QCAA Psychology EA cheat sheet

Piaget's stages in order: sensorimotor (0–2, object permanence), preoperational (2–7, egocentrism, symbolic play), concrete operational (7–11, conservation, reversibility), formal operational (11+, abstract and hypothetical reasoning).

Erikson's eight psychosocial stages each pose a crisis resolved toward a virtue: trust/mistrust, autonomy/shame, initiative/guilt, industry/inferiority, identity/role confusion, intimacy/isolation, generativity/stagnation, integrity/despair.

Vygotsky: the zone of proximal development is the gap between what a learner does alone and what they can do with guidance; scaffolding is temporary structured support withdrawn as competence grows.

Kohlberg's moral stages: preconventional (punishment avoidance, self-interest), conventional (social approval, law and order), postconventional (social contract, universal ethical principles).

Attachment classifications in the Strange Situation: secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant (ambivalent), disorganized; secure infants use the caregiver as a safe base for exploration.

Ainsworth's sensitive responsive caregiving predicts secure attachment; temperament (innate behavioural style) interacts with parenting to shape developmental outcomes.

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model nests the child in microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and chronosystem; proximal processes in the microsystem carry the most developmental weight.

Nature and nurture interact: heritability estimates describe population variance, not fixed individual destiny, and gene–environment correlations mean children shape the environments they encounter.

Developmental research designs: cross-sectional compares age groups at one time (fast, cohort effects); longitudinal follows one cohort over time (controls cohort effects, slow, attrition); sequential combines both.

Classical conditioning (Pavlov): a neutral stimulus paired repeatedly with an unconditioned stimulus acquires the capacity to elicit a conditioned response; extinction occurs when the CS is presented without the UCS.

Operant conditioning (Skinner): reinforcement increases behaviour, punishment decreases it; positive adds a stimulus, negative removes one - the sign refers to stimulus change, not to good or bad.

Schedules of reinforcement: continuous gives fastest acquisition; variable ratio produces the highest and most extinction-resistant response rates; fixed interval produces scalloped responding.

Observational learning (Bandura): attention, retention, reproduction and motivation are required; vicarious reinforcement changes the likelihood of imitation, as shown in the Bobo doll studies.

Memory model: sensory memory (brief, large capacity) → short-term/working memory (about 7±2 chunks, seconds) → long-term memory (unlimited, encoded semantically); rehearsal and chunking extend short-term retention.

Sleep is regulated by circadian rhythms and homeostatic pressure; REM supports memory consolidation and emotional processing, while chronic deprivation impairs attention and mood.

Stress response: the sympathomedullary pathway gives fast adrenaline arousal; the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis releases cortisol more slowly; chronic activation is associated with hippocampal and immune effects.

Drive-reduction and arousal theory explain motivation via homeostasis and an optimal arousal level; Yerkes–Dodson predicts best performance at moderate arousal, with the optimum lower for complex tasks.

Dual-process account: System 1 is fast, automatic, associative and effort-light; System 2 is slow, deliberate, rule-based and capacity-limited; most errors arise when System 1 answers go unchecked.

Cognitive biases to name precisely: confirmation bias (seeking supporting evidence), anchoring (over-weighting an initial value), availability heuristic (judging by ease of recall), representativeness heuristic (judging by category resemblance).

Problem-solving obstacles: functional fixedness (inability to see new uses for an object) and mental set (persisting with a previously successful strategy); insight and analogy are routes past them.

Decision framing: gains and losses are evaluated from a reference point, and losses typically loom larger than equivalent gains (loss aversion); wording of a problem can reverse choices.

Intelligence models: Spearman's general factor g, Gardner's multiple intelligences, Sternberg's triarchic theory (analytical, creative, practical); IQ scores are standardised with mean 100 and SD 15.

Reliability means consistency of measurement; validity means the test measures what it claims; a test can be reliable without being valid but not valid without being reliable.

Heuristics and algorithms differ: algorithms guarantee a solution through exhaustive procedure, heuristics are efficient shortcuts that can fail; means–end analysis reduces the gap between current and goal state.

Metacognition - monitoring and regulating one's own thinking - improves calibration; overconfidence and the hindsight bias distort retrospective judgements of what one knew.

Asch conformity: unambiguous line-judgement task, roughly one-third of responses conformed; conformity rises with group size up to about three to four, with unanimity, and with public responding, and falls with a prior committed ally.

Milgram obedience: authority legitimacy, proximity of the authority, proximity of the victim and peer rebellion each shift obedience rates; the study raised deception and protection-from-harm ethical issues.

Social facilitation and loafing: presence of others improves performance on well-learned tasks but impairs novel ones (arousal); individual effort falls in larger groups when contributions are unidentifiable.

Bystander effect: helping decreases as the number of bystanders rises; explanations are diffusion of responsibility, pluralistic ignorance and evaluation apprehension.

Attribution: the fundamental attribution error over-weights disposition and under-weights situation for others' behaviour; the self-serving bias credits successes internally and blames failures externally.

Persuasion (Elaboration Likelihood Model): central route depends on argument quality and yields durable attitude change; peripheral route relies on cues such as attractiveness or source credibility.

Cognitive dissonance: holding inconsistent cognitions produces discomfort, which people reduce by changing a belief, adding consonant cognitions, or trivialising the conflict; effort justification strengthens liking.

Group decision traps: groupthink arises with high cohesion, strong directive leadership and insulation, producing premature consensus and poor risk assessment; group polarisation shifts views toward the initial leaning.

Prejudice components are affective (prejudice), cognitive (stereotype) and behavioural (discrimination); contact under equal status, common goals and institutional support reduces intergroup hostility.