BSEH SS Psychology cheat sheet

Psychology is defined as the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes; 'scientific' distinguishes it from folk psychology and pseudoscience.

Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory at Leipzig in 1879, marking psychology's emergence as an independent discipline.

Structuralism (Wundt, Titchener) analysed consciousness into basic elements using introspection; functionalism (James) studied the adaptive purpose of mental processes.

Psychoanalysis (Freud) emphasises unconscious conflict and early childhood; behaviourism (Watson, Skinner) restricts psychology to observable behaviour; Gestalt psychology stresses organised wholes over elements.

Humanistic psychology (Maslow, Rogers) focuses on self-actualisation and free will; cognitive psychology treats the mind as an information-processing system.

The biopsychosocial approach explains behaviour through interacting biological, psychological and social factors rather than a single cause.

Branches include clinical, counselling, educational, organisational, developmental, social and cognitive psychology; psychiatry is a medical speciality that may prescribe medication.

Psychology is a science because it uses systematic observation, testable hypotheses, operational definitions and replicable methods.

Goals of psychological enquiry: description, explanation, prediction and control (modification) of behaviour.

Experimental method manipulates an independent variable and measures a dependent variable; random assignment to conditions supports causal inference.

Confounding variables vary with the independent variable and threaten internal validity; extraneous variables affect all conditions similarly.

Correlational research measures the relationship between variables without manipulation; correlation does not establish causation and ranges from -1.00 to +1.00.

Observation may be naturalistic or controlled, participant or non-participant, and overt or covert; observer bias and reactivity are key limitations.

Survey, interview and questionnaire methods collect self-report data; interview schedules may be structured, semi-structured or unstructured.

Case study is an in-depth study of one individual or unit, useful for rare phenomena but weak for generalisation.

Reliability means consistency of measurement; validity means the test measures what it claims. Ethical safeguards include informed consent, confidentiality, debriefing and the right to withdraw.

Development is lifelong, multidimensional and multidirectional; it involves growth, maintenance and decline.

Prenatal development has three stages: germinal (first two weeks), embryonic (weeks 3-8) and foetal (week 9 to birth).

Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (0-2, object permanence), preoperational (2-7, egocentrism, conservation failure), concrete operational (7-11, conservation, classification), formal operational (11+, abstract reasoning).

Kohlberg's moral development: preconventional (punishment and obedience, instrumental exchange), conventional (good boy/good girl, law and order), postconventional (social contract, universal ethical principles).

Erikson's psychosocial theory posits eight stages, each with a crisis: trust vs mistrust, autonomy vs shame, initiative vs guilt, industry vs inferiority, identity vs role confusion, intimacy vs isolation, generativity vs stagnation, integrity vs despair.

Attachment: Bowlby proposed innate attachment; Ainsworth's strange situation identified secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-ambivalent patterns.

Vygotsky emphasised social interaction and the zone of proximal development; language and scaffolding drive cognitive growth.

Adolescence involves puberty, identity formation and peer influence; ageing shows decline in fluid abilities but relative stability of crystallised abilities.

Sensation is the detection of physical energy by sense organs; perception is the interpretation and organisation of that sensory information.

Absolute threshold is the minimum stimulus intensity detected 50% of the time; difference threshold (just noticeable difference) is the smallest detectable change; Weber's law states the JND is a constant fraction of the original stimulus.

Signal detection theory separates sensory sensitivity (d') from response bias (criterion) in detection tasks.

Visual transduction occurs in rods (dim light, no colour) and cones (colour, fine detail) in the retina; the blind spot lacks photoreceptors where the optic nerve exits.

Trichromatic theory explains colour at the receptor level; opponent-process theory explains afterimages and colour blindness.

Gestalt grouping principles: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, common region and figure-ground organisation.

Depth cues: binocular disparity and convergence; monocular cues include relative size, interposition, linear perspective, texture gradient, motion parallax and height in the visual field.

Attention is selective and limited; divided attention depends on automaticity, and sustained attention declines over time (vigilance decrement). Perceptual constancies (size, shape, brightness) maintain stable perception despite changing retinal images.

Classical conditioning (Pavlov): a neutral stimulus paired with an unconditioned stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus eliciting a conditioned response.

Extinction weakens a conditioned response when the CS is presented alone; spontaneous recovery is the reappearance of a weakened response after a delay.

Stimulus generalisation is responding to similar stimuli; discrimination is responding only to the reinforced stimulus.

Operant conditioning (Skinner): reinforcement increases behaviour, punishment decreases it; positive adds a stimulus, negative removes one.

Schedules of reinforcement: fixed ratio, variable ratio, fixed interval, variable interval; variable schedules produce the most resistant behaviour.

Thorndike's law of effect: responses followed by satisfying consequences are strengthened; law of exercise concerns repetition.

Observational learning (Bandura): attention, retention, reproduction and motivation; vicarious reinforcement shapes behaviour without direct experience.

Insight learning (Kohler) involves sudden restructuring of the problem; latent learning (Tolman) occurs without reinforcement and is shown in performance later.

The Atkinson-Shiffrin model: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory; information flows through attention and rehearsal.

Sensory memory holds information briefly (iconic about 0.5 s, echoic up to several seconds); short-term memory holds about 7 plus or minus 2 chunks for roughly 20-30 seconds.

Working memory (Baddeley) has a central executive plus phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad and episodic buffer.

Long-term memory divides into declarative (episodic, semantic) and non-declarative (procedural, priming, conditioning) memory.

Encoding may be automatic or effortful; deep processing (meaning-based) produces better retention than shallow processing.

Levels of processing: structural, phonemic and semantic; semantic processing yields the best recall.

Forgetting: encoding failure, decay, interference (retroactive and proactive), retrieval failure and motivated forgetting.

Serial position effect: primacy reflects long-term memory transfer, recency reflects short-term memory; chunking and spaced practice improve retention.

Thinking is the manipulation of mental representations; concepts are categories formed by defining features or prototypes.

Problem solving: algorithms guarantee a solution but are slow; heuristics are fast rules of thumb that may fail.

Problem-solving obstacles include functional fixedness, mental set, confirmation bias and inadequate representation.

Reasoning: deductive reasoning moves from general to specific and yields valid conclusions; inductive reasoning moves from specific to general and yields probable conclusions.

Judgement heuristics: availability (ease of recall), representativeness (similarity to a prototype) and anchoring and adjustment.

Decision making is influenced by framing effects, loss aversion and the confirmation bias.

Language has phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics; Chomsky proposed an innate language acquisition device; Skinner attributed language to reinforcement.

Creative thinking is divergent (many solutions) as contrasted with convergent (single solution); it involves flexibility, fluency, originality and elaboration.

Motivation is the internal state that directs and sustains behaviour toward a goal; needs, drives and incentives are key constructs.

Maslow's hierarchy: physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, self-actualisation; lower needs generally precede higher ones.

Intrinsic motivation arises from interest and satisfaction; extrinsic motivation comes from external rewards or pressures.

Achievement motivation (McClelland) distinguishes need for achievement, power and affiliation; high achievers prefer moderate difficulty.

Drive-reduction theory (Hull) holds that physiological deficits create drives that motivate behaviour to restore homeostasis.

Arousal theory: Yerkes-Dodson law states that moderate arousal optimises performance, with optimal level depending on task difficulty.

Basic emotions (Ekman): happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, with cross-culturally recognisable facial expressions.

Theories of emotion: James-Lange (body first), Cannon-Bard (simultaneous), Schachter-Singer two-factor (arousal plus cognitive label) and cognitive appraisal theories.

Abnormality criteria: deviance, distress, dysfunction and danger; no single criterion suffices, and cultural context matters.

The DSM-5 and ICD-10 are standard classification systems; they improve reliability and communication but carry labelling risks.

Anxiety disorders include generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias and social anxiety disorder; agoraphobia is fear of places where escape is difficult.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder involves intrusive obsessions and repetitive compulsions performed to reduce anxiety.

Mood disorders: major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder; depression involves low mood, anhedonia and cognitive and somatic symptoms.

Schizophrenia symptoms divide into positive (delusions, hallucinations, disorganised speech) and negative (flat affect, avolition, alogia); dopamine and genetic factors are implicated.

Somatoform and dissociative disorders include somatic symptom disorder, illness anxiety disorder and dissociative identity disorder.

Personality disorders (clusters A, B, C) include antisocial and borderline personality disorder; neurodevelopmental disorders include autism spectrum disorder and ADHD.

Psychoanalysis (Freud) uses free association, dream analysis and transference to bring unconscious conflict to awareness; interpretation is central.

Behaviour therapy applies classical and operant principles: systematic desensitisation for phobias, aversion therapy, token economies and exposure.

Cognitive therapy (Beck) targets distorted automatic thoughts; cognitive-behaviour therapy combines cognitive restructuring with behavioural tasks.

Rational emotive behaviour therapy (Ellis) challenges irrational beliefs through the ABC model: activating event, belief, consequence.

Humanistic therapy (Rogers) uses client-centred conditions: unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence, with nondirective listening.

Biomedical therapy uses psychotropic drugs (antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilisers, anxiolytics) and may include ECT or psychosurgery.

Group and family therapy use interpersonal processes; family therapy treats the family as a system.

Effectiveness research supports CBT and exposure-based treatments for many anxiety disorders; therapy is combined with medication in severe cases.

An attitude is an evaluation of an object with affective, cognitive and behavioural components; it may be explicit or implicit.

Attitude formation occurs through direct experience, classical and operant conditioning, observational learning and social comparison.

The elaboration likelihood model: central route persuasion relies on argument quality; peripheral route relies on cues such as source attractiveness.

Cognitive dissonance (Festinger) is discomfort from inconsistent cognitions, reduced by changing the attitude, the behaviour or adding consonant cognitions.

Social cognition: schemas, stereotypes and attribution; the fundamental attribution error overweights dispositional and underweights situational causes.

Attribution biases include actor-observer bias, self-serving bias and the just-world hypothesis.

Attitude-behaviour consistency is stronger when attitudes are strong, specific, accessible and formed through direct experience.

Prejudice is a negative attitude toward a group; discrimination is the behavioural expression; stereotypes are cognitive generalisations. Contact and cooperation can reduce prejudice.