Free CLEP Intro Psychology Exam Flashcards

Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. This event is traditionally marked as the birth of psychology as a distinct experimental science, separate from philosophy.

Structuralism (Edward Titchener) used introspection to break conscious experience into its basic elements. Functionalism (William James) instead asked what mental processes and behaviors are for - their adaptive purpose.

Watson founded behaviorism, arguing psychology should study only observable behavior rather than unobservable mental states. He conducted the Little Albert study, conditioning a fear response in an infant using a white rat.

Psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud, emphasizes unconscious conflicts and childhood psychosexual experiences as the hidden drivers of adult personality and behavior.

Hours of sleep is the independent variable because the researcher manipulates it. Memory score is the dependent variable because it is the outcome being measured.

This is a correlational study - it measures the natural relationship between two variables. Because nothing is manipulated, it can show association but never proves that one variable causes the other.

Asch found that many participants gave an obviously wrong answer to a simple line-judgment task just to match a unanimous group of confederates, showing the power of social conformity to group pressure.

Milgram found that a majority of ordinary participants would administer what they believed were increasingly painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to another person simply because an authority figure instructed them to continue.

Leon Festinger identified cognitive dissonance as the mental discomfort of holding two conflicting beliefs, or a belief that conflicts with behavior. People typically resolve it by changing their attitude rather than their behavior.

The tendency, when explaining someone else's behavior, to overestimate the role of their personality or disposition and underestimate the role of the situation they are in.

The bystander effect is the finding that a person is less likely to help a victim as the number of other bystanders increases. Latane and Darley attributed it to diffusion of responsibility - each bystander assumes someone else will act.

Dopamine drives reward, motivation, and motor control. Abnormally low dopamine is linked to Parkinson's disease movement symptoms; overactive dopamine signaling is linked to symptoms of schizophrenia.

The hippocampus forms and organizes new long-term memories. The amygdala processes emotional reactions, especially fear, and helps tag emotionally charged events for stronger memory.

The sympathetic division triggers the fight-or-flight arousal response (increased heart rate, adrenaline release). The parasympathetic division calms the body afterward - the rest-and-digest response.

GABA is the brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter - it reduces neural activity and calms firing. Drugs that enhance GABA activity, such as benzodiazepines, are used to treat anxiety.

The UCS (unconditioned stimulus) naturally triggers the UCR (unconditioned response) without learning. After repeated pairing, a neutral stimulus becomes the CS (conditioned stimulus), which triggers the learned CR (conditioned response) - as when Pavlov's dogs salivated to a bell.

Operant conditioning (B.F. Skinner) shapes voluntary behavior through consequences that follow it - reinforcement increases behavior, punishment decreases it. Classical conditioning instead pairs two stimuli to produce an involuntary reflex response.

The variable-ratio schedule, which reinforces after an unpredictable number of responses (like a slot machine), produces the fastest response rate and is the most resistant to extinction.

Albert Bandura showed that children can learn a behavior - aggression toward the doll - simply by observing and imitating a model, without any direct reinforcement of their own. This is observational learning.

Information flows from sensory memory (a very brief trace) into short-term/working memory (limited capacity, about 7 plus or minus 2 items per Miller) and, if rehearsed, into long-term memory (relatively permanent storage).

Hermann Ebbinghaus found that forgetting is fastest immediately after learning and then levels off over time, rather than declining at a steady rate. This finding underlies spaced-repetition study strategies.

Encoding gets information into memory, storage retains it over time, and retrieval accesses it later. A memory failure can occur at any one of these three stages.

An intelligence quotient score, historically mental age divided by chronological age times 100, is now a deviation score (as on the Wechsler scales) comparing a person's performance to same-age peers on reasoning and problem-solving tasks.

Sensorimotor (birth to about age 2), preoperational (about 2 to 7), concrete operational (about 7 to 11), and formal operational (about 12 and up), each marked by a qualitatively different way of thinking.

Object permanence - understanding that an object still exists even when it can no longer be seen, heard, or touched.

Trust vs. mistrust, occurring in infancy. An infant who receives reliable, responsive care develops a basic sense of trust in the world; inconsistent care fosters mistrust.

Ainsworth identified infant attachment styles - secure, insecure-avoidant, and insecure-resistant (ambivalent) - based on how infants reacted to separation from and reunion with a caregiver.

Major depressive disorder involves persistent depressed mood and loss of interest without manic episodes. Bipolar disorder involves mood that alternates between depressive episodes and manic (or hypomanic) episodes of elevated energy and impulsivity.

Positive symptoms add abnormal experiences, such as hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized speech. Negative symptoms take away normal functioning, such as flat affect, social withdrawal, and reduced motivation (avolition).

It proposes that a disorder emerges when an underlying vulnerability (diathesis - a genetic or biological predisposition) interacts with an environmental stressor. Either factor alone may not be enough to trigger the disorder.

Generalized anxiety disorder involves chronic, excessive worry about many areas of life. Panic disorder involves recurrent, sudden episodes of intense fear (panic attacks), often with physical symptoms like a racing heart.

The id acts on the pleasure principle, seeking instinctual gratification. The ego operates on the reality principle, mediating between desires and reality. The superego is the internalized moral conscience that judges right and wrong.

Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism - often remembered as OCEAN - the dominant trait model used in current personality research and assessment.

Accepting and valuing a person regardless of what they say or do. Rogers considered it essential for healthy personality growth and for effective client-centered (humanistic) therapy.

Self-efficacy is a person's belief in their own competence to succeed at a task. Reciprocal determinism is the idea that personal factors, behavior, and the environment continuously influence one another.

The absolute threshold is the minimum stimulus intensity a person can detect 50% of the time. The JND (difference threshold) is the smallest change between two stimuli that a person can reliably detect.

The just noticeable difference between two stimuli is a constant proportion (percentage) of the original stimulus's intensity, not a fixed amount - so detecting a change in a heavy weight requires a bigger absolute increase than detecting a change in a light one.

The tendency to organize a visual scene into a central object (the figure) that stands out against a background (the ground) - the classic basis of reversible images like the face/vase illusion.

A gradual decrease in responsiveness to a constant, unchanging stimulus over time - such as no longer noticing a scent after being in a room for a few minutes.

CBT targets both distorted thinking patterns and the behaviors connected to them, working to change unhelpful cognitions and actions together rather than exploring unconscious causes.

Developed by Joseph Wolpe, systematic desensitization treats phobias by gradually exposing a client to the feared stimulus while pairing it with relaxation techniques, replacing the anxiety response.

Treatment that targets the biological or neurochemical basis of a disorder, primarily through psychotropic medication or, in severe cases, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Rapid eye movement sleep is the stage associated with the most vivid dreaming; brain activity closely resembles wakefulness even though the body's major muscles are effectively paralyzed.

The circadian rhythm is the body's roughly 24-hour biological clock, governed largely by the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the hypothalamus, which responds to light cues to regulate the sleep-wake cycle.

Depressants (like alcohol) slow central nervous system activity. Stimulants (like caffeine or amphetamines) speed it up. Hallucinogens (like LSD) distort perception and thought rather than simply speeding or slowing arousal.

Physiological needs, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization at the top. Maslow proposed that lower needs generally must be reasonably satisfied before higher ones become motivating.

James-Lange proposes the body reacts first and the brain then interprets that physical arousal as an emotion. Cannon-Bard proposes the physiological arousal and the subjective emotion occur simultaneously and independently.

It proposes that emotion requires both physiological arousal and a cognitive label - the person must interpret the surrounding context to decide which emotion the arousal represents.

Reliability means a test produces consistent, repeatable results. Validity means the test actually measures the construct it claims to measure. A test can be reliable without being valid, but a valid test must also be reasonably reliable.

The negative sign shows an inverse relationship (as one variable rises, the other falls), and the value's closeness to 1 shows the relationship is strong. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to +1, and no correlation value proves causation.