STUDY GUIDE FOR FINAL EXAM: 75 multiple-choice questions total, no scantron needed, pen or pencil works

50 of the 75 questions will be from Chapters 11, 12, and 13

Chapter 11: Personality
What is the definition of personality?
Be familiar with the terminology of Freuds psychoanalytic theory. What are the levels of awareness? Be familiar
with conscious, preconscious, unconscious, and Freudian slip? What are the structures of personality and the
associated terminology? Be familiar with the id, ego, superego, pleasure principle, reality principle, morality principle
Understand the definitions and be able to identify these defense mechanisms from examples: repression, sublimation,
denial, rationalization, intellectualization, projection, reaction formation, regression, displacement
Be familiar with the stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital), the associated ages, the
associated erogenous zones, the key conflicts at each stage, and the associated adult personality. What is fixation?
What is a trait? Be familiar with the five-factor model of personality traits that includes: openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. Can you identify which factor a particular trait would be
measuring?
Be familiar with Eysencks biological explanations extraversion-introversion and neuroticism-stability.
Chapter 12: Psychological Disorders
How is abnormal behavior defined? Be familiar with the four criteria for identifying abnormal behavior: deviance,
dysfunction, distress, and danger.
Understand the differences in perspectives / explanations of abnormal behavior that are suggested by the medical
model and the psychodynamic, behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, biological, evolutionary, and sociocultural
perspectives.
What is the DSM-5? What are the benefits and criticisms of the DSM-5?
How are anxiety disorders defined? What are the symptoms / criteria of the following anxiety disorders: generalized
anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, agoraphobia, specific phobias, social phobias?
Understand the psychological, biological, and sociocultural factors that contribute to the development of anxiety
disorders.
How are depressive disorders defined? What are the symptoms / criteria of major depression? What are the
symptoms / criteria of bipolar disorder?
What are the biological and psychosocial explanations of mood disorders? What is learned helplessness?
What is schizophrenia? What are hallucinations? What are delusions? Be familiar with the distinctions between
delusions of persecution, grandeur, and reference. What is flattened affect? What are examples of positive versus
negative symptoms of schizophrenia?
Be familiar with the biological explanations of schizophrenia: genetics, neurotransmitters, brain abnormalities. Be
familiar with the diathesis-stress model and the psychological and social factors contributing to the onset of
schizophrenia.
What is obsessive-compulsive disorder? What are the symptoms / criteria of OCD?
Chapter 13: Therapy
How is psychotherapy defined? What are three major categories of the approaches to treatment and what specific
therapy approaches that fit under each category?
Be familiar with psychoanalysis and its related terminology: free association, dream analysis, analysis of resistance,
analysis of transference, interpretation.
What is humanistic therapy? Be familiar with client-centered therapy and its related terminology: empathy,
unconditional positive regard, genuineness, active listening.
Be familiar with cognitive therapy. What is cognitive restructuring? Be familiar with rational-emotive behavior
theory (REBT) and its associated terminology: activating event, irrational beliefs, emotional consequences, disputing
irrational beliefs.
What is cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT)? Be familiar with the three Cs: catch the faulty thought, challenge it,
change it. What is selective perception, overgeneralization, magnification, and all-or-nothing thinking?
What is behavior therapy? Be familiar with systematic desensitization, aversion therapy, and modeling therapy.
What is biomedical therapy? What is psychopharmacology? Know the distinctions between antianxiety drugs,
antipsychotic drugs, mood-stabilzier drugs, antidepressant drugs.
What is an eclectic approach to therapy and the five most common goals of therapy?

25 of the 75 questions will be from Chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, and 14

Chapter 1: Introduction and Research Methods
How does each of the following perspectives define psychology and explain behavior and/or mental processes?:
Psychodynamic, Behavioral, Humanistic, Cognitive, Biological, Evolutionary, Sociocultural
Be familiar with the three major research methods of descriptive, correlational, and experimental. What are the
purposes and advantages and disadvantages of each?
What is naturalistic observation? Survey/interview? Case study? Archival research?
Be familiar with how to interpret correlation coefficients (identifying magnitude/strength and direction of
correlation as positive or negative).
What is an experimental research? Can you identify an independent variable (IV) and a dependent variable (DV) in
an example?
Chapter 2: Neuroscience and Biological Foundations
Be familiar with the structures and functions of the parts of the neuron: dendrite, cell body, axon, terminal buttons,
and myelin sheath.
Be familiar with the concepts of resting potential, action potential, depolarization, and repolarization.
Be familiar with the parts of synapse: What does the terminal button, synaptic vesicle, synaptic cleft, and receptor
site do? What is reuptake?
What are the functions of the following sections of the brain?: HINDBRAIN: medulla, pons, cerebellum;
MIDBRAIN: reticular formation; FOREBRAIN: hypothalamus, thalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, cerebral cortex,
corpus callosum
What are the functions of the lobes of the brain (frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital) and the functions and
locations of the four primary cortex areas (motor cortex, auditory cortex, somatosensory cortex, visual cortex)?
Chapter 4: Sensation and Perception
What are the functions of the various structures of the eye?: Be familiar with the cornea, pupil, iris, lens, retina,
fovea, optic nerve, and optic disk/blind spot. Where are the rods and cones located in the retina? What do they allow
us to see?
Be familiar with the definition and examples of the organization principles of figure-ground, proximity, continuity,
closure, and similarity
Chapter 6: Learning
What are the definitions of the following classical conditioning components?: NS, UCS, UCR, CS, CR. Can you
identify each of these in an example?
What is acquisition, stimulus generalization, stimulus discrimination, extinction, spontaneous recovery, and higherorder conditioning?
How is positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement defined? How are positive punishment and negative
punishment defined? Can you identify each of these consequences from an example?
How are the following schedules of reinforcement defined?: continuous, fixed ratio, fixed interval, variable ratio,
variable interval. Can you identify a schedule from an example?
Chapter 7: Memory
What are the characteristics (purpose, duration, capacity) of sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term
memory?
What are the different types of long-term memory?: Be familiar with explicit/declarative types of memory: semantic
and episodic memories and implicit/nondeclarative types of memory: procedural memory, classically conditioned
memory, and priming.
Be familiar with different explanations of why we forget: decay theory, interference theory, motivated forgetting
theory, encoding failure theory, and retrieval failure theory.

Chapter 9: Lifespan Development

Be familiar with stages of prenatal development (germinal, embryonic, fetal), the timelines, and what develops at
each stage.
Be familiar with the terminology of Piagets theory and in which stage it is discussed: sensorimotor stage: object
permanence; preoperational stage: conservation, lack of understanding of hierarchical classification, centration,
irreversibility, egocentrism, animism; concrete operational stage: understanding of hierarchical classification;
decentration, reversibility, concrete thinking; formal operational stage: systematic thinking, abstract thinking. Be
able to identify these phenomena from examples of human behavior.
What is the strange situation? Be familiar with the different patterns of attachment (secure, anxious/ambivalent,
anxious/avoidant, disorganized/disoriented) and the behaviors displayed by infants with these patterns of attachment.
Chapter 14: Social Psychology
What is social psychology?
What are attributions? Be familiar with the different types of attributions: personal/internal vs. situational/external.
What is the fundamental attribution error? What is the actor-observer effect? What is the self-serving bias? Be able to
identify these phenomena from examples of human behavior.
What is conformity? What is normative and informational social influence? How did Asch conduct his study of
conformity and what were the results of his study?
What is obedience? How did Milgram conduct his study of obedience and what were the results of his study?