MRCPsych on the Go: Revision Essentials

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,...