Sheila Thomas

Sheila Thomas (Bates) spent her childhood in the Page Hall and Firth Park areas of Sheffield and went on to study Modern Languages at Oxford University. After studying Psychology for her PhD, she now writes for students of this subject while also writing creatively for a general audience.

Can the Ancient Greeks help us to understand ourselves a little more? English has only one word for ‘love’, which has to cover a multitude of meanings, whereas the Ancient Greeks had a whole range of words to describe the different kinds of emotions which we in the 21st Century can only call ‘love’. This collection of monologues will make you both smile and cry as you listen to the characters describing their experience of love and life. Parental love that knows no bounds is explored here, alongside infatuated love, obsessive love, practical love that leads people to take on roles they did not perhaps wish for themselves, selfless, altruistic love for mankind and of course, romantic love that can be felt when you realise you have met your perfect soul mate. Sweet, gently humorous and occasionally poignant, this collection of monologues brings together a series of writings which speak to everyone.

A journalist turns up at a sumptuous dinner party in Belgravia where some "bright young things" are celebrating their graduation. Life was looking rosy in the afterglow of success and drink, but the journalist starts to ask them a lot of questions about the suicide attempt of their former tutor and colleague. They each in turn, try to justify their selfish, callow and vindictive behaviour and discover that each of them played a part in pushing their tutor and colleague a step closer to his suicide attempt. Their excuses and convoluted justifications will make you rage with anger and disgust. They are forced to reflect on their behaviour as the evidence mounts against them, but do they really learn from what they have done? Or are they able to just carry on behaving in the same self-centred way?

This book will be a great help to the A level Psychology student. It gives lots of opportunity to practise those all-important Research Methods skills which examiners like to see. It covers all the main Research Methods: Experiments, Observations, Interviews, Questionnaires, Correlations as well as Case Studies, Longitudinal Studies, Cross-sectional Studies and Content Analysis. The questions are all written in the style students can expect to be faced with in the exam and come with detailed answers and useful tips for remembering key points. The book can also be useful to teachers who can use the book as a source of questions which could be set in class or for homework to give students every chance to improve their Research Methods skills. Experience shows that these skills help students with the rest of their course, by improving their evaluation points when commenting on published research studies. Being good at Research Methods is the key to doing well in Psychology and this book gives students the practice they need to achieve that.