This document includes all 9 units that are tested on the AP exam in great detail. It includes all of the psychologists that are present on the AP exam aswell as their theories/ areas of psychology. Unit 2 is simplified for easy understanding and includes images. The document is 55 pages and is a c...
Barron’s Notes
Unit 1
- Chapter 1- Waves of thought
- Wave 1- Introspection
- Willhelm Wundt
- First person to set up psychological laboratory (in germany)
- Subjects asked to report on their cognitive reactions to simple stimuli
- “Structuralism”
- Idea that mind operates by combining subjective emotions and
objective sensations
- William James
- Published Psych textbook
- Identified how structures wundt found applied in real life
- Functionalism
- Mary Whiton Calkins
- President of APA
- Margaret Floy Washburn
- First woman with PhD in psych
- G Stanley hall
- STudent of james
- First president of APA
- Not huge influence today
- Wave 2- Gestalt Psychology
- Max Wetheimer
- Argued against dividing human thought and behavior into discrete
structures
- Tried to examine total experience
- Therapists used to understand context of client’s issues
- Not much other influence
- Wave 3- Psychoanalysis
- Freud
- Focus on unconscious mind
- Hidden part builds up through years of repression
- Must examine unconscious through dream analysis, word association,
and other therapy techniques
- Criticized today but basic ideas do help therapists
- Wave 4- Behaviorism
, - John B. Watson studied experiments of Pavlov
- Declared that for psych to be a science it has to limit itself to observable
phenomena not like the unconscious
- Believe that we should just look at behavior and causes of behavior
- BF Skinner
- Reinforcement, environmental stimuli that encourages/ discourages
certain responses
- Wave 5- Multiple perspectives
- Eclectic
- Drawing from many perspectives
- True for many psychologists
- Humanist
- Tried to describe mysterious aspects of consciousness
- Maslow and Rogers stressed individual choices and free will
- Believe our choices are guided by our psychological, emotional, and
spiritual needs
- Some view it as more historical rather than current
- Psychoanalytic
- Stresses unconscious mind
- Look for impulses or memories pushed into unconscious through
repression
- Focus on childhood as well
- Biopsychology (Neuroscience)
- Explain human thought/ behavior through biological processes
- Believe cognition and reactions are caused through genes, hormones, or
neurotransmitters
- Evolutionary
- Examine thoughts through natural selection
- Some traits may be advantageous to survival, those are the ones passed
down
- Similar to biopsychology
- Behavioral
- In terms of conditioning
- Look strictly at observable behaviors and responses
- Rewards/ Punishments
- Cognitive
- Explain thought and behavior through how we interpret, process, and
remember environmental events
- The rules that we use to view the world are important to understanding
why we think and behave the way we do
- Piaget
- Social-Cultural
- Emphasizes influence culture has on how we think and act
- Biopsychosocial
, - Combination of biological, psychological, and social factors
- View other perspectives as too focused on specific influences on
thinking and behavior
- Chapter 2- Methods
- Research Methods
- Hindsight bias
- After some research proved something people think that they knew it all
along
- Applied research
- Meant to solve practical problems
- Basic research
- Meant to increase scientific knowledge
- Doesn’t have immediate real world applications
- Terminology
- Hypothesis
- Explores relationship between two variab;es
- Dependent variable
- Gets affected
- Independent variable
- Effects the dependent variable
- Theory
- Aims to explore some phenomena and allows researchers to generate
testable hypotheses with the hope of collecting data that supports the
theory
- Operant definition
- Defining what constitutes as what you are looking for
- Ex. in an experiment about video games and violence you have to define
what violence would be
- Sheds light on validity and reliability of the research
- Validity and reliability
- Research is valid when it measures what the researcher set out to
measure; it is accurate
- Research is reliable when it can be replicated and receive similar results
- Sampling
- Process by which participants are selected
- Must first identify the population from which the sample will be selected
- Goal is to get a representative sample of a larger population
- Have to use enough people that it can actually be representative
- Can’t use too many people because then it's too expensive and time
consuming
- Stratified sampling is a process that allows a researcher to ensure that the
sample represents the population on some criteria
-
- Experimental method
, - Lab experiments are conducted in a lab, a highly controlled environment
- Can be more controlled
- Field experiments are conducted out in the world
- More realistic
- Psychologists prefer the experiment method as it shows a causal
relationship, allows to control for confounding variables
- Confound, any difference between the experimental and control
conditions, except for the independent variable that might affect
the dependent variable
- Assignment, the process by which participants are put into a group
- Random assignment, each participant has an equal chance of being
placed in any group
- Limits effect of participant relevant confounding variables
- Group matching
- Ensures that the experimental and control groups are equivalent
on some criteria
- Experimenter bias
- A special kind of situation-relevant confounding variable. It is
the unconscious tendency for researchers to treat members of the
experimental and control groups differently to increase the
chance of confirming their hypothesis.
- Double blind procedure
- Neither the experimenter or the participant can affect the
outcome
- Single blind
- Only participant doesn’t know
- Minimizes effect of demand characteristics, response, or
participant bias
- Social desirability
- Tendency to give answers that reflect well upon the participant
- Hawthorne effect
- Merely selecting a group of people on whom to experiment has
been determined to affect the performance of that group,
regardless of what is done to those individuals
- Placebo
- Counterbalancing
- Using group as their own control group
- Issues with order effects
- Correlational method
- Positive correlation
- Both occur in presence of each other
- Negative correlation
- One occurs in absence of the other one
- Ex post facto study
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