Psychology: should I choose it?

What will I learn?

How will I be assessed?

Progression and companion subjects

No complete companion or exclusion review is attached to this profile. Check the official course-entry conditions, language eligibility and your school’s sequence before enrolling. Links between resource hubs show related learning; they do not establish a compulsory prerequisite.

Will I find it hard?

Difficulty depends on your experience, interests, teaching and assessment. These are our reflection prompts, not an official difficulty rating.

• Look at how much data, calculation and graph interpretation appear in the sample for this particular science.
• Can you explain the ideas in your own words as well as recall the terminology?
• Do investigations and evaluating evidence interest you? Check the course’s practical requirements.

Does it scale up or down?

Psychology, 2025. Table 6 of QTAC’s 2025 report publishes separate raw and scaled subject medians for General subjects with at least 50 students. Historical cohort data cannot predict your result or a future scaling direction.

Scaling is not a measure of difficulty or a guaranteed bonus. Prioritise content you can engage with and required subjects for courses you are considering.

Try a little of the subject

The role of the brain

Psychology is a science: it builds knowledge by asking testable questions, collecting empirical evidence systematically and revising explanations when new evidence appears. Some of its oldest questions, however, began as philosophy. The mind-body problem asks how mental experience (thoughts, feelings, choices) relates to the physical body. A materialist approach claims that the mind is produced by physical matter, especially the brain. The physician Claudius Galen, working in the Roman Empire in the second century CE, is linked with this view: he served as doctor to gladiators and experimented on animals, and he argued that the brain, rather than the heart, is the source of sensation and voluntary movement and the seat of reason. A dualist approach , linked with the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, treats the mind as non-physical and separate from the body, although the two interact; Descartes suggested the pineal gland as their meeting point. The mind-body problem connects with two debates introduced in this unit: free will versus determinism (the view that behaviour is caused by earlier events) and nature versus nurture. These debates continue to shape how evidence is interpreted. Early investigators tried to locate mental functions in the brain. Franz Gall promoted phrenology around 1800, claiming that separate mental 'faculties' such as ambition or destructiveness could be judged from bumps on the skull. Phrenology failed under scrutiny: its claims rested on selected cases matched to skull features rather than on controlled, reproducible tests. Its lasting contribution was the idea of localisation of function . Pierre Flourens studied brain function experimentally in the 1820s by removing (ablating) parts of animal brains, mainly in birds, and

Original practice question: Which statement best describes the dualist approach to the mind-body problem?

This is ATARMAxxing’s original sample learning material. It is not an official assessment task or a prediction of your school’s workload.

Explore the resources

Open the Psychology subject hub and free preview (opens in a new tab)

• Psychology — QCE Units 3 & 4 (opens in a new tab)

Core subject information and planning are free. Full study resources are optional.