CLEP Intro Psychology Exam Flashcards

Q: What is the CLEP Introductory Psychology exam pass rate?

College Board does not publish an official pass rate for individual CLEP exams, including Introductory Psychology. Third-party test-prep sources often report high pass rates among candidates who studied, but these are not official College Board statistics. What is official: a scaled score of 50 (on the 20-80 scale) is the American Council on Education's recommended credit-granting score.

Q: How many questions are on the exam and how much time do I get?

The exam has approximately 95 multiple-choice questions administered in 90 minutes - roughly 57 seconds per question. It is computer-based and surveys the content of a full introductory college psychology course.

Q: What happens if I fail and want to retake the exam?

College Board requires a three-month wait before retaking an exam of the same title, and the clock starts on your original test date. Testing again before the window closes voids the new attempt, cancels the score, and forfeits the fee. There is no limit on total retakes.

Q: Do I need my college's or an instructor's sponsorship to register?

No. Anyone can register and pay for a CLEP exam directly through College Board; no employer or school sponsorship is required. Each college sets its own policy on which score it accepts for credit, so confirm your target institution's requirement before test day.

Q: Which content area is tested most heavily?

History, Approaches, and Methods is the largest area at 11-12% of the exam, covering founding theorists, schools of thought, and research methods. Social Psychology is second largest at 9-10%. Statistics, Tests, and Measurement is the smallest area at just 3-4%.

Q: Do disorder questions use DSM-5 or older terminology?

Questions about psychological disorders follow the terminology and classifications of the DSM-5 (fifth edition), so study current diagnostic categories such as major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder rather than older DSM-IV labels.

Question 1

Who founded the first formal psychology laboratory, and when?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 2

How do structuralism and functionalism differ?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 3

What did John B. Watson found, and what famous study is he known for?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 4

What does Freud's psychoanalytic approach emphasize?

Accepted Answer

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

Question 5

A study manipulates hours of sleep to measure next-day memory scores. Which variable is independent and which is dependent?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 6

A researcher measures whether hours of study correlate with GPA but changes nothing. Which method is this, and what can't it prove?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 7

What did Solomon Asch's conformity experiment demonstrate?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 8

What did Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment reveal?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 9

What is cognitive dissonance, and who identified it?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 10

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 11

What is the bystander effect, and what causes it?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 12

What is dopamine's main role, and what happens when its levels are abnormal?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 13

Hippocampus vs. amygdala - what does each do?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 14

Sympathetic vs. parasympathetic nervous system - what does each do?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 15

What is GABA's primary function in the nervous system?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 16

In Pavlov's classical conditioning, what do UCS, UCR, CS, and CR mean?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 17

How does Skinner's operant conditioning differ from classical conditioning?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 18

Which reinforcement schedule produces the fastest, most extinction-resistant responding?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 19

What did Bandura's Bobo doll experiment demonstrate?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 20

What are the three stages of the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model?

Accepted Answer

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).

Question 21

What did Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve show?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 22

Encoding, storage, and retrieval - what does each memory process do?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 23

What does an IQ score attempt to measure?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 24

What are Piaget's four stages of cognitive development, in order?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 25

What cognitive milestone marks the end of Piaget's sensorimotor stage?

Accepted Answer

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

Question 26

What is the first stage in Erikson's psychosocial theory, and when does it occur?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 27

What did Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation study identify?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 28

Major depressive disorder vs. bipolar disorder - what's the key difference?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 29

Positive vs. negative symptoms of schizophrenia - what's the difference?

Accepted Answer

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).

Question 30

What is the diathesis-stress model of psychological disorders?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 31

Generalized anxiety disorder vs. panic disorder - what's the difference?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 32

In Freud's structural model, what do the id, ego, and superego each do?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 33

What are the Big Five personality traits?

Accepted Answer

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

Question 34

What did Carl Rogers mean by 'unconditional positive regard'?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 35

What are Bandura's concepts of self-efficacy and reciprocal determinism?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 36

Absolute threshold vs. just noticeable difference (JND) - what's the distinction?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 37

What does Weber's Law state?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 38

What is the Gestalt principle of figure-ground?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 39

What is sensory adaptation?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 40

What does cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) target?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 41

What is systematic desensitization used to treat, and how does it work?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 42

What does biomedical therapy involve?

Accepted Answer

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

Question 43

What characterizes REM sleep?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 44

What regulates the circadian rhythm?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 45

Depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens - how do they differ?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 46

What is the order of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from bottom to top?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 47

James-Lange theory vs. Cannon-Bard theory of emotion - what's the key difference in sequence?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 48

What does the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory add to emotion theory?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 49

Reliability vs. validity - what's the difference, and can a test have one without the other?

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 50

What does a correlation coefficient of -0.85 tell you?

Accepted Answer

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.

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