AP Psychology, 2023-2024
Mr. Wall, South Iredell High School, Room G103
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Unit 1: Cognitive Psychology (Thinking, memory, language, and intelligence)
Week 1 – Thinking and Cognition.
Week 2 – Memory.
Week 3 - Language structure, acquisition, and development; The role of language in thinking; problem-solving, heuristics, and creative thinking strategies.
Week 4 – Psychometrics in intelligence/aptitude testing, including norms, measurement of reliability and validity and reduction of cultural bias; Introduction to Intelligence, emotional intelligence and how intelligence is measured; Twin and Adoption studies: understanding the influence of environment.
Unit 2: Motivation, Stress, Emotion, and Personality
Week 5 – Motivations: Arousal theory, drive-reduction theory, incentives, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Week 6 – Physiological effects of stress on well-being; Type A and B personalities.
Week 7 – Theories of emotion; Coping.
Week 8 - Psychoanalytical perspective, including Freud’s id, ego, superego, and psycho-sexual stages; Humanistic perspective, with a focus on the contributions of Maslow and Rogers; Trait perspective, including the Big Five factors; Social-cognitive perspective, with a focus on Bandura’s reciprocal determinism; Methods of personality assessment, including TAT, Rorschach, Myers-Briggs, MMPI.
Unit 3: Foundations of Psychology (Approaches and Research)
Week 9 – Historical perspectives and contributions; structuralism vs functionalism; Modern perspectives: psychodynamic, behaviorism, Gestalt, humanism, biological, cognitive.
Week 10 – Research Design and Ethical Considerations (The three big research designs: descriptive, correlation studies, experimental – advantages and disadvantages of each; Ethical concerns in both human and non-human animal subjects, including APA guidelines; Testing and Individual Differences).
Week 11 – Statistical Analysis (Interpreting statistics: measures of central tendency and variance, p-values, z-scores).
Unit 4: Biology of Behavior (Neuroscience, Systems, Methods, and States of Consciousness)
Week 12 – The Brain; Neuron anatomy, transmission of neurotransmitters and re-uptake; Parts and functions of the hind-brain, mid-brain, fore-brain, cerebral cortex.
Week 13 – Biological Systems; Subdivisions and functions of the nervous system and Endocrine system.
Week 14 – Neurological Research Methods (including lesions, case studies, split brain surgery, PET and CAT scans, MRI and fMRIs, and EEGs; Twin-studies, heritability and nature-nurture debate).
Week 15 – Sleep (Value and Optimization; The sleep cycle and stages, sleep functions and disorders; Dream theories and analysis, with a focus on Freud and Jung).
Week 16 – States of Consciousness.
Unit 5: Sensation and Perception
Week 17 – Psycho-physics (including thresholds, sensory adaptation, and selective attention).
Week 18 – Processing (Visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, vestibular, kinesthetic, and tactile sensory processing, including perception of pain).
Week 19 – Perceptual Organization (including Gestalt principles, depth perception, perceptual constancy).
Week 20 – Sensation and Perception Lab Project.
Unit 6: Learning
Week 21 - Acquisition, discrimination, generalization, and extinction in classical conditioning.
Week 22 – Principles (of reinforcement, punishment, and motivation in operant conditioning).
Week 23 – Major experiments and contributions (including, but not limited to: Pavlov, Rescorla, Skinner, Thorndike, Watson, Bandura).
Unit 7: Developmental Psychology
Week 24 – Approaches (Nature vs. nurture, behavior genetics, twin studies and cultural norms, values, and roles).
Week 25 – Development (Physiological, social, and cognitive development throughout the lifespan: prenatal, childhood, adolescence, adulthood).
Week 26 – Stages of (Piaget’s stages of cognitive development; Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development; Kohlberg’s stages of moral development).
Unit 8: Stress, Health, and Clinical Psychology
Week 27 – Abnormal Behavior and Treatments (DSM classification of mental disorders, including anxiety, mood, personality, dissociative disorders, and schizophrenia with a focus on symptoms and effectiveness of treatments).
Week 28 – Psychotherapies (Characteristics and evaluation of psychotherapies including psychoanalysis and humanistic, behavior, cognitive, group, family therapies; biomedical therapies (drug, ECT).
Unit 9: Sociocultural Approach
Week 29 – Theories (Attribution theory and attitude formation, including cognitive dissonance theory).
Week 30 – Social Psychological Experiences (Fundamental Attribution Error – Ross (1977). Social influence, including conformity and obedience studies, de-individuation, group-think, the bystander effect; Stereotypes, prejudice, and scapegoating; Biological and psychological aspects of aggression, attraction, altruism).
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AP Exam Review during the Weeks of 31-33 = 3 weeks of review!
AP Psychology Exam on May 9th, 2024 12 p.m./Afternoon Session
Part I: 100 Multiple-choice Questions 66.67% 70 min.
Part II: 2 Free-response Questions (Concept Application & Research Design) 33.30% 50 min.