Application of Psychology Paper Outline

Application of Psychology Final Paper Outline Tips

1. Use proper organization strategies. Think about this paper as a five section essay that you have likely been exposed to throughout your academic career. Specifically, 5 section essays have an introduction, 3 body sections, and a conclusion section. In the introduction paragraph, you are briefly introducing your topic and stating the purpose of your paper. Your thesis statement should be something like "In this paper, I will explore the symptoms, lifestyle impact, and treatments of X psychological disorder through character X in movie X. To accomplish this, I will briefly summarize the movie, explore X disorder, and then describe how x character experiences X disorder." Then, your three body sections would be the movie/character summary, the research on the disorder, and then describing the disorder through the character. The last section would be your conclusion paragraph where you make some general conclusions and restate the purpose of your paper (how you achieved your purpose) to close out your paper.

All papers may not be amenable to this format based on the topic, but many are. Some other formats I have seen are where people explore three psychological concepts so the three concepts are their body sections. Within each concept, though, they apply it to the character before moving on to the next concept. This is perfectly acceptable as well.

2. Use bullet points not complete sentences throughout. This is not a mini version of your paper, but an outline of the main concepts to cover. On the flip side, you must provide enough detail in your bullets that I can easily deduce what will be in your paper. This can include themes, major points, facts, etc. in bullet format. Good, thorough outlines can generally be done in 2-3 pages.

3. Provide a summary of the movie/book as if I have never even heard of it before. Your summary needs to stand on its own before you can go into your psychological concepts or I may not have a clue what you are talking about. This is called prepping the reader for what is to come. You do this by having your first main body section being a summary of the movie no matter how you format the rest of your paper.

4. APA format. Your paper AND the reference list must be in APA format. I realize many of you have not used APA before, but I provided links to resources to help you with this. The Owl Purdue APA site is the absolute best but for some reason it won't let me paste it into LEO as a link. Just google it and you will find it. I also provided the UMUC resource to assist you with APA. Please note you do not need an abstract for the paper or abstract, however, and the 5 pages required for the final paper DOES NOT include title or reference pages.

5. Be sure to actually cite your media used. APA has rules on how to cite films and books, so when you are talking about them, you cite them in your paper and in the reference section. APA uses parenthetical reference style. Again, you can get more information from the resources I have provided.

6. You MUST have some peer-reviewed academic references. Just citing websites or popular resources online by psychologists is insufficient. A peer-reviewed publication is one that underwent a blind review and received approval to be published in a scientific journal. I have provided you tips on how to search for peer-reviewed academic publications in the Application

of Psychology Paper folder.

7. Tips for Papers about Psychological Disorders: When we talk about someone suffering from a psychological disorder, we are interested in the etiology, symptoms, prognosis, and psychosocial impact. Etiology refers to the causes of the disorder or what has contributed to the person developing the disorder. This can include biological (e.g., genetic), psychological (e.g., how one copes with stress/emotions), and social (e.g., experiences/events/people) influences. The symptoms refer to the DSM diagnostic criteria where a person has to exhibited a specified number of behavioral, emotional, and/or social symptoms to meet the threshold for having the disorder. Prognosis refers to the projected outcome/course of the disorder or how we expect that person to be impacted over time. Lastly, psychosocial impact refers to how having the disorder impacts the person's psychological/emotional, occupational (e.g., job), and social (e.g., relationships) wellbeing. For those of you writing your Media Review paper on psychological disorders, these are the elements you should be researching and include in your psychological concept portion of the paper. Then you can evaluate your character from your chosen media based on the research you have found.

Outline Resources

Please see this link for how to structure and format outlines.

http://www.gallaudet.edu/tip/english_center/writing/essays/5- paragraph_essay_and_outline_the_hazards_of_moviegoing.html

Based on this example, here is a helpful template for you to use to guide your outline:

Outline for the Media Review Paper

Title: ____________________

I. Introduction A. Introductory statement B. Thesis statement: ____________________

II. Body

A. Summarize the Media/Movie (Topic Sentence): ____________________

1. ____________________ 2. ____________________

3. ____________________

B. Summarize Research on Psychological Concepts (Topic Sentence): ____________________

1. ____________________ 2. ____________________ 3. ____________________

C. Apply Psychological Concepts to Movie (Topic Sentence): ____________________

1. ____________________ 2. ____________________ 3. ____________________

III. Conclusion

A. Closing statement B. Restate thesis: ____________________

End with References on a Separate page. Pay attention to the reference type, spacing, italics, and use of punctuation.

References

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), page range. https://doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyyy

**Use the above for peer reviewed scientific articles. You must have two peer reviewed references utilizing this format

Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle. Publisher.

**Use the above for a book

Producer, P. P. (Producer), & Director, D. D. (Director). (Date of publication). Title of motion picture [Motion picture]. Country of origin: Studio or distributor.

**Use the above for a motion picture. YOU MUST CITE YOUR MOVIE OR MEDIA USED.

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Date of publication). Title of document. http://Web address

**Use this for websites; When there is no author for a web page, the title moves to the first position of the reference entry. Use websites sparingly as they are not academic resources and do not count towards your peer reviewed references.

The Saylor Foundation. (n.d.). Introduction to psychology. Author. http://www.saylor.org/books/.

**This is how you cite our text book.