General AP Study Summary
- Identify and focus on the topics that will be examined.
- Understand the entire test structure such as how many MCQ and FRQ questions exist.
- Practice makes perfect. This helps concepts learned stick.
Specific AP Psychology Study Summary
- Learn how the brain, nerves, and genes work together to control your actions and how your senses help you notice the world around you.
- Study how your mind “digests” information, how you solve problems, how you learn to speak, and how your memory stores and finds facts.
- Explore how people change from babies to adults and how we learn new things through rewards, punishments, or just by watching others.
- Look at why you act differently in a crowd than when you are alone and study the different theories that explain what makes your personality unique.
- Learn about mental health challenges like anxiety or depression and the different ways doctors and therapists help people feel better and live happy lives.
Unit Mastery Guide
Unit 1: Biological Bases of Behavior (The Biology Behind Behavior)
This unit looks at the hardware of the human body that makes your mind work. To perform well here, it is imperative to understand how the human brain and human body parts work together. What are the main topics you should focus on?
- Nature vs. Nurture – This has to do with how your genes and environment work together to bring about a human’s personality.
- The Nervous System – Here you study the structure of your brain and nerves then learn what each individual part does.
- Brain Power and Communication – How neurons communicate with one another and how different aspects of the brain control things the human body does like when they walk or stretch their arms or speak.
- Sensation and Perception – How your body recognizes information received from the world around it and how the human brain makes sense of that information.
Unit 2: Cognition (Thinking and Memory)
Cognition, simply put, is what the human brain does when busy. You are studying how your brain digests information, stores it and uses it afterwards. Your focus on this unit should be:
- Thinking – Here your studies involve the organization of thoughts in your mind. Concepts covered include cognitive information analysis and how the human mind makes decisions and judgements quickly.
- Problem-solving and creativity – This entails different approaches human beings take to tackle a challenge.
- Language – You learn how children learn to speak and how it ultimately contributes to how we as human beings communicate using symbols, sounds, and grammar which later determines our perception of the world around us.
- Memory – You learn about encoding, storage, and retrieval of information in the human brain.
Unit 3: Learning and Development
You learn about how people change and acquire new skills over time as they grow. The topics in this unit tend to show up in the essay part of your exam therefore understanding them can be really beneficial.
Here are the main focus points:
- Classical and Operant Conditioning – These entail the two ways human beings learn from experiences i.e. through association and rewards or punishments.
- Social Learning – Covers learning by watching other people’s experiences and outcomes in doing something.
- Lifespan Development – You look at how the human body, thinking, and feelings change from childhood until adulthood.
- Heredity versus environment – Similar to unit 1, you look at how your DNA (nature) and life experiences (nurture) determine and influence the person you ultimately become.
Unit 4: Social Psychology and Personality
Think about how you behave when you are around your parents, friends, and teachers since this is 1 out of 2 things covered in this unit. The second being what brings about the uniqueness of individual personalities.
Here are the main focus points:
- Attitude formation and change – This explains our interest or disinterest in things and what causes us to change our minds about them.
- Group Behavior – This is about how being in a crowd affects you.
- Judging others – This covers the ways we try to explain why people do what they do.
- Personality theories – Psychoanalytic, Humanistic, and trait-based theories covered.
- Personality Tests – You’ll look at the different ways psychologists “measure” personality and learn what these tests are good at and where they might make mistakes.
Unit 5: Mental and Physical Health
Here you learn what happens when a person’s mental health isn’t at its optimal state and how mental health professionals such as therapists work to help people achieve this optimal state in mental health.
Main focus points:
- Psychological Disorders: You learn about anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia in addition to other mental health challenges.
- Treatment Approaches: Learning about the different ways to help people with these mental challenges such as using behavioral, cognitive, and biological solutions.
- Health Psychology and Stress: You will learn how conditions such as stress can lead to the physical human body becoming sick together with how lifestyle choices can cause changes in mood and health.
- Positive Psychology: You learn how to help people be happy, find their talents, and live a productive life.
Attribution
This guide was made from our studies from the Albert website that discusses AP Psychology Study Strategies.