This document provides an overview of the key topics covered in an AP Psychology course, including major theories, approaches, figures, and areas of psychology. It discusses structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, and other major schools of thought. Additionally, it outlines the nature vs nurture debate, levels of analysis, and biological, behavioral, cognitive, and other perspectives. Major areas of psychology like developmental, social, and clinical psychology are also summarized.

1. AP Psychology

2.  Empiricism
 Structuralism
 Functionalism
 Experimental Psychology
 Behaviorism
 Humanistic Psychology
 Cognitive Neuroscience
 Psychology

3.  Nature-Nurture Issue
 Natural Selection
 Levels of Analysis
 Biopsychosocial Approach
 Biological Psychology
 Evolutionary Psychology
 Psychodynamic Psychology
 Behavioral Psychology
 Cognitive Psychology

4.  Social-cultural Psychology
 Psychometrics
 Basic Research
 Developmental Psychology
 Educational Psychology
 Personality Psychology
 Social Psychology
 Applied Research

5.  Industrial/ Organizational (I/O) Psychology
 Human Factors Psychology
 Counseling Psychology
 Clinical Psychology
 Psychiatry

6.  Psychology is a science
 Uses scientific methodology to study behavior
and mental processes
 A wide ranging discipline that can encompass any
aspect of human and nonhuman behavior
 Developed from the more established fields of
philosophy and biology

7.  Socrates (469-399 BC)
 Plato (428-348 BC)
 Aristotle (384-322 BC)
 Rene Descartes (1595-1650)
 Promoted Dualism- mind and body are seperate
 FrancisBacon (1561-1626)
 John Locke (1632-1704)
 Tabula Rasa (this aided in forming Empiricism)

8.  William Wundt
 The birth of modern psychology occurred in
December 1879 in Leipzig, Germany
 Wundt, Max Friedrich, and G. Stanley Hall
collected data for Friedrich’s dissertation on “the
duration of apperception” (the time lag between
the subject's recognition that he has heard the
ball hit the platform and his pressing of the
telegraph key)
 Edward Bradford Titchener

9.  WilliamJames
 Mary Whiton Calkins
 First female to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology at
Harvard, but was denied her degree
 Margaret Floy Washburn
 First female to receive a psychology Ph.D.
 Dorothea Dix
 Charles Darwin
 Natural selection shapes behaviors as well as
bodies

10.  John B. Watson
 B. F. Skinner
 Sigmund Freud
 Carl Rogers
 Abraham Maslow
 Charles DarwinIvan Pavlov
 Jean Piaget

11.  Structuralism
 Functionalism
 Behaviorism

12.  Uses introspection to explore the structural
elements of the human mind
 Has its basis in Wundt’s European
perspective. Titchener established this
school based on his work as Wudt’s student in
Germany
 Sought to identify what the mind and
consciousness were

13.  Focused on how our mental and behavioral
process function- how they enable us to
adapt, survive, and flourish
 Based on William James’ ideas about
psychology having practical applications to
life
 Assumed thinking was adaptive
 Soughtto identify how the mind and
consciousness worked

14.  Founded by John B. Watson
 He believed environment is the main component
of psychology (like Locke)
 The view that psychology
 Should be an objective science
 Studies behavior without reference to mental
processes
 B.F. Skinner rejected introspection and
studied how consequences shape behavior

15.  Sigmund Freud
 Id, Ego, Superego
 Focused
on meaning of early childhood
memories

16.  The Third Force
 In the 1950s and 1960s, psychologist followed
either the behaviorist or the psychoanalytic
perspective. Humanistic psychology offered
a third way of thinking about behavior
 Believes people are essentially good, unlike
psychoanalytic psychologist
 Believes human were unique and distinct from
animals, unlike behaviorist

17.  Emphasized the importance of current
environmental influences on our growth
potential, and the importance of having our
needs for love and acceptance satisfied

18.  Germany
 Studied how people organized perceptual
experiences in understandable ways.
 Developed rules for how we organize what
we sense and perceive
 “The whole is greater than the sum of its
parts”

19.  Supported ideas developed by earlier
psychologist, such as the importance of how
our mid processes and retains information

20.  Do our human traits develop through
experience or are we born with them?
 Evolution does not imply genetic
determinism
 Behavior can be changed
 Organisms do not have a conscious or
unconscious goal of maximizing gene
reproduction.
 Rather they most adaptive traits will survive due
to natural selection

21.  Integrated viewpoint incorporates various
levels of analysis and offers a more complete
picture of any given behavior or mental
process
 Everything is related to everything else

22. Psychological
Influence
Social-
Biological
Cultural
Influence
Influence
Behavior
or
mental
process

23.  Biological
 Evolutionary
 Psychodynamic
 Behavioral
 Cognitive
 Humanistic
 Social- Cultural

24.  How the body and brain enable
emotions, memories, and sensory
experiences; how genes combine with
environment to influence individual
differences
 Sample question:
 How are messages transmitted within the body?
How is blood chemistry linked with moods and
motives?

25.  How the natural selection of traits promoted
the survival of genes
 Sample questions
 How does evolution influence behavior
tendencies?

26.  How behavior springs from unconscious
drives and conflicts
 Sample question
 How can someone’s personality traits and
disorders be explained in terms of sexual and
aggressive drives or as the disguised effects of
unfulfilled wishes and childhood traumas?

27.  How we learn observable responses
 Sample question
 How do we learn to fear particular objects or
situations? What is the best way to alter our
behavior, say, to lose weight or stop smoking?

28.  How we encode, process, store, and retrieve
information
 Sample question
 How do we use information in remembering?
Reasoning? Solving problems?

29.  How we meet our needs for love and
acceptance and achieve self-fulfillment
 Sample question
 How can we work toward fulfilling our potential?
How can we overcome barriers to our personal
growth?

30.  How behavior and thinking vary across
situations and cultures
 Sample question
 How are we humans alike as member of one
human family? As products of different
environmental contexts, how do we differ?

31.  Basicresearch is more concerned with
discovering concepts or processes. It is less
practical in nature
 Much like Structuralism- want to discover what
the mind and consciousness were
 Appliedresearch is more concerned with
providing solutions to problems. It is more
practical in nature
 Like Functionalism- how the mind and
consciousness worked and how they helped
people adapt to circumstances

32.  Biological
 Clinical
 Cognitive
 Counseling
 Developmental
 Educational
 Experimental
 Human factors
 Industrial-Organization (I/O)
 Personality
 Psychometric
 Social

33.  Psychiatrist go to medical school and receive
training in the treatment of psychological
disorders during a special residency and they
can prescribe drugs
 Clinical psychologists earns a Ph.D. and
practice different psychologically based
treatments, or psychotherapies.