DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION STUDY GUIDE
PSYCHOLOGY
STATISTICS
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Be able to differentiate and apply the following terms: o Statistics o Population o Sample o Data o Parameter o Variable o Independent variable o Dependent variable o Continuous variables o Discrete variables (categorical, nominal) o Levels of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio) o Descriptive statistics o Inferential statistics o Effect sizes o Independent measures o Repeated measures o Correlation coefficients (strength, direction)
• Understand the various types of studies (experimental, correlation), and how they are designed.
• Be familiar with statistical notation.
• Be able to find and/or calculate: o True limits of a number o True limits of an interval o Frequencies o Proportions o Percentages
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o Mean o Median o Mode o Variation o Variance o Standard deviation o Transformation to z-scores o Confidence intervals
• Be familiar with the shapes of distributions
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Understand hypothesis testing
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Understand Type I error and Type II error
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
• Be able to differentiate and apply the following terms: o Maturation o Mortality o Validity (internal, external, construct) o Reliability (temporal consistency, test-retest, internal consistency, parallelforms, split-half, Cronbach’s alpha) o Random sampling o Random assignment o Matching of subjects o Between-subjects design o Within-subjects design o Mixed design o Correlational design o Factorial design o Interaction effects o Main effects
• Be able to interpret statistics and describe the pattern of results.
• Be familiar with the components of a research article (abstract, introduction, method, etc.)
PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
• Know the origins and history of Physiological Psychology.
• Know the components of neurons, how they function, and how they communicate
(including but not limited to: soma, dendrites, axon, terminal buttons, myelin sheath, synapse, nodes of Ranvier, action potential, resting potential, neurotransmitters)

• Know the different types of neurons and what they control (sensory, motor, inter)
• Know the components of the nervous system o Central (brain, spinal cord) o Peripheral (somatic, autonomic, sympathetic, parasympathetic)
• Understand the function of the various parts of the brain (including but not limited to: thalamus, hypothalamus, cerebellum, cerebrum, frontal lobe, occipital lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, amygdala, pons, corpus callosum, fornix, reticular formation, medulla, pineal gland, pineal gland, optic chiasm, suprachiasmic nucleus, ventrolateral preoptic area, Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area)
• Understand the biological underpinnings of the physical senses, basic drives (e.g., sleep, hunger, thirst), emotions, learning, attention, communication, stress, and mental disorders, including schizophrenia, affective disorders, and anxiety disorders.
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PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING
Understand how psychologists define and study learning and memory
Who was Ivan Pavlov, and what was his contribution to learning?
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Understand the components of classical conditioning (unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, conditioned response, extinction, spontaneous recovery, reconditioning, generalization and discrimination)
• Understand the components of operant conditioning (positive reinforcers, negative reinforcers, positive punishment, negative punishment, partial reinforcement schedules)
• Define and give examples of escape conditioning and avoidance conditioning
• Know about social learning theory, observational learning, and vicarious conditioning
• Describe the information-processing model and level-of-processing model of memory
• Define maintenance and elaborative rehearsal and explain how these concepts relate to the levels-of-processing model
• Know the components of memory storage (encoding, storage, retrieval, short-term memory, long-term memory)
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Know the sensory memory stores (iconic, echoic)
• Understand the limits of and duration of short-term and long-term memory.
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Be familiar with techniques to keep information in the short-term memory store
(rehearsal, chunking, elaborative encoding)
• Be able to distinguish between types of memory (implicit, explicit, semantic, episodic)
• Discuss the duration of short-term memory
• Define and describe the Brown-Peterson distractor technique
• Describe the importance of rehearsal in maintaining information in short-term memory
• Describe primacy and recency effects, and explain how these effects support a distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory

• Describe context-specific memory and state-dependent memory and give examples of each
• Discuss the research examining constructive memories
HISTORY AND SYSTEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY
Know the contributions of the following people: o Kenneth Bancroft Clark o Alfred Binet o Mammie Clark o Hermann Ebbinghaus o Gustav Fechner o Lillian Moller Gilvreth o Henry H. Goddard o G. Stanley Hall o William James o David Krech o Kurt Lewin o Hugo Münsterberg’s o Ross Stagner o Francis Cecil Sumner o Frederick Winslow Taylor o Lewis M. Terman o Edward B. Titchener o Margaret Washburn o John B. Watson o Ernst Heinrich Weber o Robert S. Woodworth o Wilhelm Wundt
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Be familiar with the following: o Descartes, rationalism, and empiricism o Psychophysics o Structuralism, functionalism o Emergence of applied fields of psychology (e.g., clinical and industrial psychology) o Mental testing movement o Behaviorism, neobehaviorism, radical behaviorism o Roots and evolution of modern cognitive psychology