving memory performance, and the key memory models that explain how information is process...

Right now, your brain is ignoring thousands of pieces of information to focus on these words. How does it decide what matters and what to discard? In this episode, we explore the psychology of attention and information processing. We cover selective attention, Broadbent's filter theory and Treisman's attenuation model, tracing how our understanding of attention has developed over decades...

Your brain is not a camera. It is an active interpreter, constantly making predictions and filling in gaps. And sometimes it gets things spectacularly wrong. In this episode, we explore how the brain constructs visual perception and where that process breaks down. We cover optical illusions, pareidolia, perceptual errors and Richard Gregory's constructivist theory of perception, which argues...

Most of us hear a sound and instantly know where it is coming from and what it means. But what happens when that process goes wrong? In this episode, we explore how the brain processes sound, covering sound localisation, auditory grouping, and bottom-up and top-down processing. We explain how these mechanisms help us interpret complex sound environments, and why understanding auditory perception i...

Why does your brain see a face in a cloud or a complete circle when part of it is missing? This is Gestalt psychology at work, and it tells us something fundamental about how the mind organises the world around us. In this episode, we explore the principles that govern how the brain groups sensory information into meaningful patterns. We cover figure-ground perception, similarity, proximity, symme...

Children learn by watching. So do adults. And Albert Bandura's famous Bobo doll experiment proved it in a way that changed psychology forever. In this episode, we explore how behaviours are learned through observation and imitation. We cover positive and negative punishment, modelling and Bandura's social learning theory, explaining how watching others shapes what we do. These principles...

No one sits down at a piano and plays a concerto on their first attempt. Complex behaviours are built piece by piece, through repetition, reinforcement and careful shaping. This episode explains exactly how that happens. In this episode, we explore the key behavioural learning techniques used in psychology and behavioural therapy. We cover habituation, shaping, chaining and cueing, explaining how...

Why does someone with a phobia go miles out of their way to avoid a spider? And why does that avoidance make the fear worse, not better? In this episode, we explore avoidance and escape learning, covering negative reinforcement, conditioned fear responses and the behavioural patterns that underpin anxiety disorders and phobias. Understanding why avoidance behaviour develops and persists is essenti...

What do phobias, addiction and anxiety disorders all have in common? They are all maintained by the same behavioural mechanisms that this episode unpacks. In this episode, we build on the foundations of learning theory by exploring reinforcement, stimulus generalisation and the extinction of conditioned responses. We cover positive and negative reinforcement, how learned responses spread to new si...

A dog salivates at the sound of a bell. A child tidies their room to avoid losing screen time. These are not coincidences. They are the same fundamental principle of learning, playing out in very different ways. In this episode, we explore the foundations of learning theory, covering classical conditioning and operant conditioning. We trace Pavlov's famous experiments, explain reinforcement,...