AP Psychology Online Single Semester

1: The Science of Mind: The Discipline of Psychology

·         Identify the five in-depth perspectives of psychology and explain how integrating these perspectives leads to a more comprehensive and accurate view of behavior and mental processes.

·         Explain why issues of diversity and ethics are important to explore across all topics in psychology.

·         Analyze the contributions of philosophy and the natural sciences to modern psychology.

·         Describe how early movements in psychology are significant for modern psychology.

·         Discuss the importance of the scientific method as a foundation for psychology.

·         Explain why psychology’s role as a hub science supports applications in many academic fields, contributes to the solutions of critical contemporary problems, and informs the development of public policies.

2: The Measure of Mind: Methods of Psychology

·         Distinguish scientific reasoning from common sense.

·         Assess the use of case studies, naturalistic observations, and surveys to describe behavior.

·         Analyze the key features, strengths, and limitations of correlational and experimental methods.

·         Distinguish between reliability and validity.

·         Differentiate descriptive and inferential statistics.

·         Critique the ethical guidelines for using human and animal participants in research.

3: The Evolving Mind: Nature and Nurture Intertwined

·         Analyze the role of genes as the building blocks of human nature.

·         Appraise the importance of heritability estimates, twin studies, adoption studies, and epigenetic analyses in the field of behavioral genetics.

·         Compare the roles played by mutation, natural selection, migration, and genetic drift as mechanisms of evolution.

·         Discuss how the human brain might represent an adaptation for coping with complex social behavior.

·         Explain the mechanisms by which intrasexual and intersexual selection might influence the evolution of human behavior.

·         Identify the cultural mechanisms by which nature and nurture can interact to influence human behavior.

4: The Biological Mind: The Physical Basis of Behavior

·         Identify the relevance of brain structures and processes for understanding mind and behavior.

·         Differentiate the major branches of the nervous system, explaining the core biological function of each branch.

·         Associate key structures in, and regions of, the brain and peripheral nervous system with important aspects of physical and psychological functioning.

·         Explain the process by which hormones influence psychological experience and behavior.

·         Describe the process by which neurons communicate with one another, allowing the nervous system to integrate complex information.

·         Differentiate the roles played by major neurotransmitters in supporting physical functioning and psychological experience.

5: The Perceiving Mind: Sensation and Perception

·         Explain the basic concepts of sensation and perception, including transduction of stimuli into neural signals, distinctions between bottom-up and top-down perceptual processing, thresholds, and measurement.

·         Identify the process by which the physical structures of the eye transduce light waves into neural signals, producing the sense of vision.

·         Summarize the processes responsible for color vision, object recognition, and depth perception.

·         Describe the process by which physical structures of the ear transduce sound waves into neural signals, producing perception of pitch, loudness, and spatial location in hearing.

·         Explain the mechanisms by which the somatosensory and chemical sense systems produce perception of body position, touch, skin temperature, pain, smell, and taste.

·         Analyze the causes of various individual differences in perception, including development and culture, in terms of biology, experience, and their interaction.

6: The Aware Mind: Elements of Consciousness

·         Analyze the different meanings of consciousness.

·         Describe the effects of different stages of waking and sleep on consciousness, electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns, autonomic nervous system function, and muscle activity.

·         Differentiate several sleep—wake disorders in terms of their symptoms and the type of sleep disturbed.

·         Explain disorders of consciousness in terms of damage or dysfunction of the brain.

·         Categorize the neurochemical mechanisms and effects on consciousness of major types of psychoactive drugs.

·         Describe the use of hypnosis, meditation, and other nondrug methods for altering consciousness.

7: The Feeling Mind: Emotion and Motivation

·         Distinguish between emotion and motivation.

·         Differentiate the features and predictions of major theories of emotion.

·         Explain the biological, social, and cognitive correlates of emotional expression and assessment.

·         Analyze the physiological and environmental factors that influence hunger and sexual behavior.

·         Describe motivations of affiliation and achievement in light of systems explaining the prioritization of motives.

8: The Adaptive Mind: Learning

·         Compare and contrast reflexes, instincts, and learned behaviors.

·         Identify the components of a classical conditioning experiment and discuss major phenomena and applications related to classical conditioning.

·         Describe the major components of operant conditioning and distinguish operant conditioning from classical conditioning.

·         Analyze the processes that result in observational learning.

·         Discuss the interactions between learned processes and animals’ preparation to learn in species-specific ways.

·         Apply learning principles and terminology to everyday situations and problems.

9: The Knowing Mind: Memory

·         Apply the concepts of encoding, storage, and retrieval of memory to relevant examples.

·         Differentiate among sensory memory, short-term or working memory, and long-term memory, as well as the subtypes of long-term memory.

·         Explain the models describing the organization of long-term memories.

·         Analyze the variables influencing retrieval from short- and long-term memory.

·         Explain forgetting, decay, interference, motivated forgetting, and confabulation.

·         Identify the biological correlates of memory.

10: The Thinking Mind: Thinking, Language, and Intelligence

·         Explain the role of mental representations in thinking, and compare and contrast models of concept formation.

·         Summarize the four steps of problem solving, incorporating existing research on how to approach each step successfully, and apply to a problem.

·         Analyze the building blocks and biological correlates of language.

·         Define general intelligence, and evaluate the evidence for multiple intelligence subtypes.

·         Analyze the interactions between nature and nurture in explaining individual differences in intelligence.

11: The Developing Mind: Life Span Development

·         Evaluate the evidence for sensory capacities, preferences, and reflexes in newborn infants.

·         Identify major physical, cognitive, and social/emotional differences among the prenatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and give examples of ways in which these three trajectories influence one another.

·         Differentiate Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational), and critique Piaget’s theory, using research from alternate approaches.

·         Debate the adaptive function of infant attachment, and analyze the roles of temperament, culture, and parenting in driving individual attachment styles.

·         Identify epigenetic processes, critical or sensitive periods, and the impact of experience on biological development.

·         Debate the research evidence for continuity versus discontinuity in the trajectories of physical, cognitive, and social/emotional development.

12: The Individual Mind: Personality and the Self

·         Compare and contrast the psychodynamic, humanistic, trait or Big Five, and social–cognitive theories of personality.

·         Debate the validity of self-report inventories versus projective tests as measures of personality.

·         Differentiate and illustrate several distinct aspects of self (self-concept, self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-regulation) in terms of their content, sources, and implications.

·         Analyze evidence for the biological bases of personality and the self.

·         Distinguish between the personal and interpersonal self, and relate these to cultural differences in individualistic versus collectivistic aspects of self-concept.

13: The Connected Mind: Social Psychology

·         Discuss person perception, including first impressions, our use of dispositional and situational attributions, and the types of attributional biases that can occur.

·         Define attitude, and discuss the origins of attitudes and their susceptibility to change.

·         Differentiate prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination.

·         Evaluate social influence by distinguishing among conformity, compliance, and obedience.

·         Identify types of group influence, including social facilitation, social loafing, deindividuation, group polarization, and groupthink.

·         Summarize research on the mechanisms of attraction, cooperation and competition, and aggression.

14: The Troubled Mind: Psychological Disorders

·         Analyze the general definition of psychological disorder and discuss its application in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

·         Debate the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), considering ways to distinguish symptoms of these disorders from normal childhood behavior.

·         Summarize the symptoms of schizophrenia and their biological and environmental correlates.

·         Discuss the role of bipolar disorder as a bridge between schizophrenia and major depressive disorder.

·         Identify common and differentiating symptoms of the anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and dissociative and somatic symptom disorders.

·         Assess the psychological mechanisms that may support behavioral symptoms of antisocial and borderline personality disorders.

15: Healing the Troubled Mind: Therapy

·         Summarize the core principles of evidence-based practice in psychotherapy.

·         Differentiate the training and licensure required for, and the types of care offered by, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, counselors, hypnotherapists, and life coaches.

·         Analyze the key principles of psychoanalytic, humanistic, behavioral, and cognitive psychotherapy techniques.

·         Explain the biological mechanisms by which medication, electroconvulsive therapy, psychosurgery, deep brain and magnetic stimulation, and neurofeedback are thought to alleviate symptoms of disorder.

·         Integrate biological and psychotherapeutic approaches to treating neurodevelopmental disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and personality disorders.

16: The Healthy Mind: Stress and Coping, Health Psychology, and Positive Psychology

·         Define stress, identifying key neural and hormonal aspects of Hans Selye’s general adaptation syndrome (GAS).

·         Distinguish among adaptive elements of the short-term stress response and health problems linked to chronic stress.

·         Compare and contrast strategies for coping with stress, including problem-, emotion-, and relationship-focused strategies.

·         Summarize the psychosocial factors associated with smoking, nutrition, alcohol use, and lack of exercise, and propose behavioral interventions for these problems.

·         Differentiate the aims and principles of positive psychology from those of other major movements in psychology, as described in Chapter 1.

·         Distinguish among meanings of happiness (pleasant, good, and meaningful lives), and analyze the research evidence on what makes people happy.