The core studies — practice questions

AO1 — Rosenhan (1973):

• Aim: Test whether psychiatrists can distinguish sane from insane in clinical settings.
• Method: Eight pseudopatients (including Rosenhan) presented at 12 hospitals with a single complaint of hearing a voice saying "empty," "hollow," "thud." After admission, they behaved normally.
• Results: All admitted with schizophrenia diagnosis; average stay 19 days; normal behaviours reinterpreted as symptoms (e.g. note-taking labelled "writing behaviour"); no staff detected deception.

AO3 — Issues and debates:

• Validity of diagnosis: Rosenhan shows diagnosis may reflect expectancy bias rather than objective pathology — directly relevant to health service misuse and over-medicalisation.
• Ethics: Deception of staff; however, exposed systemic problems justifying cost–benefit defence.
• Individual vs situational: Staff behaviour shaped by institutional context and labels, not just individual patient traits.
• Reductionism: Psychiatric labels may oversimplify complex human experience into a single category.

Judgement: Landmark study with high ecological validity in real hospitals, but sample of hospitals and era limits generalisability. Essential for debating reliability and validity of mental health classification.

Step 1: State the formula for percentage increase. Percentage Increase = [ (New Value - Original Value) / Original Value ] * 100 In this context, the 'New Value' is the doodling group's mean score (7.5) and the 'Original Value' is the control group's mean score (5.8).

Step 2: Substitute the values into the formula. Percentage Increase = [ (7.5 - 5.8) / 5.8 ] * 100

Step 3: Calculate the difference and perform the division. Difference = 1.7 Calculation = (1.7 / 5.8) * 100 = 0.2931... * 100

Step 4: State the final answer. The percentage increase in recall for the doodling group is 29.3% (rounded to one decimal place).

Step 5: Explain the result in context. This calculation demonstrates a substantial improvement in memory performance for the doodling group. This quantitative result directly supports the study's conclusion that doodling can aid concentration on a primary task. The improved recall suggests that doodling helped prevent participants' minds from wandering (daydreaming), which would have otherwise impaired their ability to encode the information from the telephone message.