AP Psychology Flashcards

Heritability is the share of the differences in a trait across a group that can be linked to genetic differences in that group. It does not say how much of one person's trait comes from genes. Researchers compare twins: if identical twins, who share the same genes, resemble each other more than fraternal twins do, genes matter for that trait. Adoption studies add a check by comparing adoptees with their biological and adoptive families.

Both are branches of the autonomic nervous system, which runs automatic functions like heart rate and digestion. The sympathetic branch arouses the body for action: heart rate and breathing speed up, the pupils widen and digestion slows. The parasympathetic branch calms the body and restores energy afterward. A quick hook: sympathetic is fight or flight, parasympathetic is rest and digest.

An action potential is the brief electrical signal that travels down an axon when a neuron fires. It fires when incoming signals push the neuron past its threshold. All-or-none means a neuron either fires fully or not at all, so a stronger stimulus does not make a bigger spike. It makes the neuron fire more often, and more neurons join in. After each spike there is a short refractory period when the neuron cannot fire again.

REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep is when most vivid dreaming happens. The brain is very active, the eyes move quickly under the lids and the large muscles are temporarily paralyzed, which is why it is sometimes called paradoxical sleep. NREM sleep runs from light sleep to deep, slow-wave sleep, with slower brain activity. A night alternates between the two, and the REM periods get longer toward morning.

Bottom-up processing builds a perception from the raw sensory input: the senses detect features, and the brain assembles them into a whole. Top-down processing starts with your knowledge, expectations and context and uses them to interpret the input. Reading a smudged word correctly because of the sentence around it is top-down. Perceptual set is a top-down effect: what you expect to see shapes what you see.

It is judging how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind. It misleads when memorable events are not common ones. After heavy news coverage of a plane crash, people tend to overestimate the danger of flying, even though crashes are very rare. Compare the representativeness heuristic, which judges something by how closely it matches a typical example of a category.

Both are forgetting caused by competing memories. In proactive interference, old information gets in the way of new information, as when your old locker combination keeps coming to mind after you learn the new one. In retroactive interference, new information disrupts memory for the old, as when learning a new phone number makes the old one hard to recall. Pro means forward, retro means backward.

Reliability is consistency: a reliable test gives similar scores when the same person takes it again. Validity is whether the test measures what it claims to measure, such as a college admission test predicting first-year grades. A test can be reliable without being valid, like a scale that is always five pounds off. It cannot be valid unless it is reliable.

A cross-sectional study compares people of different ages at one point in time. It is fast and cheap, but the age groups also differ by generation, so the differences may not come from age. A longitudinal study follows the same people over years and shows how individuals change, but it takes a long time and people drop out along the way. Both are used to study development.

Baumrind described three. Authoritative parents are warm, set clear rules and explain them, and this style is linked with the best outcomes in her research. Authoritarian parents are strict, demand obedience and show little warmth. Permissive parents are warm but set few limits. Later researchers added a fourth style, neglectful, with little warmth and few rules. The links are correlations, not proof that the style causes the outcome.

Extinction is the fading of a conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus keeps appearing without the unconditioned stimulus. Spontaneous recovery is the return of the weakened response after a rest period, when the conditioned stimulus shows up again. The comeback suggests that extinction hides what was learned instead of erasing it.

Observational learning is learning by watching and imitating a model. In Bandura's Bobo doll study, children who watched an adult hit an inflatable doll were more likely to hit it, and to copy the adult's exact moves, than children who had not. Learning does not need direct reward. Bandura's four processes are attention, retention, reproduction and motivation.

It is the tendency to credit your successes to your own traits and effort and to blame your failures on the situation. A student who aces a test might say I am good at this, and one who fails might say the test was unfair. The bias protects self-esteem, and it is one of the attribution patterns the exam asks you to spot in a scenario.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort of holding attitudes and behavior that clash. People reduce it by changing the attitude, changing the behavior or adding a justification. In the classic study, people paid only one dollar to tell the next participant that a dull task was fun later rated the task as more enjoyable than people paid twenty dollars. One dollar was not enough justification, so their attitude shifted.

In Freud's psychodynamic theory, the id is the unconscious drive for immediate pleasure, the ego works by the reality principle and finds realistic ways to meet those drives, and the superego is the internalized conscience. Defense mechanisms, such as repression, projection and displacement, are unconscious ways the ego reduces anxiety when the three conflict.

Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you enjoy it or find it meaningful. Extrinsic motivation is doing it for a reward or to avoid a penalty. The overjustification effect is that giving an unneeded reward for something a person already enjoys can lower their interest once the reward stops. Self-determination theory says people thrive when they feel autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Alarm is the first reaction to a stressor, with sympathetic arousal. Resistance is the body's effort to cope, staying on alert while using up resources. Exhaustion comes when the stress goes on and resources run low, which leaves a person more open to illness. The model describes how long-lasting stress wears the body down.

The diathesis-stress model says a disorder develops when a predisposition, the diathesis, meets enough stress. The predisposition can be genetic or biological. Two people under the same stress can have different outcomes because their vulnerability differs. It fits the biopsychosocial approach, which explains disorders as a mix of biological, psychological and sociocultural influences.

Positive symptoms add something that is normally not there: hallucinations, delusions and disorganized speech or behavior. Negative symptoms take away normal functioning: flat affect, very little speech and a loss of motivation. Positive does not mean good, only added. On the exam you may have to sort a described symptom into one group or the other.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy helps a person spot unhelpful thought patterns, test them against evidence and practice new behavior. It is widely used for depression and anxiety. Systematic desensitization is a behavioral therapy based on classical conditioning: the person builds a ladder of feared situations and pairs each step with relaxation. This card is exam practice about terms, not treatment advice.