Karnataka II PUC Psychology (KSEAB) cheat sheet

Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes; 'science' requires systematic observation, not intuition alone.

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

Structuralism (Wundt, Titchener) analysed consciousness into elements via introspection; functionalism (William 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 (Wertheimer, Köhler) holds that perception and thought are organised wholes, not sums of parts; 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'.

Humanistic psychology (Maslow, Rogers) focuses on self-actualisation and free will; cognitive psychology studies information processing - attention, memory, problem solving.

Branches: clinical, counselling, educational, organisational, developmental, social, cognitive, and physiological psychology each address distinct applied questions.

Modern definition includes both overt behaviour (observable) and covert processes (thoughts, feelings), studied objectively with empirical methods.

Steps of scientific enquiry: formulating a problem, developing a hypothesis, designing the study, collecting data, analysing data, and drawing conclusions.

Variables: independent variable is manipulated by the researcher; dependent variable is measured; extraneous variables are controlled to prevent confounding.

Experimental method establishes cause-effect by manipulating the IV and randomly assigning participants; control group receives no treatment or a placebo.

Correlational method measures the relationship between two variables; correlation coefficient r ranges from -1 to +1 and does not prove causation.

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

Survey and interview methods gather self-report data; structured interviews use fixed questions, unstructured interviews allow flexibility.

Case study provides in-depth analysis of a single individual or group; useful for rare phenomena but weak for generalisation.

Reliability means consistency of measurement; validity means the test measures what it claims; a reliable test may still be invalid.

Ethical principles: informed consent, confidentiality, right to withdraw, no deception (or debriefing after), and protection from harm.

Development is lifelong, multidimensional, and plastic; it proceeds from conception to death, not only in childhood.

Prenatal stages in order: germinal (zygote, about 2 weeks), embryonic (about 2–8 weeks), fetal (about 8 weeks to birth).

Teratogens are environmental agents (alcohol, drugs, radiation) that harm the fetus during prenatal development.

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

Erikson's psychosocial stages pair a crisis with each life period; trust vs mistrust (infancy) and identity vs role confusion (adolescence) are commonly tested.

Kohlberg's moral reasoning: preconventional (punishment/obedience), conventional (social approval, law and order), postconventional (universal ethical principles).

Attachment: Bowlby's ethological theory; Ainsworth's Strange Situation classifies secure, avoidant, and ambivalent (resistant) attachment.

Physical milestones: cephalocaudal (head-to-tail) and proximodistal (centre-to-periphery) direction of motor development.

Adolescence brings puberty and formal operational thought; ageing involves decline in some abilities with crystallised intelligence relatively preserved.

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

Absolute threshold: the minimum stimulus intensity detected 50% of the time; difference threshold (JND) is the smallest detectable change.

Weber's law: the JND is a constant fraction of the original stimulus intensity (ΔI/I = K).

Signal detection theory separates sensory sensitivity (d') from response criterion, accounting for hits, misses, false alarms, and correct rejections.

Sensory adaptation is reduced sensitivity after prolonged exposure to an unchanging stimulus; dark adaptation is the eye's increased sensitivity in dim light.

Visual transduction: rods (dim light, black-and-white, peripheral) and cones (colour, fine detail, fovea); trichromatic and opponent-process theories explain colour vision.

Attention is selective, shifting, and limited in capacity; divided attention is harder when tasks demand the same resources.

Perceptual constancies (size, shape, brightness) keep objects stable despite changing retinal images; depth cues are monocular (linear perspective, interposition) or binocular (retinal disparity, convergence).

Gestalt laws of perceptual organisation: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and figure-ground segregation.

Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour or potential behaviour resulting from experience, not from maturation or fatigue.

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

Key classical conditioning phenomena: acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, stimulus generalisation, and discrimination.

Operant conditioning (Skinner): behaviour is controlled by its consequences - reinforcement increases behaviour, punishment decreases it.

Positive reinforcement adds a pleasant stimulus; negative reinforcement removes an unpleasant one; both strengthen behaviour.

Schedules of reinforcement: continuous versus partial; fixed-ratio, variable-ratio, fixed-interval, and variable-interval; variable schedules resist extinction.

Thorndike's law of effect: responses followed by satisfying consequences are strengthened; law of exercise and law of readiness complete the set.

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

Cognitive learning: latent learning (Tolman) and insight learning (Köhler) show learning without immediate reinforcement.

The Atkinson–Shiffrin model: sensory memory → short-term memory → long-term memory, with attention, rehearsal, and encoding as control processes.

Sensory memory holds information briefly (iconic about 0.5 s, echoic about 2–3 s); short-term memory holds about 7±2 chunks for roughly 20–30 seconds without rehearsal.

Long-term memory is relatively permanent and unlimited; it divides into declarative (episodic, semantic) and non-declarative (procedural) memory.

Encoding may be shallow (structural) or deep (semantic); deeper processing produces better retention.

Serial position effect: primacy (long-term memory) and recency (short-term memory) in free recall.

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

The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve shows rapid initial loss of retention that slows over time.

Improving memory: chunking, rehearsal, elaboration, organisation, mnemonic devices, and spaced practice.

Thinking is a covert cognitive process involving mental representation and manipulation of information to solve problems or make decisions.

Concepts are mental categories grouping similar objects or events; prototypes are the best examples of a category.

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

Common heuristics: availability (judging by ease of recall), representativeness (judging by similarity to a prototype), and anchoring.

Obstacles to problem solving: mental set (fixed approach), functional fixedness (seeing objects only in their usual role), and confirmation bias.

Convergent thinking seeks one correct answer; divergent thinking generates many novel ideas and underlies creativity.

Reasoning is deductive (general to specific; conclusion follows necessarily from premises) or inductive (specific to general; probabilistic).

Language and thought are linked; the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf) claims language shapes thought categories.

Motivation is the force that initiates, directs, and sustains behaviour toward a goal; needs create drives that reduce through goal-directed action.

Maslow's hierarchy from bottom: physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualisation needs.

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

Achievement motivation (McClelland) is the need to meet high standards; high achievers prefer moderate difficulty and personal responsibility.

Theories: drive-reduction (Hull), arousal (Yerkes–Dodson inverted-U), incentive, and cognitive (expectancy-value) theories.

James–Lange theory: bodily changes come first and emotion follows; Cannon–Bard: physiological arousal and emotion occur simultaneously.

Schachter–Singer two-factor theory: emotion = physiological arousal + cognitive labelling of that arousal.

Basic emotions (Ekman): happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust; facial expressions show cross-cultural universality.

Individual differences refer to relatively stable variations among people in abilities, traits, and behaviour.

Intelligence is the capacity to understand complex ideas, adapt, learn from experience, and solve problems.

Spearman's two-factor theory: a general factor (g) plus specific factors (s); Thurstone proposed primary mental abilities.

Gardner's multiple intelligences include linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.

Sternberg's triarchic theory: analytical, creative, and practical intelligence.

IQ = (mental age / chronological age) × 100 for the ratio IQ; deviation IQ compares a score to the age-group mean and standard deviation.

The normal distribution of IQ has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15; about 68% fall between 85 and 115.

Reliability and validity are essential test properties; cultural bias and standardisation affect fairness of assessment.

Personality is the relatively stable pattern of behaviour, thoughts, and emotions that characterises an individual.

Freud's structure: id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), and superego (morality); defence mechanisms protect the ego.

Psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital; fixation at a stage is said to shape adult personality.

Trait approaches: Allport (cardinal, central, secondary traits), Cattell (16 factors), Eysenck (extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism), and the Big Five (OCEAN).

Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Humanistic view (Rogers): self-concept and unconditional positive regard promote growth; Maslow emphasises self-actualisation.

Social-cognitive view (Bandura): reciprocal determinism and self-efficacy link person, behaviour, and environment.

Assessment methods: interviews, observation, rating scales, and projective tests (Rorschach inkblots, TAT) with limited reliability and validity.

Social influence is the change in an individual's behaviour or attitudes caused by the real or imagined presence of others.

Conformity (Asch): individuals yield to group pressure even on clear perceptual judgments; group size, unanimity, and culture affect conformity.

Obedience (Milgram): authority figures can induce harmful obedience; proximity, legitimacy, and presence of a disobedient model reduce it.

Compliance techniques: foot-in-the-door (small request first), door-in-the-face (large request then concession), and low-ball.

Attitudes have cognitive, affective, and behavioural components; cognitive dissonance (Festinger) motivates attitude change.

Group properties: norms, roles, cohesiveness, and status; groups satisfy belonging, information, and identity needs.

Social facilitation improves performance on simple tasks; social loafing reduces individual effort in groups.

Group decision phenomena: group polarisation (shift to extremes) and groupthink (pressure for unanimity suppresses dissent).

Prejudice involves negative attitudes toward a group; discrimination is the behavioural expression; stereotypes are overgeneralised beliefs.