2026 AP Psychology Full Exam Review (EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW!!) Includes ALL 750+ AP concepts!

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]We are about to review all of AP psychology. This is the only video you'll need to study for the exam. I'm going to go over more than 750 terms across five units, including unit one, biological basis of behavior, unit two, cognition, unit three, development and learning, unit four, social psychology and personality, and unit five, mental and physical health. The entire course starts with this question. Are we shaped more by biology or by experience? The answer psychologists have landed on is that it's always both. Your genes give you predispositions, a higher likelihood of developing certain traits or conditions. But your environment determines which of these predispositions actually get expressed.

[00:00:34]Research designs differential contributions of nature and nurture.

[00:00:36]Twin studies compare identical twins who share all their genes with fraternal twins who share about half of their genes. Adoption studies compare adopes to both their biological and adoptive parents. Family studies look at trait patterns across relatives. The evolutionary perspective argues that behavior is aiding survival got passed down through natural selection. But know that this has been misapplied through eugenics, a practice of forcibly sterilizing people deemed to have undesirable traits. Think of a hierarchy. The CNS, the brain, and spinal cord occupy the top of the chain and coordinate everything. The spinal cord can even handle simple reflex arcs without consulting the brain. The PNS extends outward, linking the CNS to the rest of your body through sensory neurons carrying information in and motor neurons carrying commands out.

[00:01:11]Within the PNS, the sematic system covers deliberate movement, raising your hand, walking across a room. The autonomic system manages automatic functions, heartbeat, digestion, and pupil dilation. The autonomic splits again. Sympathetic is your gas pedal for emergencies and parasympathetic is the break that settles everything back to normal. Don't confuse sematic and sympathetic. Both start with an S, but sematic is voluntary and sympathetic is automatic. The endocrine system ships hormones via the bloodstream directed by the pituitary gland, which the hypothalamus controls. The label diagram on the screen shows you the parts of the neuron. Dendrites gather incoming signals. The cell body increases all that input and determines if the combined input warrants forwarding, which is discussed further in the next slide. If it is, the message races across the axon insulated by the myelin sheath, which is a fatty layer made by gial cells that forces the signal to jump between gaps called nodes of ranva through saltatory conduction dramatically accelerating transmission.

[00:01:58]At the end, the axon terminal passes the message onward. When myelin breaks down, as in multiple sclerosis or myina gravis, neural communication deteriorates. There are three types of neurons. Sensory ones shuttle information toward the brain. Moto runs fy instructions outward and inter neurons handle all the computing in between. Quick plug. If you're looking to get a hard copy of these slides, be sure to check out the link in the description below. And if you're interested in Elite College consulting, we offer that, too. Be sure to subscribe for more updates. All right, back to the video. When a neuron is idle, it carries a negative charge internally. That's resting potential, its ready state.

[00:02:28]Stimulation has to reach a critical level called a threshold before it responds. Once it does, the neuron fires an action potential. Depolarization flips the charge positive.

[00:02:36]Repolarization returns it to negative, and the refractory period blocks immediate refiring. The all ornone principle is essential. Partial signals do not exist. It either goes or it stays silent. So, how does your brain tell the difference between a whisper and a shout? By varying the firing rate of neurons and recruiting more neurons.

[00:02:51]Once the electrical signal arrives at the axon terminal, it needs to jump across the syninnapse, which is a tiny gap between neurons. Neurotransmitters get launched from vesicles, drift across the synaptic clft, and bind to receptor sites on the next neurons dendrite. The messages they deliver are either excitatory or inhibitory. Many NTS can play either role depending on which receptor they land on. where a neurotransmitter is located in the nervous system can also shift its function. After transmission, reuptake vacuums leftover neurotransmitters back into the sending neuron to terminate the message. Re-uptake inhibitors jam that cleanup process. SSRIs do it with serotonin. Cocaine does it with dopamine. Agonist and person NTS and pylon. Antagonists bind receptors and sit in the receptor and keep the real NTS out. There are eight neurotransmitters you need to know. AC is behind every voluntary muscle twitch and plays a major role in forming memories. Alzheimer's disease involves a steady die off of AC producing neurons.

[00:03:37]Dopamine powers your pleasure circuits and voluntary movement. An overload shows up as schizophrenia, while running too low brings Parkinson's tremors.

[00:03:44]Serotonin keeps mood, sleep, and appetite on an even keel. A shortage is the go-to biological store behind depression. GABA is the main chemical that quiets neural activity. Without enough of it, you're going to get anxiety and seizures. Glutamate does the opposite, revving the activity up for learning. Endorphins are your built-in pain relief. Opioid drugs hijack those same receptors. Norepinephrine keeps you alert and responsive to stress. An excess leaves you jittery while deficit leaves you drained. And substance peak carries pain messages up into the brain.

[00:04:11]Hormones work just like NTS but take the slow route through the bloodstream.

[00:04:14]Linger for days rather than milliseconds and reach your whole body at once. Five specific ones are testable. Adrenaline for fight or flight. Leptin from fat signals signaling fullness. Grein from the stomach signaling hunger. Melatonin from the pineal gland promoting sleep.

[00:04:26]And oxytocin promoting social bonding.

[00:04:28]For psychoactive drugs, every single one operates by hijacking these NT systems as an agonist, antagonist or reuptake inhibitor. There are four categories you need to know. Stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, and opioids. With extended use, your brain will develop tolerance, and cutting off after addiction sets in triggers withdrawal.

[00:04:44]The brain sacks from the oldest at the bottom to the newest at the top. The medulla at the base keeps your lungs going and your heart ticking. Losing it is almost always fatal. The ponds bridges lower and upper brain regions and has a hand and sleep regulation. The RA governs your overall arousal and decides which sensory information is worth bringing to your attention. The brain's reward center ties into motivation, pleasure, learning, and certain types of movement. And the cerebellum smooths out your coordination, supports balance, and stores a muscle memory for practice skills. But the key point is that it refineses movement without ever actually starting it. There are five structures to nail down here. The phalamus routes sensory information to the right cortical area for every sense except one. That's smell. Smell travels directly through the alactory bulb straight into emotional brain regions, which is exactly why a particular scent can instantly bring back a vivid memory.

[00:05:25]The hypothalamus manages homeostasis, keeping hunger, thirst, temperature, and daily rhythms in check. It also directs the pituitary gland, which orchestrates every other hormone producing gland in your body. The pituitary itself isn't technically part of the brain. The amydala is where fear and threat detection happen. And the hippocampus is where short-term memories get packaged into long-term ones. Though the memories themselves end up stored all over the cortex. Lose it and you get enterrograde amnesia, meaning you cannot form new memories going forward. The cerebral cortex is the wrinkled outer layer where all your complex thinking lives. The frontal lobe houses the prefrontal cortex for planning and decision-making.

[00:05:56]The motor cortex for voluntary movement and Broca's area for speech production where damage makes speech halting and labor. The parietal lobe is home to the somataensory cortex and association areas with body regions mapped by sensitivity rather than size. The temporal lobe handles hearing and contains verix area for language comprehension where damage produced fluent but nonsensical speech. The occipital lobe handles vision. The corpus colosum ties the two halves together and split brain research on patients whose connection was severed showed each hemisphere has its own specialties. Neuroplasticity means your brain can reroute around damage throughout your entire life, though mostly in birth. Researcher studies with fMRI for tracking activity, EEG for recording electrical patterns, CT and MRI for viewing anatomy, lesioning for testing what happens when tissue is destroyed, and case studies of patients with injuries. Being awake and asleep are different stages of consciousness, your awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings. Your circadian rhythm runs about 24 hours and trained by light. REM sleep produces brain waves resembling wakefulness.

[00:06:50]Paradoxial sleep while your body is paralyzed by muscle atonia. Vivid dreaming happens here. REM periods lengthen as the night progresses and REM rebound after deprivation proves your brain needs it. For ENREM, stage one is the lightest transition with theta waves and hypnogogic sensations, feeling like you're falling, seeing patterns, or hearing voices. Stage two is still theta waves with the longest proportion of total sleep time. Stage three is deep slow wave sleep with delta waves. It's the most restorative and there's growth hormone that's released during this time. Also, sleepwalking, sleepalking, and night terrors also happen very n stage three. Night tears are like nightmares except you don't actually remember them once you wake up. There are two main dream theories. Activation synthesis says the brain stem fires randomly during REM and the cortex improvises a story. That story is the dream. Consolidation theory says sleep actively replace and strengthens memories from the day. Sleep restores the body to homeostasis and consolidates memories. The fact that disruptions impair your thinking and mood is itself evidence that sleep is biologically necessary. There are five disorders to know. Insomnia is the most common.

[00:07:45]Narcolepsy is a sudden untrouble REM sleep attack. Sleep apnea is repeated breathing sensation. Somni ambulism which is sleepwalking happens in NREM 3.

[00:07:53]And REM behavior disorder means that normal paralysis fails. Sensation detects stimuli through transduction converting physical energy into neural signals. Perception is the brain's interpretation of all those signals. The absolute threshold is the minimum stimulus you can detect half the time, like a candle flame from 30 miles away on a dark night. Weber's loss is a just noticeable difference is a constant proportion. You notice the difference between one pound and two, but not between 100 and 102. Signal detection theory adds that your psychological state matters. Motivation, expectations, and consequences all shift your sensitivity. Walking a tight row with versus without a net changes your detection threshold completely. Sensory adaption tunes out constant stimulus so your brain focuses on changes. And senesthesia is when senses cross, literally hearing colors or seeing sounds. There's two types of photo receptors. Rods in the periphery, which is about 120 million per eye, handle dim light in motion, but cannot see color.

[00:08:39]They drive light and dark adaptation.

[00:08:41]Cones in the phobia, of which there are about 6 million, require both light and process color through three types, blue, green, and red. There are two color theories, both correct at different processing stages. Triomatic at the receptor level combines three cone types like RGB pixels. Opponent process the gang cell level uses opposing pairs and explains after images. Dromatism means one cone type is out. Monochromatism is black and white only. For the eye itself, light enters through the cornea.

[00:09:04]The lens focuses via accommodation. And a fat eyeball means nearsightedness while a skinny one means far-sightedness. Everyone has a blind spot. The brain fills in. And cortical damage can cause propagnosia or blind sight. Sound waves enter the ear. The osticles amplify vibrations and hair cells in the basler membrane inside the coia transduce them into the neural signals. Three theories handle different pitches. Place theory for high, frequency theory for low, and valley theory for mid-range. Sound localization uses timing and intensity differences between the ears. Conduction deafness is mechanical damage while sensory neural is hair cell or nerve damage. It's more common and usually more permanent.

[00:09:36]Alaction is the only sense that skips the phalamus going straight to the lyic system via the alactory ball. That's why smells trigger emotional memories.

[00:09:43]Pherommones are chemical olfactory signals. There are six basic tastes.

[00:09:46]Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and oologus. Taste sensity varies from super tasters to non-tasters. This is the last part of unit one. The sensation of hot is actually produced by warm and cold receptors firing simultaneously. Your brain interprets a combination as heat.

[00:10:00]Substance P carries pain signals and gate control theory says the spinal cord has a neural gate that can be closed by competing input. Phantom limb sensation means that amputes feel pain or sensation where the limb used to be and the vestibular sense handles balance through semic-ircular canals. Kesthesia tracks body position through muscle and joint receptors. That's how you touch your nose with your eyes still closed.

[00:10:18]Bottom up processing takes in raw sensory data with no expectations. Pure feature detection. Top-down processing uses context and prior knowledge to guide interpretation, like reading terrible handwriting. Schemas and perceptual sets are internal frameworks that filter what you notice. And cultural background matters. Different people can generally perceive the same scene differently. Selective attention lets you hear your name across a crowded room. That's called the cocktail party effect. But inattentional blindness means you can completely miss a gorilla walking through a basketball name when your counting passes. Change blindness is failing to notice even major visual changes during brief interruptions.

[00:10:48]Binocular depth cues require both eyes, retinal disparity, and convergence. Five moninocular cues create depth on flat surfaces, relative clarity, relative size, texture gradient, linear perspective, and interposition. Gestalt principles describe how the brain organizes. Figure ground, proximity, similarity, and closure. Perceptual constencies keep objects stable despite changing retinal images. Size, shape, and color all stay constant. Apparent movement, which is flashing lights in sequence, is the basis of video.

[00:11:14]Concepts and prototypes are the building blocks. A golden retriever, for example, is a prototypical dog. Schemas update their assimilation and accommodation.

[00:11:21]Algorithms guarantee solutions but are slow, while heristics are mental shortcuts with predictable errors. The representativeness heristic ignores base rates, judging that a shy person, for example, must always be a librarian. The availability heristic overweights vivid, easily recalled events like plane crashes. Priming, mental set, and the framing effect all influences decisions without actually changing the facts. The gamblers's fallacy of thinks that past random events affects future odds, while the sunk cost fallacy keeps investing because of what's already been spent.

[00:11:47]Functional fixedness and convergent thinking block creative solutions, while divergent thinking does the opposite.

[00:11:52]Executive functions in the prefrontal cortex handle planning and impulse control. Explicit memory is conscious.

[00:11:58]It's episodic for personal events, semantic for facts. Implicit memory is expressed through performance.

[00:12:02]Procedural memory for skills like riding a bike. Prospective memory is remembering to do things in the future.

[00:12:07]LTP is the biological mechanism. Neurons that fire together wire together. The multi-storm model. Sensory memory flows to short-term flows to longterm. Echoic memory holds sounds briefly while iconic memory holds images for about a half a second. Short-term holds roughly seven items up for up to 30 seconds. Working memory dynamically processes information through a central executive funological loop and visual spatial sketch pad. And the levels of processing model says semantic encoding processing meaning always produces the strongest most durable memories. Monic devices deepen encoding. The method of loai associates items with locations in a familiar place. Chunking groups items into meaningful units and acronyms compress information. The self- reference effect means relating material to yourself creates the strongest encoding. The spacing effect states that distributed practice destroys cramming. The testing effect states that actively retrieving beats passively rereading every single time. And the serial position effect states that you remember beginnings and endings best. Add a delay before testing and recency vanishes because working memory clears but primacy holds. The hippocampus consolidates memories but doesn't store them. Once consolidated, they distribute across the cortex.

[00:13:11]Maintenance rehearsal, which is simple repetition, prolongs storage, but elaborative rehearsal, making meaningful connections, is far more durable. Ham individuals recall extraordinary autobiographical detail, suggesting biological abilities for enhanced storage. Antrograde amnesia means you can't form new explicit memories. You essentially wake up in the same day every single day, though implicit skills like riding a bike often remain intact.

[00:13:31]Retrograde amnesia means you can't retrieve old memories which often happens after a concussion. Alzheimer's involves progressive memory loss starting with recent events linked to AC neuron death. Infantalesia is completely normal and basically just means you can't remember anything from ages 2 to three. Recall generates answers from scratch like essay questions.

[00:13:48]Recognition picks from options like multiple choice questions. Relearning proves that traces persist. Previously learned material comes back faster than new material even when you think you've forgotten it completely. There are three retrieval enhancers. context dependent memory, mood congruent memory, and state dependent memory. Metacognition, which is awareness of your own learning, helps you allocate study time to the material you haven't actually learned yet. The Eping House forgetting curve shows that forgetting is steepest right after learning, then levels off. Space review flattens it. Encoding failure means the memory is never properly stored in the first place. There are two types of interference. Proactive interference means that an old memory blocks recall of a new one. Retroactive interference is when an new memory disrupts an old one. Repression is Freud's idea that threatening memories are unconsciously blocked, which is debatable. Loft showed that the misinformation effect can alter memories. Changing the word smash to hit after a car crash video change what participants actually remembered seeing.

[00:14:38]Source amnesia is remembering a fact but forgetting where you actually heard it and imagination inflation increases confidence that imagine events actually happened. The bottom line is that false memories can be implanted and eyewitness testimony is therefore unreliable.

[00:14:49]Defining and measuring intelligence is hard. Spearman's G proposes one general factor. While the multiple intelligences camp, which is gardener's eight plus types, Serber's analytic creative practical tribe, says it's many distinct abilities. IQ was originally mental age divided by actual age times 100. Now it identifies students needing extra support at both ends. The Flynn effect shows the scores rise about three points per decade from environmental factors.

[00:15:11]Requirements for all psychological assessments, including IQ tests, include standardization, reliability, and validity. Social cultural responsivity reduces stereotype threat and stereotype lift. Achievement tests measure what you've learned, while aptitude tests predict future performance. Growth mindset, which is believed that intelligence is malleable, leads to greater persistence and fixed mindset.

[00:15:30]There's three debates: stability versus change, nature versus nurture, continuous versus sages, and it's always both. Cross-sectional studies compare different ages simultaneously, but confound generational differences.

[00:15:40]Longitudinal ones follow the same people, but are expensive with attrition. Teratogens like alcohol cause FAS, which is the leading preventable intellectual disability. Development follows the same general order, but timing varies. Fine motor skills like picking up a cheerio and gross motor skills like walking mark major milestones. Reflexes like rooting indicate healthy development. The visual cliff show death reception and crawling infants. Critical periods mean certain experiences must happen within specific windows. And language is the clearest example of this. Some animals imprint on the first object they encounter. During puberty, the prefrontal cortex matures after the lyic system. Intense emotions plus weak impulse control. Adulthood brings gradual decline in menopause, mobility, reaction time, and sensory acuity. The test wants you to know that biological sex is chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy, while gender is a socially constructed layer. Gender roles vary hugely across cultures. You should also know that two theories, social learning and gender schema. Finally, know that sexual orientation is biological and prenatal influences while conversion therapy is shown to have zero evidence and causes documented harm. There are two primary theorists when it comes to cognitive development. The first one said that children build knowledge through schemas updated via assimilation and accommodation. There are four stages that he came up with. sensory motor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Beigotsski emphasizes social dimension. The ZPD is what you can do with help, and scaffolding is the temporary support that's gradually withdrawn. Crystallized intelligence holds or increases with age, while fluid peaks in the mid20s and declines. Dementia can affect adults, and low intelligence early in life is itself a risk factor. Language is shared, often arbitrary, rule governed by grammar and generative.

[00:17:11]Building blocks include phonms, which are sound units, and morphs, which are meaning units.

[00:17:16]There are universal stages to learning language. Non-verbal gestures, cooing, babbling, holof phrases, and then telegraphic speech. Over a generalization, saying for example, go proves that children are learning rules and not just imitating. The critical period means that language exposure before puberty is essential. Broeria controls production while ver controls comprehension. You should know both of those aacious from earlier. There's a two-prong superior warf hypothesis. The strong version states that language is determined in thought which is rejected and the weak version says that influences perception. That's accepted.

[00:17:46]Temperament is innate and influences attachment. Aims were a strange situation identify four styles. Secure at about 60%, insecure, avoidant, insecure, anxious, and disorganized.

[00:17:56]Styles vary by culture. Harlo proved that contact comfort matters more than feeding. Monkeys preferred the soft cloth surrogate. There are three parenting styles: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. Cultural context can change the outcomes. Brophen Brren's ecological model nest development in layers from the microsystem through the chronos. and aces have cumulative lifelong health effects. What counts as an ace may vary across cultures. Each of Ericson's eight psychosocial stages present a crisis from trust versus mistrust and infancy through integrity versus the despair in a late adulthood. Marcia expanded the identity stage into four statuses.

[00:18:28]Achievement, foreclosure, moratorium and diffusion. Identity development spans racial, gender, religious, occupational, and familiar dimensions through imagining possible selves. Children develop through parallel play and pretend play. Adolescence show egoentrism through the imaginary audience and personal fable. that their social clock creates pressure to hit milestones on time and some cultures recognize emerging adulthood as a distinct period. Childhood attachment can also influence adult romantic relationships.

[00:18:52]The behavioral perspective focuses on observable behavior, not internal mental processes. Classical conditioning is when you pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus that naturally triggers a response. After enough pairings, a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus which triggers a conditioned response. CS before UCS is the most effective. Acquisition strengthens the association. Extension phases CR with the CS of pairs alone, but it's not truly race because spontaneous recovery can bring it back.

[00:19:17]Generalization extends the response to simul stimuli and discrimination narrows it. Higher order conditioning chains new associations. Little Albert proved emotions can be conditioned. Counter conditioning reverses fears by pairing the CS with something pleasant, the foundation of therapeutic techniques.

[00:19:31]Garcia's taste aversion broke the rules.

[00:19:33]One trial, hours of delay, and biological preparedness means we're predisposed to associates taste with nausea. Habituation, which is decreased response to constant stimulation, is a similous form of learning. Operate condition states behavior through consequences. Thornikeke's law of effects states that satisfying outcomes get repeated while unpleasant ones don't. There are four quantities to the table. Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment. Primary reinforcers satisfy biological needs, while secondary ones have learned value like money or grades. Shaping builds complex behavior through successive approximations. But instinctive drift means trained behaviors can revert to species typical patterns. Superstitious behavior is when accidental reinforcement creates false associations. Learned helplessness became the model for depression.

[00:20:13]Continuous reinforcement, which rewards every response, produces the fastest learning, but also the fastest extinction. Partial schedules resist instinction much better. Fixed ratio rewards after a set number of responses.

[00:20:23]Variable ratio rewards unpredictably and produces the highest response rate with the strongest resistance to extinction.

[00:20:28]That's why slot machines and social media are addictive. Fixed interval rewards the first response after a set time and it produces a scalped pattern cramming right before weekly quizzes.

[00:20:37]Variable interval variable interval rewards at unpredictable times, keeping you constantly prepared, like pop quizzes. Each schedule produces a distinctive graph pattern you should be able to recognize. Social learning theory states you can learn just by watching with no direct reinforcement.

[00:20:49]The more similar the model, the more likely you copy them. In the Boba doll experiment, children reproduce exact aggressive behaviors they'd observed.

[00:20:56]Even kids who saw the model get punished had still learned it. They just didn't perform it until incentivized. This proves learning and performance are different things. Insight learning is when solutions come all at once in an aha moment. While latent learning shows that learning can hide until there's actually a motivation to demonstrate it.

[00:21:09]Attributions explain behavior.

[00:21:11]Dispositional blames the character while situational blame circumstances. Locus of control is when you fall on a spectrum. Internal believing you control your outcomes linked to better health and achievement versus external believing fate controls you linked to learn helpfulness. People develop a predictable explanatory style which is either optimistic or pessimistic. The fundamental attribution error is the most important concept. We consistently overestimate personality while explaining other people's behavior. The actor observer bias means we blame the situation for ourselves but personality for others.

[00:21:40]The self-serving bias is when we credit for the wins and blame the situation for losses. The just world phenomenon leads to victim blaming. The mere exposure effect states that repeated exposure increases liking. Self-fulfilling prophecies mean that expectations literally shape others behavior.

[00:21:54]Social comparison and relative deprivation mean happiness depends on comparison, not absolute level. And the halo effect means that one positive impression biases your overall judgment towards a person. Attitudes have three parts. Stereotypes are cognitive generalizations feeding prejudice and discrimination. Implicit attitudes operate unconsciously. Related biases include outgroup homogeneity, in-group bias, and ethnosentrism. Belief perseverance plus confirmation bias lock people into their existing views.

[00:22:19]Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable tension when behavior contradicts attitudes. To reduce it, you need to change one or the other.

[00:22:26]Social norms define expected behavior.

[00:22:28]Normative influence means that you need to conform to be liked. Informational influence is when you conform because the group might be right. The elaboration likelihood model states that central persuasion uses careful argument evaluation for lasting change. While the peripheral route relies on surface use for temporary change. There's also a couple of methods to kind of carry out this persuasion. There's the foot in the door method and the door in the face method. Ash also showed the impact of conformity. Mgram showed that 65% delivered maximum shock under authority.

[00:22:55]Social facilitation improves simple task performance but hurts complex tasks with an audience. Individualism, collectivism, and multiculturism all shape self-perception. De-individuation is lost identity in groups which produces impulsive behavior. Group polarization pushes existing views to extremes after discussion. Group think suppresses descent for harmony and social loafing leads less individual effort in groups. Diffusion of responsibility means that everyone assumes someone else will act and the false consensus effect overestimates agreement. The bystander effect means that more witnesses means less individual helping. Superordinate goals reduce intergroup conflict. Social traps happen when self-interest undermines the group. There's also pro-social behavior.

[00:23:33]IIO psychology studies workplace performance management and burnout.

[00:23:37]Freud said that there was a personality driven by the unconscious. There's three parts. The it is your devil operating on the pleasure principle. The super the super ego is your angel enforcing moral standards and the ego mediates between them and reality. When they conflict, the ego deploys defense mechanisms, unconscious strategies that reduce the conflict. You should know all eight: repression, denial, projection, displacement, reaction formation, rationalization, sublimation, and regression. These are constant FRQ material. You should also know about projective tests and neoians who adapted Freud's models. Reciprocal determinism says personality emerges from the continuous interaction of personal factors, behavior, and environment.

[00:24:10]Self-concept, which is how you view yourself, has two key components, self-e self-efficacy, and self-esteem. You should not confuse them. Trade theories say personality stable, enduring characteristics. The big five, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are identified through factor analysis and replicated cross-culturally. Traits predict aggregate behavior, but any single situation can override personality. The drive reduction theory states that biological needs create drives, and behavior restores homeostasis. Arousal theory and the Eurodson law say that performance peaks a moder arousal an inverted U as we see up here in the top right hand corner.

[00:24:43]Self-determination theory says people are motivated by intrinsic or exttrinsic rewards. Incentive theory says that behavior is pulled by external rewards.

[00:24:51]Instincts are innate fixed patterns in non-human animals and humans don't really have them. The overjustification effect states that rewarding someone for something they already enjoy decreases their actual intrinsic motivation.

[00:25:01]Luan's conflicts include approach approach, avoidance, avoidance, and approach avoidance. Sensation seeking has four subtypes. For when we talk about eating, ghrelin again singles hunger, leptin singles fullness, and it's regulated all by the hypothalamus.

[00:25:13]External factors like food presence, the time of day, and social situations can also influence eating. Emotion is distinct from reasoning. There are three theories that the exam would like you to know. That's the body first, simultaneous, and two factor theories.

[00:25:25]The facial feedback hypothesis says that expressions can influence experience.

[00:25:29]There's somewhat unclear evidence for this. Broaden build says that positive emotions expand awareness while negative emotions narrow it. There are also six key facial expressions I recognize across cultures. The universality findings are mixed. Display rules and elicitors vary by culture, gender, age, and class. On to unit five, our last full unit. Health psychology studies how bio, psych, and social factors affect health. Stress contributes to hypertension, headaches, and immune suppression. Stress is your appraisal of the event, not the event itself. Use stress motivates while distress to buildates. Daily hassles are actually stronger health predictors in major events while aces are lifelong stress sources. GS has three stages: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion. Tendum befriend is the way that some people respond to stress through social connection rather than confrontation.

[00:26:11]Problem focused coping addresses the stressor when you have control. And emotion focus manages your reaction when you don't. Deep breathing, meditation, exercise, and medication. Social support is the strongest protective buffer.

[00:26:22]Positive psychology studies flourishing well-being, resilience, and strengths.

[00:26:26]Gratitude measurably increases well-being while exercising your character strengths like wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence boosts happiness.

[00:26:34]Post-traumatic growth is the opposite of PTSD. Growth mindset, believing that abilities are malleable, leads to persistence. Fixed mindset leads to avoidance. The adaptation level phenomenon, which says that happiness returns to baseline after major changes, is also incredibly important. Disorder equals dysfunction plus distress plus devian. But cultural context always matters. Diagnosing requires specialized training and evidence-based tools. The DSM is used in the EU while the ICD is used internationally. There are seven causal perspectives: biological, behavioral, psychonamic, humanistic, cognitive, evolutionary, and social cultural. You need to know this for the FRQs on your exam. Most clinicians use an electic approach. The biocschosocial model integrates everything while the diiathesis stress model says that a genetic vulnerability stays dormant until stress triggers it. Think of a cup gradually filling with water until it overflows. Diagnostic labels carry consequences, both access to treatment and stigma, and can be influenced by racism, sexism, and other discrimination. Anxiety disorders are the most common globally. GAD is a chronic worry without a clear trigger.

[00:27:32]Specific phobias involve disproportionate fear. Social anxiety is fear of judgment. Agorophobia is fear of situations where escape is difficult.

[00:27:39]There are also two cultural disorders that you need to know. Panic disorder features recurrent unexpected attacks, while anxiety causes include conditioning, biological preparedness, genetics, and cognitive biases. OCD cycles between intrusive obsessions and anxiety reducing compulsions. PTSD includes hypervigilance, flashbacks, emotional detachment, insomnia lasting over a month, but not everyone who's exposed to trauma develops it.

[00:27:59]Depressive disorders involve persistent sad, empty, or irritable mood impairing daily function. MDD requires a specific list of symptoms to be diagnosed with it. PDD is the chronic lower intensity form. There are several causes of each.

[00:28:11]Bipolar disorders cycle between depression and mania. While bipolar one is full manic episodes, bipolar 2 is a little bit calmer. Schizophrenia has five symptom areas, acute or chronic.

[00:28:21]Positive symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, word salad, and catatonia, which can be excited movement or frozen stuper. Negative symptoms include flat affect and withdrawal. The dopamine hypothesis links overactive dopamine to positive symptoms while twin while twin concordance is about 50%.

[00:28:36]Dissociative disorders involve consciousness and identity disruptions.

[00:28:39]DID is not schizophrenia. ADHD and ASD are neurodedevelopmental. Personality disorders come in three clusters. A is odd, B is dramatic, and C is anxious.

[00:28:47]And OC personality disorder is different from OCD. You should also know two eating disorders for AP psych. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

[00:28:55]Psychotherapy is evidence-based treatment backed by metaanalysis.

[00:28:58]Therapists build therapeutic alliances, respect cultural norms, and follow APA ethics. Psychonamic therapy uses free association and dream interpretation and is a little bit questionable. Cognitive therapy from Beck challenges cognitive distortions. CBT combines both and is the most broadly supported treatment.

[00:29:13]DBT adds mindfulness for BBT. REBT challenges irrational beliefs. Personal therapy or PCT from Rogers provides unconditional positive regard and active listening. Hypnosis works for pain and anxiety but does not recover memories and group therapy and family systems can also provide benefits.

[00:29:30]SSRIs block serotonin reuptake which is the first line for depression, anxiety and OCD. Benzoazipines enhance GABA for anxiety but carry dependence risk.

[00:29:39]Lithium stabilizes bipolar.

[00:29:40]Antiscychotics block dumping for schizophrenia but wrist heart of diskynesia. There are also several physical interventions though labbotoy is not used very much anymore. There's also TMS and ect. Moving on to research methods. These will show up all over the multiple choice question of your exam.

[00:29:54]So you need to make sure that you have those down. Experiments manipulate an independent variable, measure the dependent variable randomly assigned to groups and can establish cause and effect. Confounding variables, however, do threaten validity in some cases.

[00:30:06]Non-experimental methods including case studies, correlations, naturalistic observation, and meta analyses cannot prove causation. Operational definitions make variables measurable and replicable. A hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable. And the golden rule is that correlation does not equal causation because of the directionality problem and the third variable problem.

[00:30:22]Random assignment to groups is what makes an experiment an experiment.

[00:30:25]Different from random sampling from a population, which enables generalization. Convenient sampling introduces bias and the control group is the baseline, sometimes receiving a placebo. Single blind hides group assignment from participants while double blind hides it from researchers too. Qualitative measures collect non-numerical data while quantitative collect numbers. Watch for self-report and social desiraability bias. Science advances through peer review and replication.

[00:30:47]You should definitely know what mean, median, and mode are and also how to calculate them. In skewed data, median resists outliers best while standard deviation measures spread across the mean. The normal curve includes a 68, 95, and 99.7 rule. You need to memorize this for the exam. Positive skew means that the tail goes right and negative skew means that the tail goes left.

[00:31:05]Biotal distributions have two peaks and percentile rank means that you beat x% of the group. Correlation coefficient, the sign tells direction and the absolute value tells you the strength.

[00:31:15]Effect size tells you if a finding actually matters practically and statistical significance means rewards probably aren't random chance, but it does not tell you that the effect is necessarily important. Regression towards the means that extreme scores naturally become less extreme on retesting. This is our last slide and you should know that for research ethics, the IRB reviews every study before it begins for both human and animal research. Informed consent means participants know what they're getting into and can leave any time. For children, that's informed as confidentiality keeps data private.

[00:31:43]Deception using confederates must be followed by a debriefing. Animal research must be humane, justified, and supervised. That's everything. Every concept across all five units, plus research methods and statistics. Good luck on exam day. Go get that five.