Edexcel A-Level Psychology Paper 2: Choosing and Revising Your Application Option
Edexcel A-Level Psychology Paper 2: Choosing and Revising Your Application Option
Edexcel A-Level Psychology (9PS0) is one of the few specifications that lets you and your teacher choose part of what you study. Paper 2, "Applications of Psychology," is built from two halves: Clinical Psychology, which everyone sits, and one application option chosen from three -- Criminological Psychology, Child Psychology and Health Psychology. That single choice shapes a substantial chunk of your final grade, so it is worth understanding what each option involves before you commit, and knowing exactly how to revise whichever one you take.
This guide does two jobs. First, it compares the three options honestly -- their content, their appeal, and their difficulty -- so you can make an informed choice (or understand the one your centre has made for you). Second, it works through the core knowledge and evaluation for each option, from eyewitness testimony and offender profiling in criminological, through attachment, deprivation and autism in child, to addiction, treatment and persuasion in health. Whichever option you sit, the essay demands the same thing: precise knowledge of theories and studies, supported by critical, well-structured evaluation.
If you are new to the specification as a whole, start with our complete guide to Edexcel A-Level Psychology 9PS0, then return here to plan your Paper 2 application option.
How Paper 2 Is Built
Paper 2 is a written exam worth 90 marks and 35% of the A-Level. It is divided into two sections:
- Section A: Clinical Psychology -- compulsory for every student. Covers diagnosis and classification of mental disorders, schizophrenia, one other disorder (typically depression, an anxiety disorder or an eating disorder), and the interactionist approach to treatment. Our separate clinical psychology guide covers this section in depth.
- Section B: Application option -- one of Criminological, Child or Health Psychology.
Both sections mix short-answer questions (define, describe, calculate, apply) with extended-response essays worth up to 20 marks. The application-option content is examined only in Section B, but be warned: Edexcel loves synoptic questions that ask you to bring in methods, studies and issues from across the whole course, so nothing you learn in Papers 1 and 3 is wasted here.
Key point: the three options are examined to an identical standard and mark tariff. There is no "easy option." The right choice is the one whose content you find most engaging and whose studies you can remember under pressure.
Choosing Your Option: An Honest Comparison
Most students have the option chosen for them by their centre, because a class studies one option together. But if you have a genuine choice -- or you are a private/resit candidate deciding for yourself -- the table below summarises what each involves.
| Feature | Criminological Psychology | Child Psychology | Health Psychology |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core question | Why do people offend, and how does the justice system respond? | How do early relationships and atypical development shape children? | Why do people become addicted, and how can behaviour change? |
| Signature studies | Loftus & Palmer (1974); Canter & Larkin (1993) | Ainsworth (1970); van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988); Baron-Cohen et al. (1985) | Olds & Milner (1954); Hovland et al. (1953) |
| Feels like | Forensic science meets social psychology | Developmental psychology with real-world welfare relevance | Biology of the brain meets health promotion |
| Maths demand | Moderate (statistics on crime, EWT accuracy) | Moderate (Strange Situation percentages, meta-analysis) | Moderate (drug efficacy, campaign evaluation) |
| Overlaps with | Cognitive (memory), learning, biological | Learning (attachment), biological, clinical | Biological (addiction), learning, clinical |
| Common appeal | True-crime interest; law/forensics ambitions | Childcare, education, nursing, social work interests | Medicine, nursing, public health interests |
A few pointers if the choice is genuinely yours:
- Criminological rewards students who enjoy applying cognitive and social theory to real cases and who can handle the ambiguity of a field where profiling "works" only sometimes. It links beautifully to the memory content in the cognitive course.
- Child is the most content-heavy of the three on studies: attachment research is deep and well-populated with named investigators, and the autism content adds a further layer. If you like a subject with a strong evidence base and clear real-world welfare implications, this is it.
- Health is the most "biological" option -- reward pathways, tolerance, drug therapy -- balanced by the persuasion and behaviour-change material. It is a natural fit if you took the biological course seriously and are heading toward a health-science degree.
Whichever you choose, commit early. The worst outcome is switching options late and carrying half-remembered content from two of them into the exam.
Explore the three option courses directly:
- Edexcel A-Level Psychology: Criminological Psychology
- Edexcel A-Level Psychology: Child Psychology
- Edexcel A-Level Psychology: Health Psychology
Option 1: Criminological Psychology
Criminological psychology asks why people commit crime, how reliable our evidence about crime is, and what the justice system can do about offending. It is a genuinely applied topic: almost every concept connects to a real courtroom, police investigation or prison.
Defining and Measuring Crime
Before you can explain crime you must define it, and that is harder than it looks. A crime is legally an act that breaks the criminal law and is punishable by the state -- but this legal (consensus) definition makes crime entirely dependent on the current statute book. A social definition focuses instead on acts that violate a society's norms and values, whether or not they are illegal. Deviance is the broader category; crime is the subset of deviance the law has chosen to prohibit. The conflict view, associated with Marxist criminology, argues the criminal law is not neutral but protects the interests of the powerful.
Measurement is equally treacherous. The three methods you must compare are:
- Official statistics -- crimes recorded by police. Cheap and continuous, but they miss the enormous "dark figure" of unrecorded crime and are shaped by reporting and recording practices.
- Victim surveys -- large-scale surveys asking people about crimes committed against them. They capture unreported offences but rely on memory and honesty.
- Self-report studies -- offenders anonymously report their own offending. Useful for hidden crime but vulnerable to exaggeration or concealment.
Exam move: questions on measurement almost always want the strengths and weaknesses of each method against the others. Never describe one method in isolation -- comparison is where the AO3 marks live.
Biological and Social Explanations of Criminality
The specification pairs a biological and a social explanation of offending:
- Biological: genetic and neural accounts. Twin and adoption studies suggest a heritable component; brain-imaging research (e.g. reduced prefrontal functioning in some violent offenders) points to neural correlates. The historical atavistic form (Lombroso) is now discredited but useful as a critical case study of how not to do criminology.
- Social: learning-based accounts. Labelling theory (Becker, 1963) argues that being labelled "criminal" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; differential association proposes that offending is learned when exposure to pro-criminal attitudes outweighs pro-social ones.
The examiner's favourite evaluation here is the nature-nurture and reductionism debate: biological explanations risk being biologically reductionist, ignoring the social context that social explanations foreground -- and vice versa. An interactionist conclusion (diathesis-stress applied to offending) is usually the strongest closing move.
Eyewitness Testimony: Loftus & Palmer (1974)
Eyewitness testimony (EWT) is the criminological application of the memory content you meet in the cognitive course. The prescribed classic study is Loftus & Palmer (1974).
In their first experiment, participants watched films of car accidents and were asked how fast the cars were going when they hit / smashed / collided / bumped / contacted each other. The mean speed estimate rose systematically with the intensity of the verb -- "smashed" produced the highest estimates and "contacted" the lowest. In a second experiment, participants who had heard "smashed" were more likely, a week later, to falsely report having seen broken glass that was never in the film. The study demonstrates that leading questions and post-event information can distort memory, either by biasing retrieval or by permanently altering the stored representation.
The implications are serious: eyewitness confidence is a poor guide to accuracy, and the way police question witnesses can inadvertently contaminate evidence. Evaluate Loftus & Palmer on the usual dimensions -- high control and replicability (a lab experiment) versus low ecological validity (watching a film is not the stress of a real crime), and the ethical and practical importance of the findings for the justice system.
The Cognitive Interview
If leading questions damage memory, the cognitive interview (Geiselman and colleagues) is the response. It uses four techniques grounded in memory theory: report everything (even apparently trivial detail), context reinstatement (mentally returning to the scene), change of order (recalling events in reverse), and change of perspective (describing the scene from another viewpoint). The first two draw on encoding-specificity; the last two disrupt schema-driven reconstruction. Research generally shows the enhanced cognitive interview increases the amount of correct information recalled, though sometimes at a small cost in accuracy -- a nuance worth citing for AO3.
Offender Profiling
Two contrasting approaches feature:
- Top-down (FBI) profiling begins with a pre-existing organised/disorganised typology derived from interviews with convicted US offenders and fits the crime scene to it. Criticised for its small, unrepresentative sample and its assumption that offenders fall neatly into one type.
- Bottom-up profiling (Canter) is data-driven. Investigative psychology assumes offending is lawfully patterned -- interpersonal coherence, forensic awareness -- and uses statistical techniques such as smallest space analysis. Geographical profiling (Rossmo, 1997) analyses the spatial distribution of linked crimes to infer where an offender is based.
The key evaluative study is Canter & Larkin (1993), whose analysis of serial offences supported a "marauder" model in which offenders operate outward from a home base -- evidence for the geographical assumptions of the bottom-up approach. Contrast the empirical, replicable British tradition with the more intuitive American top-down method.
Jury Decision-Making, Treatment and Punishment
Two further sub-topics round out the option:
- Jury decision-making: how factors such as the order of testimony, the characteristics of the defendant, and majority influence shape verdicts. This connects directly to the conformity research in the social course.
- Treatment and punishment of offenders: the aims of custodial sentencing (deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, rehabilitation) set against high recidivism; and rehabilitative approaches such as token economies, anger management and restorative justice, each with its own evidence base and limitations.
Common error: writing about "prison" in vague, opinion-led terms. The examiner wants the stated aims of sentencing set against evidence on reoffending, plus a named alternative intervention and its effectiveness.
Option 2: Child Psychology
Child psychology studies how early relationships shape development, what happens when those relationships are disrupted, and how atypical development -- especially autism -- is explained and supported. It is the option with the richest bank of named studies, which is both its strength and its revision challenge.
Caregiver-Infant Interactions and Bowlby's Theory
Attachment begins with the fine-grained rhythms of caregiver-infant interaction: reciprocity (turn-taking, as in a "conversation" of gestures) and interactional synchrony (mirrored, coordinated behaviour). These early exchanges lay the foundation for a full attachment.
Bowlby's evolutionary theory of attachment (1969) is the theoretical spine of the option. Its key claims:
- Attachment is innate and adaptive, promoting survival by keeping infant and caregiver close.
- There is a critical (later "sensitive") period for forming attachments.
- Monotropy -- a bias toward one primary attachment figure.
- Social releasers (crying, smiling) elicit caregiving.
- The relationship forms an internal working model that becomes a template for later relationships (the continuity hypothesis).
Bowlby's earlier maternal deprivation hypothesis (1951) -- that prolonged separation from a mother figure in early childhood causes lasting emotional damage -- is examined alongside the theory and is a rich source of evaluation.
Types of Attachment and the Strange Situation
Ainsworth's Strange Situation (1970) is the standardised laboratory procedure for classifying attachment. Through a series of episodes involving separation from and reunion with the caregiver, and the presence of a stranger, infants are classified as:
- Secure (Type B) -- moderate stranger and separation anxiety; comforted on reunion; the majority classification.
- Insecure-avoidant (Type A) -- low anxiety; avoids the caregiver on reunion.
- Insecure-resistant (Type C) -- high anxiety; seeks yet resists comfort on reunion.
Evaluate the Strange Situation for its standardisation and replicability against concerns about its ecological validity (a contrived setting), whether it measures a stable trait or a relationship, and its cultural specificity -- which leads directly to the classic study.
Cross-Cultural Attachment: van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988)
The prescribed classic study for child psychology is the meta-analysis by van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg (1988). They combined the results of 32 Strange Situation studies across eight countries. Two findings are essential:
- Secure attachment was the most common classification in every country studied, supporting the idea that attachment has a strong innate, universal basis (consistent with Bowlby).
- Variation within countries was up to 1.5 times greater than variation between countries, cautioning against treating whole nations as culturally uniform.
Beyond the averages, the pattern of insecure attachments differed by culture -- insecure-avoidant classifications were relatively more common in some Western European samples, insecure-resistant relatively more common in some others -- which the authors linked to differing child-rearing practices. This is the ideal study for discussing the culture bias issue and the tension between universality and cultural relativism.
Deprivation, Privation and Institutionalisation
The option distinguishes carefully between:
- Deprivation -- the loss of an attachment that had already formed.
- Privation -- the failure ever to form an attachment.
Rutter (1981) drew this distinction and argued that many effects Bowlby attributed to deprivation were in fact due to privation. The evidence base includes studies of institutionalised children, most importantly the Romanian orphan studies following children adopted from severely depriving institutions after 1989. Rutter's English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study found that the developmental outcomes depended heavily on the age at adoption: children adopted before about six months often recovered well, while later-adopted children showed more persistent difficulties, including disinhibited attachment. This is powerful evidence for a sensitive period and for the potential -- but limits -- of recovery.
The Effects of Day Care
A perennial applied debate: does day care harm or help social development? Evidence is genuinely mixed -- some studies associate long hours of low-quality care in infancy with slightly raised aggression, while high-quality care can benefit peer relations and cognitive outcomes, especially for disadvantaged children. The examiner rewards a balanced, evidence-led answer that distinguishes quality, quantity and age rather than a blanket verdict.
Autism: Explanations and Interventions
The final strand is atypical development, focused on autism spectrum disorder:
- Theory of mind -- the prescribed contemporary explanation is Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith (1985). Using the Sally-Anne false-belief task, they found that most children with autism failed to attribute a false belief to a character, unlike typically developing and Down's-syndrome comparison groups. This supported the hypothesis of a specific theory-of-mind deficit in autism. A later related task, the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001), extended this to adults.
- Biological explanations -- genetic and neurological accounts, including the heritability shown by twin studies.
For interventions, cover behavioural and educational approaches (for example structured programmes based on learning principles), evaluating them on effectiveness, intensity and ethics. Be careful and respectful in framing: the specification treats autism as a difference in development to be understood and supported, and your evaluation should reflect that.
A-Level-depth misconception: do not overstate the theory-of-mind account as a complete explanation of autism. It captures one important feature (social cognition) but not the full profile, and not every individual with autism fails false-belief tasks. Nuance here separates strong answers from adequate ones.
Option 3: Health Psychology
Health psychology applies psychological theory to physical health, with addiction as its central case study. You will study how substances affect the brain, why addiction develops, how it is treated, and how attitudes and persuasion can change health behaviour.
Substance Misuse: Dependence and Tolerance
Precise vocabulary earns easy marks. Distinguish:
- Physical dependence -- the body has adapted to a substance, so stopping produces withdrawal symptoms.
- Psychological dependence -- a perceived need for the substance to function or cope, even without physical withdrawal.
- Tolerance -- needing increasing amounts to achieve the same effect as the body adapts.
Biological Explanation of Addiction: Olds & Milner (1954)
The biological explanation centres on the brain's reward pathway (the mesolimbic dopamine system). The prescribed classic study is Olds & Milner (1954), who discovered that rats would press a lever repeatedly to deliver electrical stimulation to specific brain regions -- to the exclusion of food and rest. This landmark study identified "pleasure" or reward centres in the brain and grounded the idea that addictive substances hijack a natural dopamine-based reward system. Addictive drugs raise dopamine in this pathway; tolerance develops as receptors downregulate; withdrawal reflects an under-active reward system.
Learning Explanation of Addiction
The complementary explanation is learning theory:
- Operant conditioning: addiction is maintained by positive reinforcement (the reward of the substance) and negative reinforcement (relief from withdrawal).
- Classical conditioning: environmental cues associated with use become conditioned stimuli that trigger cravings (cue reactivity).
The strongest answers show these mechanisms working together with the biological account -- the dopamine reward is precisely what makes the operant reinforcement so powerful.
Treating Addiction: Drug Therapy and Aversion
Two treatment families are examined:
- Drug therapy -- for example nicotine replacement, which eases withdrawal by supplying nicotine without smoking, or antagonist drugs that block a substance's rewarding effects. Evaluate on effectiveness, side effects and the fact that drug therapy treats symptoms rather than underlying causes.
- Aversion therapy and covert sensitisation -- behavioural treatments that pair the addictive behaviour with an unpleasant stimulus (real or imagined). These can produce short-term change but suffer high relapse rates and raise ethical concerns.
A comparison table is a strong revision tool:
| Treatment | Mechanism | Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drug therapy (e.g. NRT) | Eases withdrawal / blocks reward | Practical, evidence-based | Treats symptoms; side effects |
| Aversion therapy | Classical conditioning of disgust | Can disrupt the habit quickly | High relapse; ethical concerns |
| Covert sensitisation | Imagined aversive consequences | Non-invasive; no physical harm | Relies on vivid imagery; variable |
Anti-Drug Campaigns and Persuasion
Health psychology's most distinctive content is persuasion. The foundational model is the Hovland-Yale model (Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1953), which analyses persuasion in terms of source (credibility, attractiveness of the communicator), message (one- vs two-sided arguments, fear appeals) and audience (intelligence, self-esteem, existing attitudes). Apply this framework to real anti-drug campaigns: why some fear-based messages backfire, why source credibility matters, and why a campaign that ignores the audience's starting attitudes tends to fail.
Attitudes to Health and Behaviour Change
Finally, two models of how attitudes translate (or fail to translate) into behaviour:
- The Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991): behaviour follows intention, which is shaped by attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control. Its key limitation is the intention-behaviour gap -- intending to change is not the same as changing.
- The Transtheoretical (Stages of Change) Model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983): behaviour change proceeds through pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance (and sometimes termination). Its strength is treating relapse as a normal part of the cycle rather than a failure.
Synoptic tip: health psychology's models of persuasion and behaviour change reappear whenever the exam asks about social influence or applying psychology to real-world problems. Learn them well and you gain marks in more than one place.
Revising Any Option: A Common Method
Whichever option you sit, the same revision strategy works, because all three are examined the same way.
- Build a study grid. For each prescribed study (classic and contemporary), record the aim, method, key results and two evaluation points. Studies are the currency of Section B -- a good essay is anchored by named, dated evidence.
- Learn theories in matched pairs. The specification repeatedly pairs a biological with a social/learning explanation. Revise them together so you can compare, not just describe.
- Rehearse the interactionist conclusion. For explanations of offending, addiction and atypical development, the strongest closing move is usually an interactionist / diathesis-stress synthesis. Have a sentence ready.
- Drill the AO3 discriminators. Reliability, validity, ethics, generalisability, reductionism, and real-world application are the evaluative levers. Practise applying them to specific studies, not in the abstract.
- Time your essays. The 20-mark extended responses reward structure under time pressure. Practise a PEEL/PEC paragraph rhythm: point, evidence (named study), evaluation, link back to the question.
Put this into practice with the option courses and the exam-prep course, and use retrieval quizzes rather than passive re-reading -- the studies stick far better when you have to recall them cold. You can follow the whole specification in sequence through the Edexcel A-Level Psychology learning path.
Summary
- Paper 2 = compulsory Clinical + one application option (Criminological, Child or Health), worth 90 marks and 35% of the A-Level.
- All three options are examined to the same standard -- choose on interest and memorability, not perceived difficulty.
- Criminological: defining/measuring crime, biological and social explanations, EWT (Loftus & Palmer 1974), the cognitive interview, offender profiling (Canter & Larkin 1993), juries, and treatment/punishment.
- Child: caregiver-infant interaction, Bowlby (1969), the Strange Situation (Ainsworth 1970), cross-cultural attachment (van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg 1988), deprivation vs privation (Rutter 1981), day care, and autism (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith 1985).
- Health: dependence and tolerance, the reward pathway (Olds & Milner 1954), learning explanations, drug and aversion therapies, persuasion (Hovland, Janis & Kelley 1953), and behaviour change (Ajzen 1991; Prochaska & DiClemente 1983).
- Revise every option the same way: study grids, matched-pair theories, interactionist conclusions, AO3 discriminators and timed essays.