TASC Psychology cheat sheet

Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory (Leipzig, 1879), marking psychology's separation from philosophy; he used introspection to study conscious experience.

Structuralism (Titchener) analyzed consciousness into elements via introspection; functionalism (James) asked how mental processes aid adaptation and survival.

Psychoanalytic perspective (Freud): behavior driven by unconscious conflicts among id, ego, and superego; psychosexual stages and defense mechanisms are central concepts.

Behaviorism (Watson, Skinner) restricts psychology to observable behavior; classical conditioning pairs stimuli, operant conditioning shapes behavior through consequences.

Humanistic perspective (Maslow, Rogers) emphasizes free will, self-actualization, and unconditional positive regard; Maslow's hierarchy orders needs from physiological to self-actualization.

Cognitive perspective treats the mind as an information processor; it studies memory, attention, problem solving, and language, reviving interest in internal mental states.

Biopsychology explains behavior through nervous system structure, neurotransmitters, hormones, and genetics; the neuron's parts are dendrites, soma, axon, and terminal buttons.

Research methods: experimental designs establish causation via random assignment and manipulated independent variables; correlational designs reveal relationships but not causation.

Classical conditioning terms: unconditioned stimulus elicits an unconditioned response; a conditioned stimulus gains power through repeated pairing; extinction weakens the response when the CS is presented alone.

Operant conditioning: reinforcement increases behavior, punishment decreases it; positive adds a stimulus, negative removes one, so positive punishment adds an aversive event.

Schedules of reinforcement: fixed-ratio produces high rates with pauses after reinforcement; variable-ratio yields high, steady rates; variable-interval yields slow, steady responding.

Memory systems: sensory memory holds information briefly; short-term/working memory holds about 7 plus or minus 2 items; long-term memory has effectively unlimited capacity.

Encoding, storage, and retrieval are the three memory processes; the serial position effect shows primacy (long-term) and recency (short-term) advantages in recall.

Developmental stages: Piaget's sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages; object permanence emerges in the sensorimotor stage.

Erikson's psychosocial theory poses eight stages across the lifespan, each defined by a crisis; the first is trust versus mistrust in infancy.

Statistical reasoning: the mean is sensitive to outliers, the median is not; a normal distribution has about 68 percent of scores within one standard deviation of the mean.