AP Psychology Exam Review

psychiatry

A branch of medicine dealing with psychological disorders; practiced by physicians who sometimes provide medical/drug treatments as well as psychological therapy. Medical degree M.D.

counseling psychology

A branch of psychology that assists people with problems in living (often related to school, work, or marriage) and in achieving greater well-being

psychodynamic/psychoanalytic perspective

A branch of psychology that studies how unconscious drives and conflicts influence behavior, and uses that information to treat people with psychological disorders (UNCONSCIOUS, CHILDHOOD)

developmental psychology

A branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span

clinical psychology

A branch of psychology that studies, assesses, and treats people with psychological disorders

evolutionary perspective

A relatively new specialty in psychology that sees behavior and mental processes in terms of their genetic adaptations for survival and reproduction (SURVIVAL VALUE, OFFSPRING)

functionalism

A school of psychology that focused on how our mental and behavioral processes function - how they enable us to adapt, survive, and flourish (William James).

behaviorism/behavioral perspective

A theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behavior-Skinner (LEARNING, REWARDS, PUNISHERS)

Robert Rescorla

American psychologist who experimentally demonstrated the involvement of cognitive processes in classical conditioning

Margaret Floy Washburn

American psychologist who studied animal behavior; first woman to receive a Ph.D. in psychology

structuralism

An early school of psychology that used introspection to explore the elemental structure of the human mind (WUNDT, TITCHENER).

biopsychosocial approach

An integrated approach that incorporates biological, psychological, and social-cultural levels of analysis (ECLECTIC)

Gazzaniga or Sperry

Bio Psych; Concepts: Split brain; Study Basics: Key aspects of split brain and how people with this situation will be able to perceive reality and particular sensory stimuli

Loftus

Cognition and memory; Concepts: False memories, memory consolidation; Study Basics: Showed how easily memories could be changed and falsely created by techniques such as leading questions and illustrating the poverty of accuracy in eyewitness reports.

Tolman

Cognition; Concepts: Cognitive map; Study Basics: Studied rats and discovered the cognitive map in rats and humans

Richard Walk

Created the visual cliff experiment with Eleanor Gibson

Mary Calkins

Denied Harvard PhD, but became first female head of American Psychological Association.

Julian Rotter

Developed terms: internal/external locus of control

Zajonc & Markus

Development; Concepts: Birth order, first born, middle child, intelligence; Study Basics: Discovered that first born and only children tend to have higher IQs than latter born children

Harlow

Development; Concepts: Love, attachment; Study Basics: Cloth monkey and wire monkey mothers: which would the child monkeys go to when scared?

Piaget

Development; Concepts: Object permanence, perception of reality by children, development of cognition; Study Basics: "The development of object concept: The construction of reality in the child."

Gibson & Walk

Development; Concepts: Visual Cliff; Study Basics: Visual Cliff studies with infants

Gilligan

Development; Concepts: gender in moral development; Study Basics: Did moral development studies to follow up Kohlberg. She studied girls and women and found that they did not score as high on his six stage scale because they focused more on relationships rather than laws and principles. Different reasoning, not better or worse

Kohlberg

Development; Concepts: stages of moral development; Study Basics: Studied boys responses to and processes of reasoning in making moral decisions. Most famous moral dilemma is "Heinz" who has an ill wife and cannot afford the medication. Should he steal the medication and why?

Festinger

Emotion, Social Cognition; Concepts: Cognitive dissonance; Study Basics: Studied and demonstrated cognitive dissonance

Ekman & Friesen

Emotion; Concepts: Universal Emotions (based upon facial expressions); Study Basics: Constants across culture in the face and emotion

Schacter

Emotions; Concepts: emotion and cognition; Study Basics: Worked with emotions and modified theory of emotions to include cognitions and their role in the formation of emotions

Lorenz

Ethology; Concepts: Imprinting, Critical periods; Study Basics: Did the ducks with imprinting and critical period work

human factors psychology

Explores how people and machines interact and how machines and physical environments can be made safe and easy to use (psychology + engineering)

Francis Cecil Sumner

First African American to receive a Ph.D in psychology

Margaret Floy Washburn

First women to get a PhD in psychology.

Gestalt psychology

Focuses on how we organize the world around us - perception. We create order out of chaos and make things "whole".

Terman

IQ and development; Concepts: IQ, longitudinal study, Emotional quotient; Study Basics: Tested group of young geniuses and followed in a longitudinal study that lasted beyond his own lifetime to show that high IQ does not necessarily lead to wonderful things in life. Daniel Goleman followed with EQ or Emotional Quotient that learning how to handle people and your own emotions in social situations can be more helpful than IQ.

empiricism/empirical methods

Information is collected by objective observations and experimentation using the scientific method.

Rosenthal & Jacobson

Intelligence and learning; Concepts: Self-fulfilling prophecy, Pygmalion Effect; Study Basics: Researchers misled teachers into believing that certain students had higher IQs. Teachers changed own behaviors and effectively raised the IQ of the randomly chosen students

Edward Lee Thorndike

Learning occurs gradually, positive consequence strengthen, negative do not weaken

Wolpe

Learning/Therapy; Concepts: Systematic desensitization; Study Basics: Systematic desensitization work

Watson & Raynor

Learning; Concepts: Classical conditioning terms, behavioral conditioning; Study Basics: Classical conditioning—conditioned fear into infants (including Little Albert) in order to examine how fears are learned and generalized

Pavlov

Learning; Concepts: Classical conditioning, unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response; Study Basics: Began by measuring the salivary reaction of dogs. Ended with a new understanding of associational learning and the conditioned reflex.

Skinner

Learning; Concepts: Operant conditioning, chaining; Study Basics: Trained animals to do complex behaviors; e.g. making pigeons exhibit superstitious behavior

biological/biopsychological perspective

Looking at the physical and genetic determines of behavior (BRAIN, BODY, GENES, HORMONES)

Ebbinghaus

Memory; Concepts: memory; Study Basics: Memory of meaningless words

Sigmund Freud

Most famous psychologist of all time. Developed the psychoanalytic approach. Ideas heavily influenced by Darwin.

Holmes & Rahe

Motivation; Concepts: Stress and coping; Study Basics: Using a "social readjustment scale" to measure stress

Masters & Johnson

Motivation; Concepts: Virtually anything sexual was now being talked about publicly; Study Basics: The human sexual response—studied how both men and women respond to and in relation to sexual behavior

John Locke

Nurture. "tabula rasa" - we are born a blank slate.

Richard Solomon

Opponent-process theory-the brain is structured in such a way that pleasurable emotions such as drug induced euphoria inevitably lead to opponent process-negative aftereffects- that leave the person feeling worse than usual

Rorschach

Personality Testing; Concepts: Ink-blot, projective test; Study Basics: "Psychodiagnostics: A diagnostic test based on perception."

Freud

Personality; Concepts: Defense mechanisms, ego, displacement, sublimation, projection, repression, regression, etc.; Study Basics: "The ego and the mechanisms of defense."

Seligman

Personality; Concepts: Learned helplessness; Study Basics: Learning to be depressed—the learned helplessness studies with dogs and electric shock

humanistic perspective

Perspective that emphasizes the growth potential of healthy people and the individual's potential for personal growth- think Maslow and Carl Rogers (NEEDS, SELF-ACTUALIZATION)

Survival of the Fittest (Natural Selection)

Process by which individuals that are better suited to their environment survive and reproduce most successfully (related to evolutionary approach)

Rosenhan

Psychopathology or Social Psych; Concepts: labeling; Study Basics: Rosenhan and colleagues checked selves into mental hospitals with symptoms of hearing voices say "empty, dull and thud." Diagnosed with schizophrenia. After entered, acted normally. Never "cleared" of diagnosis. Roles and labels in treating people differently.

basic research

Pure science that aims to increase the scientific knowledge base.

applied research

Research designed to help with everyday, practical problems.

psychology

Scientific study of behavior and mental processes

Hobson & McCarley

Sleep or Consciousness; Concepts: Activation-Synthesis Theory; Study Basics: Sleep studies that indicate the brain creates dream states, not information processing or Freudian interpretations

Asch

Social Cognition; Concepts: Conformity, group influence, factors increasing conformity; Study Basics: Asch deceived subjects by telling them it was a study in perception. He was really testing their conformity levels. Also called "the line study."

Darley & Latane

Social Psych; Concepts: "Bystander Intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility"

Langer & Rodin

Social Psych; Concepts: Helping behavior, personal responsibility; Study Basics: The effects of enhanced personal responsibility and helping behavior

Asch

Social Psych; Concepts: Opinions and social pressure;

Milgram

Social Psych; Concepts: Shock study, teacher/learner study or obedience study; Study Basics: "Behavioral study of obedience"—wanted to see if Germans were an aberration or if all people were capable of committing evil actions

Zimbardo

Social Psych; Concepts: prison study, expectations; Study Basics: simulated Prison Study that showed the power of roles in people's behaviors. When one takes on a role, they will often change their behavior in order to fit the perceived set of expectations for that role.

Edward Bradford Titchener

Structuralism; "thoughts and feelings can be reduced to sensations and images"

Jean Piaget

Swiss psychologist who pioneered the study of cognitive development in children; fourstage theory of cognitive development: 1. sensorimotor, 2. preoperational, 3. concrete operational, and 4. formal operational. He said that the two basic processes work in tandem to achieve cognitive growth-assimilation and accomodation

nature-nurture issue

The longstanding controversy over the relative contributions that genes and experience make to the development of psychological traits and behaviors

Introspection

The process of looking inward in an attempt to directly observe one's own psychological process -developed by Wundt.

social psychology

The scientific study of how we think about, influence, and relate to one another

industrial-organizational psychology

Uses psychological concepts and methods to optimizing human behavior in workplaces (HR help, employee incentive programs)

Edward Lee Sapir

With Whorf, developed "linguistic determinism" hypothesis

Ivan Pavlov

a Russian researcher in the early 1900s who was the first research into learned behavior (conditioning) who discovered classical conditioning

Max Wertheimer

a gestalt psychologist who argued against dividing human thought and behavior into discrete structures, Gestalt: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Herbert Simon

advanced study of problem solving

cognitive perspective

an approach to psychology that emphasizes internal mental processes (thinking) and how we view the world.

Amos Tversky

availability and representative heuristics

John Watson

behaviorism; emphasis on external behaviors of people and their reactions on a given situation; famous for Little Albert study in which baby was taught to fear a white rat

B F Skinner

behaviorism; pioneer in operant conditioning; behavior is based on an organism's reinforcement history; worked with pigeons

Edward Chace Tolman

behaviorist, demonstrated that rats that had explored a maze that contained food while they were not hungry were able to run it correctly on the first trial when they entered it having now been made hungry

Lev Vygotsky

child development; investigated how culture & interpersonal communication guide development; zone of proximal development; play research

Elizabeth Loftus

cognition and memory; studied repressed memories and false memories; showed how easily memories could be changed and falsely created by techniques such as leading questions and illustrating the inaccuracy in eyewitness testimony

William Stern

derived the intelligence quotient (IQ) from tests like the Stanford-Binet test

Stanley Schachter

emotion; stated that in order to experience emotions, a person must be physically aroused and know the emotion before you experience it

Beverly Inez Prosser

first African-American female to receive a Ph.D in psychology

George Sperling

first studied sensory memory using iconic memory, found that you can read visual info from sensory memories

Wilhelm Wundt

german physiologist who founded psychology as a formal science; opened first psychology research laboratory in 1879

Abraham Maslow

humanistic psychologist who developed a theory of motivation that emphasized psychological growth

Robert Sternberg

intelligence; devised the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence (academic problem-solving, practical, and creative)

Benjamin Whorf

language; his hypothesis is that language determines the way we think, "linguistic determinism"

Robert Zajonc

motivation; believes that we invent explanations to label feelings

Stanley Milgram

obedience to authority; had participants administer what they believed were dangerous electrical shocks to other participants; wanted to see if Germans were an aberration or if all people were capable of committing evil actions

Martin Seligman

researcher known for work on learned helplessness and learned optimism as well as positive psychology

Konrad Lorenz

researcher who focused on critical attachment periods in baby birds, a concept he called imprinting

Lewis Terman

revised Binet's IQ test and established norms for American children; tested group of young geniuses and followed in a longitudinal study that lasted beyond his own lifetime to show that high IQ does not necessarily lead to wonderful things in life

Robert Rosenthal

social psychology; focus on nonverbal communication, self-fulfilling prophecies; Studies: Pygmalion Effect-effect of teacher's expectations on students

Philip Zimbardo

social psychology; proved peoples behavior depends to a large extent on the roles they are asked to play

Roger Sperry

studied split brain patients; showed that left/right hemispheres have different functions

psychometrics

the scientific study of the measurement of human abilities, attitudes, and traits

personality psychology

the study of an individual's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and acting

educational psychology

the study of how psychological processes affect and can enhance teaching and learning

social-cultural perspective

the study of how situations and cultures affect our behavior and thinking (SOCIETY, CULTURE, GROUPS)