Application of Psychology Final Paper

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