Prepare for the AP Psychology exam with this full review and practice questions. This comprehensive guide covers all units, theories, and psychological concepts.
Q: Psychology
Answer: The science of behavior and mental processes
Q: Positive Psychology
Answer: A field of research that focuses on people’s positive experiences and characteristics, such as happiness, optimism, and resilience.
Q: Biological Psychologists
Answer: Psychologists who analyze the biological factors influencing behavior and mental processes.
Q: Developmental Psychologists
Answer: Psychologists who seek to understand, describe, and explore how behavior and mental processes change over a lifetime.
Q: Cognitive Psychologists
Answer: Psychologists who study the mental processes underlying judgment, decision making, problem solving, imagining, and other aspects of human thought or cognition. Also called experimental psychologists.
Q: Clinical And Counseling Psychologists
Answer: Psychologists who seek to assess, understand, and change abnormal behavior.
Q: Educational Psychologists
Answer: Psychologists who study methods by which instructors teach and students learn and who apply their results to improving those methods
Q: School Psychologists
Answer: Psychologists who test IQ’s, diagnose students’ academic problems, and set up programs to improve students’ achievement
Q: Forensic Psychologists
Answer: Psychologists who assist in jury selection, evaluate defendants mental competence to stand trial, and deal with other issues involving psychology and the law.
Q: Psychodynamic Approach
Answer: A view developed by Freud that emphasizes the interplay of unconscious mental processes in determining human thought, feelings, and behavior.
Q: Behavioral Approach
Answer: An approach to psychology emphasizing that human behavior is determined mainly by what a person has learned, especially from rewards and punishments.
Q: Critical Thinking
Answer: The process of assessing claims and making judgments on the basis of well-supported evidence.
Q: Hypothesis
Answer: In scientific research, a prediction stated as a specific, testable proposition about a phenomenon.
Q: Variable
Answer: A factor or characteristic that is manipulated or measured in research
Q: Theory
Answer: An integrated set of propositions that can be used to account for, predict, and even suggest ways of controlling certain phenomena
Q: Naturalistic Observation
Answer: The process of watching without interfering as a phenomenon occurs in the natural environment.
Q: Case Study
Answer: A research method involving the intensive examination of some phenomenon in a particular individual, group, or situation.
Q: Survey
Answer: A research method that involves giving people questionnaires or special interviews designed to obtain descriptions of their attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and intentions.
Q: Control Group
Answer: In an experiment, the group that receives no treatment or provides some other baseline against which to compare the performance or response of the experimental group.
Q: Independent Variable
Answer: The variable manipulated by the researcher in an experiment.
Q: Dependent Variable
Answer: In an experiment, the factor affected by the independent variable.
Q: Placebo
Answer: A physical or psychological treatment that contains no active ingredient but produces an effect because the person receiving it believes it will.
Q: Experimenter Bias
Answer: A confounding variable that occurs when an experimenter unintentionally encourages participants to respond in a way that supports the hypothesis.
Q: Double-Blind Design
Answer: A research design in which neither the experimenter nor the participants know who is in the experimental group and who is in the control group.
Q: Sampling
Answer: The process of selecting participants who are members of the population that the researcher wishes to study.
Q: Correlation Coefficient
Answer: A statistic, r, that summarizes the strength and direction of a relationship between two variables.
Q: Statistically Significant
Answer: Referring to a correlation, or a difference between two groups, that is larger than would be expected by chance.
Q: Nervous System
Answer: A complex combination of cells whose primary function is to allow an organism to gain information about what is going on inside and outside the body and to respond appropriately.
Q: Neuron
Answer: Fundamental unit of the nervous system; nerve cell.
Q: Glial Cells
Answer: Cells in the nervous system that hold neurons together and help them communicate with one another.
Q: Axon
Answer: A fiber that carries signals from the body of a neuron out to where communication occurs with other neurons.
Q: Dendrite
Answer: A neuron fiber that receives signals from the axons of other neurons and carries those signals to the cell body.
Q: Synapse
Answer: The tiny gap between neurons across which they communicate
Q: Myelin
Answer: A fatty substance that wraps around some axons and increases the speed of action potentials.
Q: Neurotransmitters
Answer: Chemicals that assist in the transfer of signals from one neuron to another.
Q: Central Nervous System
Answer: The parts of the nervous system encased in bone, including the brain and the spinal cord.
Q: Autonomic Nervous System
Answer: A subsystem of the peripheral nervous system that carries messages between the central nervous system and the heart, lungs, and other organs and glands.
Q: Cerebellum
Answer: The part of the hindbrain whose main functions include controlling finely coordinated movements and storing memories about movement, but which may also be involved in impulse control, emotion, and language.
Q: Thalamus
Answer: A forebrain structure that relays signals from most sense organs to higher levels in the brain and plays an important role in processing and making sense out of this information.
Q: Hippocampus
Answer: A structure in the forebrain associated with the formation of new memories.
Q: Cerebral Cortex
Answer: The outer surface of the brain
Q: Corpus Callosum
Answer: A massive bundle of fibers that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres and allows them to communicate with each other.
Q: Dopamine
Answer: A neurotransmitter used in the parts of the brain involved in regulating movement and experiencing pleasure.
Q: Serotonin
Answer: A neurotransmitter used by cells in parts of the brain involved in the regulation of sleep, mood, and eating.
Q: Sensations
Answer: Messages from the senses that make up the raw information that affects many kinds of behavior and mental processes.
Q: Amplitude
Answer: The difference between the peak and the baseline of a waveform.
Q: Wavelength
Answer: The distance from one peak to the next in a waveform
Q: Frequency
Answer: The number of complete waveforms, or cycles, that pass by a given point in space every second.
Q: Cornea
Answer: The curved, transparent, protective layer through which light rays enter the eye.
Q: Pupil
Answer: An opening in the eye, just behind the cornea, through which light passes.
Q: Iris
Answer: The colorful part of the eye, which constricts or relaxes to adjust the amount of light entering the eye.
Q: Retina
Answer: The surface at the back of the eye onto which the lens focuses light rays.
Q: Rods
Answer: Highly light-sensitive, but color-insensitive, photoreceptors in the retina that allow vision even in dim light.
Q: Cones
Answer: Photoreceptors in the retina that help us to distinguish colors.
Q: Blind Spot
Answer: The light-insensitive point at which axons from all of the ganglion cells converge and exit the eyeball
Q: Optic Chiasm
Answer: Part of the bottom surface of the brain where half of each optic nerves fibers cross over to the opposite side of the brain.
Q: Trichromatic Theory
Answer: A theory of color vision identifying three types of visual elements, each of which is most sensitive to different wavelengths of light.
Q: Opponent-Process Theory
Answer: A theory of color vision stating that color-sensitive visual elements are grouped into red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white elements
Q: Perception
Answer: The process through which people take raw sensations from the environment and interpret them, using knowledge, experience, and understanding of the world, so that the sensations become meaningful experiences.
Q: Psychophysics
Answer: An area of research focusing on the relationship between the physical characteristics of environmental stimuli and the psychological experiences those stimuli produce.
Q: Signal-Detection Theory
Answer: A mathematical model of what determines a person’s report that a near-threshold stimulus has or has not occurred.
Q: Just-Noticeable Difference
Answer: The smallest detectable difference in stimulus energy
Q: Relative Size
Answer: A depth cue whereby larger objects are perceived as closer than smaller ones.
Q: Texture Gradient
Answer: A graduated change in the texture, or grain, of the visual field, whereby objects with finer, less detailed textures are perceived as more distant.
Q: Top-Down Processing
Answer: Aspects of recognition that are guided by higher-level cognitive processes and psychological factors such as expectations.
Q: Parallel Distributed Processing
Answer: An approach to understanding object recognition in which various elements of the object are thought to be simultaneously analyzed by a number of widely distributed, but connected, neural units in the brain.
Q: Classical Conditioning
Answer: A procedure in which a neutral stimulus is repeatedly paired with a stimulus that elicits a reflex or other response until the neutral stimulus alone comes to elicit a similar response.
Q: Unconditioned Stimulus
Answer: A stimulus that elicits a response without conditioning
Q: Unconditioned Response
Answer: The automatic or unlearned reaction to a stimulus
Q: Conditioned Stimulus
Answer: The originally neutral stimulus that, through pairing with the unconditioned stimulus, comes to elicit a conditioned response.
Q: Conditioned Response
Answer: The response that the conditioned stimulus elicits
Q: Extinction
Answer: The gradual disappearance of operant behavior due to elimination of rewards for that behavior.
Q: Spontaneous Recovery
Answer: The reappearance of the conditioned response after extinction and without further pairings of the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli
Q: Stimulus Generalization
Answer: A phenomenon in which a conditioned response is elicited by stimuli that are similar but not identical to the conditioned stimulus.
Q: Operant Conditioning
Answer: A process through which an organism learns to respond to the environment in a way that produces positive consequences and avoids negative ones
Q: Positive Reinforcers
Answer: Stimuli that strengthen a response if they follow that response.
Q: Negative Reinforcers
Answer: The removal of unpleasant stimuli, such as pain.
Q: Primary Reinforcers
Answer: Reinforcers that meet an organism’s basic needs, such as food and water.
Q: Latent Learning
Answer: Learning that is not demonstrated at the time it occurs
Q: Observational Learning
Answer: Learning how to perform new behaviors by watching others
Q: Encoding
Answer: The process of acquiring information and entering it into memory.
Q: Storage
Answer: The process of maintaining information in memory over time
Q: Retrieval
Answer: The process of recalling information stored in memory
Q: Episodic Memory
Answer: Memory of an event that happened while one was present.
Q: Semantic Memory
Answer: A type of memory containing generalized knowledge of the world.
Q: Explicit Memory
Answer: The process in which people intentionally try to remember something
Q: Implicit Memory
Answer: The unintentional influence of prior experiences
Q: Maintenance Rehearsal
Answer: Repeating information over and over to keep it active in short-term memory.
Q: Elaborative Rehearsal
Answer: A memorization method that involves thinking about how new information relates to information already stored in long-term memory.
Q: Parallel Distributed Processing (Pdp) Models
Answer: Memory models in which new experiences change one’s overall knowledge base.
Q: Selective Attention
Answer: The focusing of mental resources on only part of the stimulus field
Q: Short-Term Memory
Answer: The maintenance component of working memory, which holds unrehearsed information for a limited time.
Q: Chunks
Answer: Stimuli that are perceived as one unit or as a meaningful grouping of information.
Q: Long-Term Memory
Answer: ) A relatively long-lasting stage of memory whose capacity to store new information is believed to be unlimited.
Q: Primacy Effect
Answer: A characteristic of memory in which recall of the first two or three items in a list is particularly good.
Q: Recency Effect
Answer: A characteristic of memory in which recall is particularly good for the last few items in a list.
Q: Context-Dependent Memory
Answer: Memory that can be helped or hindered by similarities or differences between the context in which it is learned and the context in which it is recalled.
Q: State-Dependent Memory
Answer: Memory that is aided or impeded by a person’s internal state.
Q: Anterograde Amnesia
Answer: A loss of memory for any event that occurs after a brain injury
Q: Retrograde Amnesia
Answer: A loss of memory for events prior to a brain injury.