Psychology is the study of the human mind, its functions and the impact of that on our behaviour. Below, you will find a list of things that you could use to learn more about Psychology, or to improve a future application to university.
Books; There are all sorts of different books that can be included in Psychology, ranging from popular culture best sellers, to books about topics as diverse as sleep, crime, brain development, sport and a wide-range of textbooks and academic reads. The sample below should offer a good range:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
A range of books by Malcolm Gladwell including Blink; Outliers; and The Tipping Point
Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed (psychology of teamwork, relevance for several areas but Syed writes extensively on sport) several other Syed books are worth mentioning - Bounce; and Black Box Thinking
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
The Human Mind by Paul Bloom
The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
Magazines, Journals and Websites; The British Psychological Society maintain a free website full of articles but you can also pay to access a magazine and to get additional benefits from the website; Psychology Today are a well known magazine, mainly focused on popular culture type Psychology like health and fitness, but they have a free website; Scientific American is a Science magazine but covers a lot of Psychology; The Association for Psychological Science (APS) maintain a magazine called Observer and a range of journals and their material is far more academic than the popular culture dominated magazines.
Podcasts; The major podcast sources, such as Spotify and Podbean, have a wide-range of podcasts that are easy to search for, but some examples are; Speaking of Psychology which is produced by the highly prestigious American Psychological Association; Hidden Brain which is based on different stories from all over the world which involve aspects of Psychology; Choiceology with Katy Milkman is about the decisions people make, why they make them and how to improve them, and veers into the behavioural economics area of Psychology; Pop Psych 101 is a podcast dedicated to exploring how mental health is portrayed in popular culture and discusses the use of mental health conditions in the latest books, movies, TV and music; All in the Mind is a general interest Phycology podcast from the BBC; The Psychology Podcast is among the most listened to in this area and covers the whole range of Psychology; Shrink Rap Radio is a long running series which has an excellent best of section in which you can find topics as diverse as sleep, addiction, children, ADHD and trauma among others; The Sport Psych Show is a UK based podcast around the science of Sports Psychology.
YouTube Channels; The excellent Crash Course series has a Crash Course Psychology course with 40 short videos, well worth utilising to get a broad understanding of lots of different aspects of Psychology (and very easy to watch); Bite Size Psych is popular Psychology and looks at aspects of Psychology in every day life; SciShow Psych has a range of easy to follow videos on some of the major concepts or examples from Psychology, including famous studies or experiments; Psychology Unlocked is also good for a general overview of some of the more common or important aspects of Psychology as an area of study.
Video; Gresham College (link goes to Psychology search results) offer free lectures on diverse topics, including the Psychology of the stock market, and collections on Psychology in other disciplines like Politics, Finance and Criminology; The popular TED Talks (link goes to Psychology search results) website has hundreds of Psychology videos, including animations from the excellent TED ED series of educational videos.
Competitions; The John Locke Institute runs an annual and highly reputable essay competition and you can choose Psychology as a topic; Minds Underground have a Psychology category in their annual competition; Immerse Education, a company who sell summer school experiences around the world, offer a competition to win one of ten funded places at one of their summer school events (including overseas); The American Psychological Association have an international competition but it is only open to people who study Psychology at school; The International Psychology Olympiad is an international school competition for teams and you require a teacher to sign up; Royal Holloway University of London offer a schools competition for teams, but the event is held in person on their site and quite limited in number.
Activities; If your school don't cover Psychology as a subject, then starting a club could be a good way of filling that gap, and finding like-minded people who want to spend time discussing it - you could use the resources listed above to find things to watch, read or listen to together, or to do so in advance and then discuss at the club. Alternatively, offer to deliver an assembly on it or to go into a younger yeargroup and tell them about it.