Important Names to Study for the Exam

The AP exam will not require you to be familiar with the work of many psychologists on the exam, but it may ask about a few. To prepare you, we have assembled a "Top 27" list of psychologists, the chapters in which we have discussed them, and brief descriptions of the psychologists' best-known work..

  1. Mary Ainsworth- Developmental Psychology
  2. Placed human infants into a "stranger situation" in order to examine attachment to parents
  3. Solomon Asch - Social Psychology
  4. Conformity experiment-people incorrectly reported lengths of lines
  5. Impression formation study-professor was warin or cold
  6. Albert Bandura - Learning and Personality
  7. Social-learning theory (modeling)
  8. Reciprocal determinism (triadic reciprocality)
  9. Self-efficacy
  10. Alfred Binet- Intelligence
  11. Creator of the first intelligence test
  12. Noam Chomsky – Thinking & Language
  13. Theorized the critical-period hypothesis for language acquisition
  14. Erik Erikson - Developmental Psychology
  15. Psychosocial stage theory of development (eight stages)
  16. Neo-Freudian
  17. Sigmund Freud - States of Consciousness and Personality
  18. Psychosexual stage theory of personality (oral, anal, phallic, and adult genital)
  19. Stressed importance of unconscious and sexual drive
  20. Psychoanalytic therapy
  21. Theory of dreaming
  22. Carol Gilligan - Developmental Psychology
  23. Challenged the universality of Kohlberg's moral development theory
  24. Harry Harlow - Developmental Psychology
  25. Experimented with infant monkeys and attachment
  26. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel - Sensation and Perception
  27. Discovered feature detectors, groups of neurons in the visual cortex that respond to different types of visual images.
  28. William James - Methods, Approaches, and History
  29. Published The Principles of Psychology, psychology's first textbook Functionalism
  30. Lawrence Kohlberg - Developmental Psychology
  31. Stage theory of moral development (preconventional, conventional, and postconventional)
  1. Elizabeth Loftus - Memory
  2. Demonstrated the problems with eyewitness testimony and constructive memory
  3. Alexandra Luria – Memory
  4. Tested eidetic memory
  5. Abraham Maslow – Motivation, Emotion, and Therapies
  6. Humanistic psychologist
  7. Hierarchy of needs, self-actualization
  8. Stanley Milgram - Social Psychology
  9. Obedience studies-participants think they are shocking a learner
  10. Ivan Pavlov - Learning
  11. Classical conditioning studies with dogs and salivation
  12. Jean Piaget - Developmental Psychology
  13. Stage theory of cognitive development (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations)
  14. Robert Rescorla - Learning
  15. Revised the Pavlovian contiguity model of classical conditioning
  16. Carl Rogers – Therapy and Personality
  17. Humanistic psychologist-person-centered therapy and unconditional positive regard
  18. Self theory of personality
  19. Stanley Schacter - Motivation and Emotion
  20. Two-factor theory for emotion
  21. B. F. Skinner- Learning
  22. Operant conditioning
  23. Invented Skinner box
  24. George Sperling – Memory
  25. Experimented with the nature of sensory memory
  26. Edward Tolman - Learning
  27. Experimented with latent learning
  28. Found that sometimes learning occurs but is not immediately evidenced
  29. John Watson - Learning
  30. Father of behaviorism
  31. Baby Albert experiment-classically conditioned fear
  32. Benjamin Whorf - Cognition/Language
  33. The linguistic relativity hypothesis
  34. Wilhelm Wundt - Methods, Approaches, and History
  35. Set up the first psychological laboratory in an apartment near the university at Leipzig, Germany
  36. Theory of structuralism