AP Psych Practice Test
• 1. the answer is B. Sensory adaptation
explains why our eyes adapt to the dark, and
why we don’t smell cat urine after a while. It
happens because our senses are constantly
stimulated and get fatigued
• 2. D. social – how we interact with other
people
• A. experimental – in a lab
• B. cognitive – how we think
• C. developmental – how we develop
• E. clinical – in a clinic or hospital
• 3. The answer is A. It helps people diagnose
and classify disorders.
• 4. The answer is E.
•
•
•
•
Post = after traumatic =
trauma. PTSD is common with war veterans but it
also happens with other horrific events.
A. GAD – anxiety disorder with a constantly low
level of autonomic nervous system arousal
B. Major Depressive Disorder – 5 signs of
depression (lack of energy, loss of appetite, loss of
interest in friends and activities etc.) lasting 2 or
more weeks
C. Hypochondriasis – Somatoform disorder
worrying about having a serious illness
D. Histrionic – personality disorder – dramatic,
attention seeking
• 5. The answer is D. Humanists emphasize free
will, self actualization, self-discovery. Believe
all Humans are good. Humanists – hippies.
• 6. Remember the ticking clock???
• The answer is A. selective attention (similar to
the cocktail party effect).
• B. Subliminal perception – below the absolute
threshold, outside conscious awareness
• 7. C. Stimulus Generalization - Just like Little Albert,
you generalize your association to similar things.
• A. stimulus discrimination is when you know the
difference – only respond to 1 specific thing
• B. second order conditioning - when you train a dog
to drool to a bell, then train the dog to associate light
with the bell then drools to – CR is not as strong
• E. Spontaneous Recovery – after extinction the CR or
the behavior returns
• 8. C. cross sectional studies study different sections of
the population (different ages, class levels, race).
• A. Longitudinal studies - Same people followed over a
long long long time (like decades). Scientist measure
how things change over time.
• D. Case studies study something in depth
• E. Observational – observe and take notes. If it’s a
naturalistic observation the observation takes place
usually in a public setting where the observer goes
unnoticed by the subjects
• 9. The answer is C. People who do things for the
love of it are intrinsically motivated.
– Intrinsic – inside (the heart)
• A. Functional Fixedness – unable to see another use
for an object other than it’s intended use – don’t
have a hammer, don’t think to use your shoe
• C. Inductive Reasoning – Going from a general to a
specific. All men are mortal. John is a man,
therefore John is mortal.
• D. Incubation – a stage of creative thought
• E. Heuristics – a short cut to solving a problem –using
something that worked in the past, narrowing down
your choices
• 10. The answer is D. D is the definition of
figure ground
• 11. E. A dog drooling to a bell but not a gong.
• 12. C (racial)
• This tiger apparently doesn’t discriminate!
• 13. D The 3 D’s – Deviant (lowstatistically
prevalent), Distressful, Disordered
(maladaptive) abnormal, gender is not a
consideration.
• 14. B. If twins are reared apart then their
environment is different. Since IQ scores have
a lower correlation when reared apart, then
environment is important.
• 15. D. validity - tests the material that its
supposed to.
• A. standardization - it was given the same way
to a representative group of test takers and
the results form a bell curve.
• B. Norms – an informal way to behave in a
culture
• C. fairness?
• E. reliability - results are the same again and
again.
• 16. The answer is A. Reason for split brain.
• 17. The answer is C. maturation. Biologically,
process that can’t be sped up no matter what
parents/environment do
– Roll-over, sit-up, crawl, walk (order is universal,
timing is not.
• 18. E. Behavioral therapy involves reinforcements
and punishments to change a behavior.
• A. Cognitive = thinking. The psychologist is trying
to change Wade’s behavior, not his thinking.
• B. Biological – give Wade medicine or surgery
• C. Psychodynamic – probe Wade’s unconscious
mind through dream analysis or transference
• D. Humanistic – help Wade remove barriers to
self actualization or find himself
• 19. a. RET therapy is a technique that challenges a
person’s irrational thoughts, so it’s very
confrontational!
• B. Psychoanalysis – uncovering unconscious conflicts
• C. aversive conditioning- might involve shocking one’s
testicles every time something is done or thought
(classical cond.)
• D. person-centered usually means the client does most
of the talking.
• E. systematic desensitazion involves gradually exposing
someone to their source of fear or anxiety.
• 20. B. Think optical – occipital; Hearing goes to
the temporal lobe (think ears are near the
temple)
• A. Parietal – touch
• C. Frontal – planning, reasoning, moral
thinking, controlling emotion
• 21. c. Internal Locus of Control
• 22.A. Pick the answer that is closest to 24
hours.
• Circa means about dian means day
• Circadian rhythms are your day/night cycles.
• If constantly exposed to artificial light or shut
in a cave, Circadian rhythms are 25 hrs.
• 23. B. 10 - If you know the
variance, the standard
deviation is the square root
of the variance –
• If you know the standard
deviation, the variance in the
standard deviation squared
• Standard deviation is always
smaller than the variance
• 24. D. Psychoanalytic is an insight therapy
• a. behavior – behavioral therapy
• B. reach full potential – self actualization –
humanistic therapy
• C. alter thought processes – cognitive therapy
• E. get rid of irrational thoughts – cognitive
(RET)
• 25. The answer is D. If the mean is 70, and the standard
deviation is 10, How many test takers scored above 60? 60
is 1 standard deviation below the mean.
• Steps to figure this out
• 1. draw an normal bell curve just like the one below (but leave out the Welchsler IQ
scores)
• Put the mean (70) at 0 then add the standard deviation(10) to the mean (70) = 80
place it on the graph at +1 standard deviation. Add 10+80 =90 and put it on the
graph at +2 standard deviations 90+10 = 100 at 3 standard deviation. Subtract 10
from each number going down (ie 70-10 = 60)
• Look where you placed 60 on the graph and add all of the % from the normal bell
curve to the right or 60.
• NOTE: You will need to memorize the %
on the normal bell curve!
• 26. Na+ = Salt (sodium and K+ = bananas
(potassium)!
• The answer is B.
• 27. A. correlation = relationship, measured
by a correlation coefficient (#between 0-1,
closer to 1 the stronger the correlation. Can
be plotted on a scatterplot.
• B. Central Tendency – mean, median, mode
• C. Histogram – graph of numerical distrib.
• D. Standard Deviation – tells us how far the
scores are spread out from the mean
• 28. B. Hippocampus – hippos attend college
campus to remember.
• A. Amygdala – Amy is afraid and angry
• C. Pituitary – Master Gland
• D. Hypothalamus – 4 F’s (fight, flight, food,
fornication) and Teddy (Temperature),
Roosevelt (Rewards)
• E. Thalamus – Thalia the switchboard operator
– Routes sensory info. to correct lobe except smell
• 29. B semicircular canals
– vestibular sense tells
you where your head is in
relationship to your
body—are you upside
down or horizontal
• A. skin = touch
• C. taste buds – gustatory
sense
• D. Olfactory – smell
• E. rods and cones - sight
• 30. D. alcohol is the answer – causes you to
slur your words
• A. cocaine is a stimulant
• B. marijuana is a hallucinogen
• C. dopamine is a neurotransmitter
• E. nicotine is not a stimulant
• 31. E. Only an experiment can establish cause
and effect.
• 32. C – the lipstick test or the smudge test
• 33. C. “interpret” is another work for
cognition
• Here are some others – think, memorize,
recall, process, recognize, realize, perceive,
believe, etc.
• 34.A. The Stanford-Binet test is the actual
name for what we call the IQ test.
• Binet wanted to find away to identify Parisian
children that needed extra help in school
• 35. D. Too difficult ant they might get too
aroused. Too easy, not enough arousal –
Yerkes Dodson law
• 36. C. diffusion means spread.
This is the bystander effect
• A. prejudice – unjustified and negative
attitude
• B. Social facilitation – you perform better in a
group (as long as the task isn’t too difficult)
• Group polarization – like minded people who
discuss an issue get more extreme in their
views
• Self-efficacy – your confidence that you cah
complete a task
• 37. The answer is A. Confirmation bias is
when we only notice things that confirm our
already held beliefs.
38. A schema is a set of expectations, a
mental construct, that we have about
something that helps us organize
information. 30 people were asked about
this office picture below.
•
•
•
•
29 out of 30
recalled
Chair, desk,
and walls
Only 8
subjects
recalled it
had a skull
9 subjects
recalled it
had books
which it did
not
Memory for
location is
influenced
by the
person’s
schema for
that
location.
• 39. C. If you catch a virus, then eat at a Mexican food
restaurant, throw up, then you will NOT want to eat at
that restaurant, even if you know that’s not where you
got the virus. That’s the Garcia effect.
• Garcia said we are biologically predisposed to learn
some behaviors more readily than others.
• 40. A. Rods – on the periphery of our retina,
help see black and white and in the dim light
• Cones are in the center area of the retina
called the fovea)C C C C Cones C C C C C
Color.
.
• 41. D. Temperament – the part of our
personality that we are born with – emotional
reactivity (excitability)and outgoingness
(extroversion/introversion)
42. D. Observational learning (like the Bobo doll
experiment)
A. Classical conditioning deals with reflex-like
responses. Like a dog drooling to a bell.
B-E are all classical and operant conditioning
terms
• 43. E.
• 44. The answer is B. A client will “project”
their personality onto the therapist. Any
vague stimuli that the therapist interprets is a
projection test
• This example is the Thermatic Apperception
Test . Rorchoch inkblot test is another
E. Behaviorism. John B. Watson - the B.
stands for Behaviorism - was famous for the
Little Albert experiment when he classically
conditioned a baby to fear a white rat (and
generalized that fear to all white furry things).
• 45.
• 46. What is the brain made of? What are
nerves made of?
• The answer is B. neuron
• 47. If you give an 11-year-old non-alcoholic
beer, he’ll start acting drunk because he
expects the alcohol to make him feel that way.
• The answer is A. expectations. – causes the
placebo effect. If we expect a drug to make us
feel better it will!
• 48. B. Which answer deals with an individual
conforming to the group? B.
– 2 types of Conformity
– Normative Social Influence – we go along with the
group to be accepted or avoid rejection
– Informational Social Influence – we going along
with the group because we think they are right
• 49. C. based on the ideas of unconditional
positive regard, even mass murderers are
good inside.
• A. No. That’s behaviorism
• B. Although Abraham Maslow talked about
peak experiences, he said that not all people
have them. No.
• D. Humanists are more positive than that!
• E. Nah, they valued free will more than that.
• 50. Remember, the brain evolved from the bottom to
the top. The bottom of the brain deals with basic life
support. So, what is at the very top of the brain??
• C. The cerebral cortex, the source of higher level
thinking and conscious thought. The outer wrinkly
part of the brain where the lobes are.
•
•
•
•
A. Occipital – seeing
B. cerebellum – Sarah Balances
D.homunculus – picture of the parts of the brain
E. Pituitary gland – master gland of the endocrine
system
• 51. E. Retro = backward with Amnesia, so we
forget things that happened before the
accident. Don’t get this mixed up with
Retroactive interference – Use PORN for that
• A. Simple failure to encode
• B. reconstruction errors after the event
• C. the inability to form NEW memories is
called antereograde amnesia (50 first dates)
• D. state dependent memory
• 52. B. hallucination is when you see or hear things
that are not there.
• a. fixation - freudian term for being stuck in a
psychosexual stage of development or it could be the
inability to solve a problem from a different
perspective
• c. illusion is a disortion of perception (ie. Optical
illusion)
• D. An eidetic image is formed if you can still see, at least in some degree of
detail, an "image" of the original stimulus (picture) after it has been
removed. The image will appear to "linger" on the original surface it was
seen, something like an after-image (except in the original color). A true
eidetic image can literally be "seen" by the subject until it fades. Sometimes
eidetic images can be recalled at will without significant fading.
• E. phobia is an uncontrollable fear of something, not a hallucination. The
individual may have a phobia but s/he is not “experiencing” it in this
question.
• 53. The answer is C.
• There is something called instinctive
drift. One time psychologists tried to
train raccoons to deposit coins in a
slot. However, they ALWAYS wanted
to rub 2 coins together and “wash”
them like they wash food in a stream.
• Garcia is known for understanding
biological predispositions play a part
in whether an animal learns
something and how quickly they learn
it.
• 54. A. Schizophrenia is associated with an
abundance of dopamine, hallucinations and
Enlarged, fluid-filled areas in the brain.
• 55. D. psychoanalysis focuses on unconscious,
unresolved conflicts from childhood.
• A. ntm imbalance is the biological perspective
• B. thoughts – cognitive perspective
• C. biopsychosocial perspective
• 56. A. hippocampus - memory
• B. Hypothalamus (remember the 4 F’s plus
Teddy Roosevelt)
• C. Thalamus – relay station
• D. Pons – facial expressions, basic biological
processes
• E. medulla – heart beat, blood pressure
• 57. a. Fixation – being stuck in a psychosexual
stage
• B. repression – motivated forgetting
• C. regression – acting immature in times of
stress
• D. sublimation – doing something positive
with your “faults”
• E. reaction formation – acting the opposite of
how you truly feel
• 58. C. behavioral (After all, the question is
asking about behaviors)
• Maladaptive behaviors, like overeating, can be
reinforced or learned through observation just
like any other behavior.
• 59. B. systematic (gradual) desensitization
• The picture is virtual reality exposure therapy.
• 60. D. Set point - It theorizes that our body
gets comfortable at a certain weight and is
resistant to change—we tend to keep going
back to the original weight
• 61. This prompt deals with Ainsworth’s studies
on attachment styles. She described the
secure attachment, avoidant, and the answer,
C. resistant or ambivalent attachment style
(generally this is called an insecure
attachment)
• 62. The answer is D. The stimulus causes your
autonomic nervous system (physiological
arousal) to react and you cognitively label the
stimulus.
• My heart beats, I think “I’m scared”, I feel the
emotion
• Schacter-Singer is the 2 Factor Theory of
Emotion
• 63. Standard deviation is how far apart are the
numbers away from each other. How much
do they deviate from each other. If the
numbers are all close together, then the
standard deviation is low
• The answer is B.
• 64. A. Soma = body somataform disorders
are the brain leading to some sensation of the
body.
• 65. D. Classical conditioning – associative
learning
• When a person or animal creates an
automatic/involuntary association between 2
things without reinforcements, that is classical
conditioning (like Pavlov training a dog to
drool to a bell)
• In this case the involuntary response (CR) is
the immune suppression and the (CS) is the
sweetwater
• 66. D. Early behaviorists were uber-scientists
who took things a bit too far. They said we
should only study observable behavior like a
pigeon pecking on a disk.
• 67. C. Deindividuation (not an individual for the
moment). They riot because they get lose our selfawareness and get swept up by the crowd—like
what’s happening in Baltimore
• A. Group polarization – when we’re with like minded
people and discuss and issue we agree on, our
position on the issue becomes more extreme
• B. Mere Exposure - the more we are around
someone, the more we like them
• E. Fundamental Attribution Error – we attribute
other’s behavior more to their disposition than the
situation
• 68. B. Humanists were the pioneers of group
therapy. It makes sense since they are into
client-centered therapy. In a group, the
therapist doesn’t dominate the
conversation—self-help groups, encounter
groups etc.
• 69. A. Seyle’s General adaptation syndrome
• 70. Reliability means you get the same results
again and again, even if the test is crap.
• A. no because it needs to be the same test
• B. that’s predictive validity
• C. needs to be the same people
• D. there needs to be some sort of retake
• E. This is the best answer, its an example of
test-retest
• 71. D. Heuristics are mental shortcuts
• Use a heuristic to unscramble this word:
EQEUN
Using a heuristic you might put the q and the u
together.
Using an algorithm, you would try all 1000 letter
combinations until you get it.
• 72. E. absolute threshold - the point at which
we notice a stimulus—remember the ticking
clock.
• B. JND – the point at which we notice the
difference between 2 similar things
• 73. A. semantic – the meaning of words
• B. episodic – an “episode” of your life (that
time you farted in class)
• C. priming – hints
• D. procedural – “procedures” like playing a
piano, walking
• 74. The answer is B. Serotonin deals with
depression. These drugs are called Selective
Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI’s)
• 75. When people work in large groups (like in
a tug of war game), the individual does not
work as hard. This is called social loafing. The
answer is C.
• 76. B. Biological – deals with the physical body
(brain, hormones, neurotransmitters)
• 77. The answer is D. You “know” the answer
but just can’t access it for some reason.
• 78. B.Token economy is when you use positive
reinforcement with a large group of people
like elementary schools or classrooms or
mental wards. (Pizza party if everyone passes
the test)
• 79. Think how old does a child need to be
before s/he understands that water conserves
its mass even if it’s poured into a taller beaker.
• The answer is C.
• 80. Dissonance = discomfort
• cognitive = thinking
• We experience cognitive dissonance
(discomfort) when our behavior doesn’t
match our attitudes. The answer is B.
• 81. For the evolutionary perspective, always
look for words and phrases like “adaptive”
“survival of the fittest” “evolution” Darwin
• The answer is B.
• 82. D. Signal detection theory says we are
more likely to hear something if we expect to
hear something.
• 83. The answer is D. Intensity
• 84. Just think, which one comes first?
Especially, which comes last???
• The answer is E.
• 85. Cognitive therapy is about changing
maladaptive thoughts. He would challenge
irrational thoughts that would stress or
depress the clients. (He’s where Dr. Phil got a
lot of inspiration.) The answer is A
• 86. a. Decay is a gradual forgetting over a long
period of time
• B. amnesia is brought on by some sort of trauma
• C. no reconstruction error in remembering the
number 9
• PORN
• Proactive-Old info gets in the way of new
• Retroactive-New info gets in the way of old
• The answer is E because channel 16 is making her
forget channel 9.
• 87. E.The self serving bias is when we attribute
our successes to internal (dispositional) causes
such as our hard work and intelligence. . .
While we attribute our failures to external
causes (the teacher was a jerk; the test was
too hard).
• 88. Just rule out all the BAD things.
• The answer is E.
• 89. First, antisocial does NOT mean
introverted. It means one does not have a
conscience (like a serial killer).
• The answer is D.
• E. that’s narcissism
• 90. Psychoanalysts use projective personality
tests, meaning they seek to access your
unconscious mind by how you interpret
pictures or fill in blanks.
• The MMPI is a self-report test, even more
respected than the Myers-Briggs.
• The answer is B.
91. The answer is D.
Acetylcholine
• Its function is motor movement
and maybe memory.
To much and you will….
Not enough and you will….
Lack of ACH has been linked to
Alzheimer’s disease.
• 92. The psychoanalytic perspective focuses on
unconscious desires and conflicts.
• The answer is C.
• 93. Self report tests (like the MMPI and the
Myers-Briggs and the Big Five) are trait tests.
The trait approach to psychology says our
personality is based on the sum of our traits
(such as introversion, openness)
• The answer is B.
• 94. When we commit the FAE, we
overestimate dispositional (internal) factors
and we underestimate situational factors.
• The answer is A.
• 95. I feel Starbucky today. Language is
creative. If we had a language acquisition
device, then we couldn’t be so creative.
• The answer is A.
• 96. What are we doing to the subjects to
study this? The answer is C
• 97. What are we measuring? The answer is B.
• 98. C. (same as 96.) (the independent
variables)
• 99. Stage 2 has sleep spindles. (A)
• The sleep cycle has changed. I’m not sure this
question is valid.
• 100. C. Social – people facil – easy
• Sometimes, athletes and musicians play better
on game day in front of people than at
practice.
• (The Yerkes-Dodson law supports this as well!)