Bihar BSEB Intermediate Psychology cheat sheet

Definition: psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes, including conscious and unconscious experience, and of how these are influenced by biological, social and cultural factors.

Goals of psychology: description, explanation, prediction, and control or modification of behaviour; applied work usually targets the last two.

Schools of thought: structuralism (Wundt, Titchener: introspection into elements of consciousness); functionalism (James: adaptive functions of mind); Gestalt (Wertheimer, Köhler: whole is more than sum of parts); behaviourism (Watson, Skinner: observable behaviour, stimulus-response and reinforcement); psychoanalysis (Freud: unconscious conflict, defence); humanistic (Maslow, Rogers: self-actualisation, free will); cognitive (information processing, memory, attention).

Methods of enquiry: observation (naturalistic and controlled), experimental method (manipulation of independent variable, control of extraneous variables), correlation (association without causation, coefficient -1 to +1), case study, survey and interview, and psychological tests.

Experimental design decision rule: use independent-groups design when practice or carryover effects are likely; use repeated-measures when individual differences are large and the task is not practice-sensitive.

Reliability refers to consistency of a measure across time or items; validity refers to whether the measure actually assesses the intended construct. A test can be reliable but not valid; it cannot be valid without being reliable.

Branches: clinical, counselling, educational, organisational, social, developmental, environmental, health, sports, and forensic psychology differ mainly in population, setting and applied goal.

Indian contributions: early psychology departments at Calcutta University (1916, N.N. Sengupta) and the Indian Psychological Association (1925); later work on yoga, meditation and indigenous concepts such as self and dharma.

Self-concept is the organised set of beliefs a person holds about their own attributes; self-esteem is the evaluative, affective component of that self-view.

Carl Rogers: the real self versus the ideal self; congruence between them predicts well-being, while large discrepancy produces anxiety and defensive behaviour; unconditional positive regard fosters congruence.

Type approaches: Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, choleric); Sheldon's body types (endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph); Jung's introvert and extrovert typology.

Trait approaches: Allport distinguished cardinal, central and secondary dispositions; Cattell used 16 source traits from factor analysis; Eysenck proposed three dimensions (extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism); the Big Five are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Psychoanalytic structure: id operates on the pleasure principle, ego on the reality principle, superego on the morality principle; defence mechanisms include repression, projection, rationalisation, displacement, reaction formation and sublimation.

Assessment methods: self-report inventories (for example MMPI, 16PF, NEO-PI), projective techniques (Rorschach inkblots, TAT, word association), behavioural rating, interview and observation.

Decision rule for assessment: use projective tests when the respondent may censor socially undesirable traits or is a child; use standardised inventories when quantifiable comparison with norms is needed.

Personality is relatively stable but not fixed; temperament is largely biological and present early, whereas character and self-concept are shaped by socialisation and culture.

Stress is a dynamic transaction between the person and the environment, appraised as taxing or exceeding resources; primary appraisal judges harm or threat, secondary appraisal judges available coping resources.

General Adaptation Syndrome (Selye): alarm reaction (fight-or-flight, sympathetic arousal), resistance (continued cortisol and resource mobilisation), and exhaustion (depletion, illness risk).

Sources of stress: life events, daily hassles, occupational strain, trauma and catastrophic events; the Social Readjustment Rating Scale ranks life events by required readjustment.

Coping: problem-focused coping acts on the stressor; emotion-focused coping regulates the distress; avoidant coping reduces immediate discomfort but usually worsens long-term outcome.

Stress effects: physiological (increased heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol, suppressed immunity), psychological (anxiety, poor concentration), and behavioural (sleep loss, irritability, substance use).

Life skills (WHO): self-awareness, empathy, effective communication, interpersonal relationship skills, creative thinking, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, coping with stress, and coping with emotion.

Hardiness (Kobasa) has three components: commitment, control and challenge; high hardiness buffers the stress-illness relationship.

Relaxation and stress-management techniques include progressive muscle relaxation, meditation and yoga, guided imagery, biofeedback, and time management; regular exercise improves mood and sleep quality.

A psychological disorder is a clinically significant pattern of behaviour or experience associated with distress, disability or increased risk of harm, and not merely a culturally expected reaction.

Classification systems: DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association) and ICD-10/ICD-11 (WHO) organise disorders by descriptive criteria; both are categorical and use duration, severity and impairment thresholds.

Anxiety disorders: generalised anxiety disorder (persistent excessive worry for at least six months), panic disorder (recurrent unexpected panic attacks plus worry about recurrence), phobias (specific and social), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (intrusive obsessions plus repetitive compulsions performed to reduce distress).

Mood disorders: major depressive disorder requires depressed mood or loss of interest for at least two weeks plus other symptoms such as sleep, appetite or concentration change; bipolar disorder involves episodes of mania alternating with depression.

Schizophrenia symptoms: positive (delusions, hallucinations, disorganised speech), negative (flat affect, avolition, social withdrawal), and cognitive; duration criteria distinguish it from brief psychotic disorder.

Somatoform and dissociative disorders: somatisation and conversion involve physical symptoms without adequate medical explanation; dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder involve disruption of memory or identity.

Personality disorders are enduring, inflexible patterns causing impairment; clusters are A (odd-eccentric: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal), B (dramatic: antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic) and C (anxious: avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive).

Causal frameworks are multifactorial: genetic vulnerability, neurotransmitter changes, early adversity and psychosocial stressors interact in a diathesis-stress model; labelling can itself create stigma and self-fulfilling effects.

Psychoanalysis (Freud): free association, dream analysis, analysis of transference and resistance; goal is insight into unconscious conflict; transference is the client's displacement of earlier feelings onto the therapist.

Behaviour therapy: systematic desensitisation (Wolpe) pairs relaxation with a graded anxiety hierarchy; flooding exposes the client to the feared stimulus at full intensity; aversion therapy pairs an unwanted behaviour with an unpleasant stimulus; token economy reinforces target behaviours with exchangeable tokens.

Cognitive therapy (Beck, Ellis): identifies and restructures distorted automatic thoughts; Ellis's rational emotive behaviour therapy targets irrational beliefs through the ABCDE model (activating event, belief, consequence, disputation, effect).

Humanistic therapy: Rogers's client-centred therapy uses unconditional positive regard, empathy and genuineness; Gestalt therapy (Perls) focuses on awareness of present experience and integration of self.

Biomedical therapy: antipsychotics reduce positive psychotic symptoms mainly by blocking dopamine receptors; antidepressants act on serotonin and noradrenaline; lithium stabilises mood; anxiolytics relieve acute anxiety; ECT is used in severe, treatment-resistant depression.

Decision rule: biological treatment is usually indicated for severe, disabling or psychotic conditions; psychological therapy is preferred for mild to moderate conditions and for building coping skills; combined treatment is common.

Ethical requirements: informed consent, confidentiality with its limits, competence of the therapist, and the right of the client to withdraw; psychotherapy is not a substitute for emergency medical care.

Effectiveness evidence: psychotherapy generally outperforms no treatment for depression and anxiety; the therapeutic alliance predicts outcome across orientations.

Attitude has three components: cognitive (beliefs), affective (feelings) and behavioural (action tendency); attitudes are learned, relatively stable evaluations of an object.

Attitude formation occurs through direct experience, classical and operant conditioning, observational learning, and group or reference-group influence.

Attitude change: the elaboration likelihood model distinguishes the central route (argument quality, high involvement) from the peripheral route (cues such as source attractiveness, low involvement); the source factors are credibility, attractiveness and similarity.

Cognitive dissonance (Festinger): inconsistency between attitudes and behaviour produces discomfort, which is reduced by changing the attitude, changing the behaviour, or adding consonant cognitions.

Social cognition: schemas organise social knowledge; heuristics such as availability and representativeness produce biases; the fundamental attribution error is over-attributing others' behaviour to disposition and underweighting the situation.

Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a group; discrimination is the behaviour; stereotypes are generalised beliefs; the contact hypothesis predicts reduced prejudice when groups meet under equal status, common goals and institutional support.

Prosocial behaviour: bystander intervention follows noticing, interpreting as emergency, taking responsibility, deciding how to help and acting; diffusion of responsibility increases with the number of bystanders.

Impression formation: primacy effect (first information weighs more), recency effect, halo effect (one good trait spreads to others), and stereotyping all shape social judgements.

Conformity (Asch): participants conformed to a clearly wrong majority judgement on about one-third of critical trials; conformity rises with group size up to about three or four members and with unanimity of the majority.

Obedience (Milgram): ordinary participants administered apparently painful shocks when instructed by a legitimate authority figure; proximity of the victim, proximity of authority and group support for defiance change obedience rates.

Compliance techniques: foot-in-the-door (small request first), door-in-the-face (large request refused, then smaller), and low-ball (changing terms after agreement).

Group decision-making: group polarisation shifts decisions toward the initially dominant tendency; groupthink (Janis) is a concurrence-seeking tendency marked by illusion of invulnerability, self-censorship and pressure on dissenters, producing poor decisions.

Group structure: norms are shared expectations; roles are differentiated positions; status is the prestige ranking; cohesiveness is attraction to the group and resistance to leaving.

Social facilitation is improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks in the presence of others; social loafing is reduced individual effort in larger groups on additive tasks.

Conflict resolution: superordinate goals, negotiation, mediation and arbitration; the Robbers Cave study showed that competition creates hostility and superordinate goals reduce it.

Leadership styles: autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire; democratic leadership generally yields higher satisfaction and better group performance.

Environmental psychology studies the reciprocal relation between people and their physical settings, including crowding, noise, temperature, personal space and territoriality.

Personal space is the invisible boundary around a person; it is smaller in crowded or intimate settings and varies with culture, gender and relationship.

Crowding is a subjective experience of insufficient space; high density does not always produce crowding, but prolonged crowding is linked to stress, aggression and reduced helping.

Noise above about 80-85 decibels, especially unpredictable or uncontrollable noise, impairs concentration and increases irritability and physiological arousal.

Health psychology applies the biopsychosocial model: biological, psychological and social factors jointly determine health, illness and recovery; lifestyle factors such as smoking, diet and exercise are major modifiable risks.

Work and leisure: job satisfaction depends on the work itself, pay, promotion, supervision and co-workers; role conflict and role ambiguity are reliable predictors of occupational stress and burnout.

Burnout has three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation or cynicism, and reduced personal accomplishment.

Human-environment interaction is guided by environmental attitudes and behaviour; pro-environmental behaviour is promoted by feedback, incentives, prompts and social norms.

Communication: the core conditions are active listening, empathy, paraphrasing, reflecting feeling, summarising and asking open questions; closed questions yield short, specific answers and are used to confirm facts.

Nonverbal communication includes eye contact, facial expression, posture, gesture, proxemics and paralanguage; inconsistency between verbal and nonverbal messages usually signals conflict or discomfort.

Observation skills: distinguish observation from inference; record behaviour in specific, observable, low-inference terms rather than as traits or interpretations.

Interviewing: structured interviews use fixed questions for comparability; unstructured interviews allow depth; the sequence typically moves from rapport building through the body of the interview to closure and summary.

Common interviewing errors: halo effect, leniency or severity bias, central tendency, leading questions, and premature interpretation; recording responses verbatim reduces recall bias.

Counselling versus guidance: guidance is advice-oriented and often educational or vocational; counselling is a relationship in which the client explores feelings and makes their own decisions.

Counselling ethics: confidentiality and its limits, informed consent, competence, avoidance of dual relationships, and referral when the problem exceeds the counsellor's competence.

Skills development follows a cycle of practice, feedback, supervised reflection and refinement; role-play and micro-counselling are standard training methods.

Experimental method: state an operational hypothesis, manipulate the independent variable, measure the dependent variable, and control extraneous variables by random assignment or standardised procedure.

A true experiment requires random assignment; a quasi-experiment compares pre-existing groups and therefore cannot fully rule out selection differences.

Correlational design: report the coefficient r between -1 and +1; r near zero means no linear relation; correlation does not establish causation.

Psychological testing: report reliability, validity, norms and standardisation; test-retest reliability compares scores on two occasions; internal consistency is estimated by split-half or Cronbach's alpha.

Case study: an in-depth study of one individual or small group using interviews, records and observation; strengths are depth and ecological richness, weaknesses are limited generalisability and observer bias.

Project work: structure as title, rationale, aims, method, results, discussion and references; report raw data and the procedure in enough detail for replication.

Statistics for the practical: mean, median and mode for central tendency; range and standard deviation for dispersion; compare group means with t-test or ANOVA where assumptions hold.

Ethics in practicals: informed consent, right to withdraw, confidentiality, debriefing and protection from harm are required for experiments, tests and case studies.