MRCPsych on the Go: Revision Essentials

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 research developed and what the Big Five model tells us about individual differences.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone curious about the science of personality. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.6.

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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' four humours, and why this debate still matters in modern psychiatry.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone interested in what makes us who we are. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.6.

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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 are directly relevant to clinical reasoning and diagnostic decision making in psychiatry, where bias can have real consequences for patients.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone curious about how the mind makes decisions. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.5.

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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 features. Together these mechanisms explain how humans classify objects, recognise patterns and organise knowledge.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone fascinated by the relationship between language and the mind. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.5.

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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 ideas have important implications for memory disorders in psychiatry and for understanding false memories.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone curious about the unreliability of human memory. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.4.

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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 processed and stored in the brain. These concepts are clinically relevant to memory disorders in psychiatry.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone who has ever wondered how memory actually works. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.4.

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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. We also examine how abnormalities of attention and information processing contribute to psychiatric conditions, particularly schizophrenia.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone curious about how the mind manages the chaos of the world. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.3.

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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 that seeing is always an act of inference rather than passive recording.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone intrigued by the tricks the brain plays on us. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.2.

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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 is essential for making sense of hallucinations in psychiatric disorders.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone fascinated by how the brain hears. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.2.

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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, symmetry, continuity and closure, and explain why these principles matter in both cognitive psychology and psychiatric practice.

Ideal for MRCPsych Part A revision, psychology students and anyone curious about how the brain constructs reality. Aligned with the Royal College of Psychiatrists MRCPsych Part A syllabus, paragraph 1.1.2.

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