AP Psychology review for the AP exam
Step 1: review all vocabulary terms!!!!
Step 2: Read and reflect on the following unit summaries
Step 3: Breathe: It’ll be okay… you know more than you think!!!
§ I. History and Approaches (2–4%)
§ II. Research Methods (6–8%)
§ III. Biological Bases of Behavior (8–10%)
§ IV. Sensation and Perception (7–9%)
§ V. States of Consciousness (2–4%)
§ VI. Learning (7–9%)
§ VII. Cognition (8–10%)
§ VIII. Motivation and Emotion (7–9%)
§ IX. Developmental Psychology (7–9%)
§ X. Personality (6–8%)
§ XI. Testing and Individual Differences (5–7%)
§ XII. Abnormal Psychology (7–9%)
§ XIII. Treatment of Psychological Disorders (5–7%)
§ XIV. Social Psychology (7–9%)
WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?
Psychology’s Roots
Psychology traces its roots back through recorded history to the writings of many scholars who spent their lives wondering about people—in India, China, the Middle East, and Europe. In their attempt to understand human nature, they looked carefully at how our minds work and how our bodies relate to our minds.
Prescientific Psychology
More than 2000 years ago, Buddha and Confucius focused on the power and origins of ideas. In other parts of the world, the ancient Hebrews, Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle pondered whether mind and body are connected or distinct, and whether human ideas are innate or result from experience. In the 1700s, René Descartes and John Locke reengaged aspects of those ancient debates, and Locke coined his famous description of the mind as a "white paper."
Psychological Science Is Born
Psychology as we know it today was born in a laboratory in Germany in the late 1800s, when Wilhelm Wundt ran the first true experiments in psychology’s first lab. Soon, the new discipline formed branches: structuralism, which searched for the basic elements of the mind, and functionalism, which tried to explain why we do what we do. William James, a pragmatist and functionalist, wrote the first text for the new discipline.
Psychological Science Develops
After beginning as a "science of mental life," psychology evolved in the 1920s into a "science of observable behavior." After rediscovering the mind in the 1960s, psychology now views itself as a "science of behavior and mental processes." Psychology is growing and globalizing, as psychologists in 69 countries around the world work, teach, and do research.
Contemporary Psychology
Psychology’s Perspectives
Psychologists view behavior and mental processes from various perspectives. These viewpoints are complementary, not contradictory, and each offers useful insights in the study of behavior and mental processes.
Psychology’s Subfields
Psychology’s subfields encompass basic research (often done by biological, developmental, cognitive, personality, and social psychologists), applied research (sometimes conducted by industrial/organizational psychologists), and clinical applications. Psychology’s methods and findings aid other disciplines, and they contribute to the growing knowledge base we apply in our everyday lives.
WHY DO PSYCHOLOGY?
What About Intuition and Common Sense?
Although in some ways we outsmart the smartest computers, our intuition often goes awry. To err is human. Without scientific inquiry and critical thinking we readily succumb to hindsight bias, also called the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. Learning the outcome of a study (or of an everyday happening) can make it seem like obvious common sense. We also are routinely overconfident of our judgments, thanks partly to our bias to seek information that confirms them. Such biases lead us to overestimate our unaided intuition.
Enter psychological science. Science, with its procedures for gathering and sifting evidence, restrains error. Although limited by the testable questions it can address, a scientific approach helps us sift reality from illusion, taking us beyond the limits of our intuition and common sense.
The Scientific Attitude and Critical Thinking
Scientific inquiry begins with an attitude—a curious eagerness to skeptically scrutinize competing ideas and an open-minded humility before nature. Putting ideas, even crazy-sounding ideas, to the test helps us winnow sense from nonsense. The curiosity that drives us to test ideas and to expose their underlying assumptions carries into everyday life as critical thinking.
HOW DO PSYCHOLOGISTS ASK AND ANSWER QUESTIONS?
The Scientific Method
Research stimulates the construction of theories, which organize observations and imply predictive hypotheses. These hypotheses (predictions) are then tested to validate and refine the theory and to suggest practical applications.
Description
The Case Study, the Survey, and Naturalistic Observation
Through individual case studies, surveys among random samples of a population, and naturalistic observations, psychologists observe and describe behavior and mental processes. In generalizing from observations, remember: Representative samples are a better guide than vivid examples.
Correlation
Correlation and Causation
The strength of the relationship between one factor and another is expressed as a number in their correlation coefficient. Scatterplots and the correlations they reveal help us to see relationships that the naked eye might miss. Knowing how closely two things are positively or negatively correlated tells us how much one predicts the other. But it is crucial to remember that correlation is a measure of relationship; it does not reveal cause and effect.
Illusory Correlations and Perceiving Order in Random Events
Correlations also help us to discount relationships that do not exist. Illusory correlations—random events we notice and assume are related—arise from our search for patterns.
Experimentation
To discover cause-and-effect relationships, psychologists conduct experiments. By constructing a controlled reality, experimenters can manipulate one or more factors and discover how these independent variables affect a particular behavior, the dependent variable.
Evaluating Therapies, and Can Subliminal Tapes Improve Your Life?
In many experiments, control is achieved by randomly assigning people either to the experimental condition, the group exposed to the treatment, or to a control condition, a group that experiences no treatment or a different version of the treatment.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY
Can Laboratory Experiments Illuminate Everyday Life?
By intentionally creating a controlled, artificial environment in the lab, researchers aim to test theoretical principles. These principles help us to understand, describe, explain, and predict everyday behaviors.
Does Behavior Depend on One’s Culture and Gender?
Attitudes and behaviors do vary between genders and across cultures, but the principles that underlie them vary much less. Cross-cultural psychology explores both our cultural differences and the universal similarities that define our human kinship.
Why Do Psychologists Study Animals?
Some psychologists study animals out of an interest in animal behavior. Others do so because knowledge of the physiological and psychological processes of animals gives them a better understanding of the similar processes operating in humans.
Is It Ethical to Experiment on Animals?
Only about 7 percent of all psychological experiments involve animals, and under ethical and legal guidelines these animals rarely experience pain. Nevertheless, animal rights groups raise an important issue: Even if it leads to the relief of human suffering, is an animal’s temporary suffering justified?
Is It Ethical to Experiment on People?
Occasionally researchers temporarily stress or deceive people in order to learn something important. Professional ethical standards provide guidelines concerning the treatment of both human and animal participants.
Is Psychology Free of Value Judgments?
Psychology is not value-free. Psychologists’ own values influence their choice of research topics, their theories and observations, their labels for behavior, and their professional advice.
Is Psychology Potentially Dangerous?
Knowledge is power that can be used for good or evil. Applications of psychology’s principles have so far been overwhelmingly for the good. Psychology addresses some of humanity’s greatest problems and deepest longings.
TIPS FOR STUDYING PSYCHOLOGY
How can psychological principles help you as a student?
1. Distribute your study time.
2. Learn to think critically.
3. In class, listen actively.
4. Overlearn.
5. Be a smart test-taker.
___NEURAL COMMUNICATION
The body’s circuitry, the nervous system, consists of billions of individual cells called neurons. A neuron receives signals from other neurons through its branching dendrites and cell body, combines these signals in the cell body, and transmits an electrical impulse (the action potential) down its axon. When these signals reach the end of the axon, they stimulate the release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. These molecules pass on their excitatory or inhibitory messages as they traverse the synaptic gap between neurons and combine with receptor sites on neighboring neurons. Researchers are studying neurotransmitters to discern their role in behavior and emotion. Some drugs (agonists) excite by mimicking particular neurotransmitters or blocking their reuptake; others (antagonists) inhibit by blocking neurotransmiters.
THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
The central nervous system’s neurons in the brain and spinal cord communicate with the peripheral nervous system’s sensory and motor neurons. The peripheral nervous system has two main divisions. The somatic nervous system directs voluntary movements and reflexes. The autonomic nervous system, through its sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions, controls our involuntary muscles and glands. Like people clustering into neighborhoods, neurons cluster into working networks.
THE BRAIN
Clinical observations have long revealed the general effects of damage to various areas of the brain. But CT and MRI scans now reveal brain structures, and EEG, PET, and functional MRI recordings reveal brain activity. By surgically lesioning or electrically stimulating specific brain areas, by recording the brain’s surface electrical activity, and by displaying neural activity with computer-aided brain scans, neuroscientists explore the connections among brain, mind, and behavior.
Lower-Level Brain Structures
The brainstem begins where the spinal cord swells to form the medulla, which controls heartbeat and breathing. Within the brainstem, the reticular formation controls arousal. Atop the brainstem is the thalamus, the brain’s sensory switchboard. The cerebellum, attached to the rear of the brainstem, coordinates muscle movement.
Between the brainstem and cerebral cortex is the limbic system, which is linked to memory, emotions, and drives. One of its neural centers, the amygdala, is involved in responses of aggression and fear. Another, the hypothalamus, is involved in various bodily maintenance functions, pleasurable rewards, and the control of the hormonal system.
The Cerebral Cortex
Each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex—the neural fabric that covers the hemispheres—has four geographic areas: the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. Small, well-defined regions within these lobes control muscle movement and receive information from the body senses. However, most of the cortex—its association areas—is uncommitted to such functions and is therefore free to process other information.
Some brain regions serve specific functions (figure 2.30, page 94). The brain divides its labor into specialized subtasks and then integrates the various outputs from its neural networks. Thus, our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors result from the intricate coordination of many brain areas. Language, for example, depends on a chain of events in several brain regions. If one hemisphere is damaged early in life, the other will pick up many of its functions, thus demonstrating the brain’s plasticity.
BRAIN REORGANIZATION
Our Ever-Changing Brain
If one hemisphere is damaged early in life (in the first five years), the other will pick up many of its functions, thus demonstrating the brain’s plasticity. Although the brain is less plastic later in life, nearby neurons may partially compensate for damaged ones, as when a patient recovers from a minor stroke.
Our Divided Brain
Clinical observations long ago revealed that the left cerebral hemisphere is crucial for language. Experiments on people with a severed corpus callosum have refined our knowledge of each hemisphere’s special functions. Separately testing the two hemispheres, researchers have confirmed that in most people the left hemisphere is the more verbal, and that the right hemisphere excels in visual perception and the recognition of emotion. Studies of healthy people with intact brains confirm that each hemisphere makes unique contributions to the integrated functioning of the brain.
THE ENDOCRINE SYSTEM
This chapter has focused on the body’s speedy electrochemical information system. There is, however, another communication system. Hormones released by the endocrine glands form the body’s slower information system.
GENES: OUR BIOLOGICAL BLUEPRINT
Genes (DNA segments that form the chromosomes) are the biochemical units of heredity. They provide the blueprint for protein molecules, the building blocks of our physical and behavioral development.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: MAXIMIZING FITNESS
Evolutionary psychologists study how natural selection has shaped our universal behavior tendencies. They reason that if organisms vary, if only some mature to produce surviving offspring, and if certain inherited behavior tendencies assist that survival, then nature must select those tendencies. They believe this helps explain gender differences in sexuality. Critics maintain that evolutionary psychologists make too many hindsight explanations.
BEHAVIOR GENETICS: PREDICTING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Behavior geneticists explore our individual differences. Using methods such as twin, adoption, and temperament studies, they identify the heritability of various traits and disorders.
Studies of the inheritance of temperament, and of twins and adopted children, provide scientific support for the idea that nature and nurture influence one’s developing personality. Genes and environment, biological and social factors, direct our life courses as their effects intertwine.
Molecular geneticists are on a fast-moving frontier in their work to identify the specific genes that influence behaviors.
ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCE
Genetic influences are pervasive, but so are prenatal environments, early experiences, peer influences, and cultures. Sculpted by experience, neural interconnections multiply rapidly after birth. Human variations across cultures and over time show how differing norms, or expectations, guide behavior. Cultures differ in their norms for personal space, expressiveness, and pace of life.
THE NATURE AND NURTURE OF GENDER
Although males and females share similarly adaptive bodily procedures, differing sex chromosomes and differing concentrations of sex hormones lead to significant physiological sex differences. Yet gender differences vary widely depending upon cultural socialization through social learning and gender schemas.
PRENATAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE NEWBORN
Conception and Prenatal Development
Developmental psychologists examine how we develop physically, cognitively, and socially, from conception to death. The life cycle begins when one sperm cell, out of the some 200 million ejaculated, unites with an egg to form a zygote. Attached to the uterine wall, the developing embryo begins to form body organs. By the ninth week, the fetus becomes recognizably human. The mother eats, drinks, and breathes for two, so that any teratogens she ingests can reach the developing child and place it at risk.