Memly's AP® Psychology Key Terms: 300 Free Study Cards

300 terms, with the confusable pair named on 52 of them.

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앞면	뒷면
Operational definition	Definition: A statement of exactly how a variable is measured or manipulated in a particular study. Example: Defining anxiety as a score on a published rating scale rather than as a feeling. Why it matters: Two studies claiming to measure the same thing may not, so the operational definition is what makes a finding checkable.
Experimenter expectancy effect	Definition: Unintended influence of a researcher's expectations on participants' behaviour or on how it is recorded. Example: A researcher who expects a faster response timing that group slightly more generously.
Measures of central tendency	Definition: The mean, median and mode, each summarizing where a distribution centres. Why it matters: The mean is pulled by extreme scores while the median is not, so a skewed distribution is better summarized by the median.
Reliability of a measure	Definition: The consistency of a measure, across occasions, across items, or across raters. Why it matters: A measure can be perfectly consistent and consistently measure the wrong thing, so reliability does not imply validity.
Medulla	Definition: A hindbrain structure controlling automatic functions including heartbeat and breathing. Why it matters: Damage here is life-threatening in a way that damage to much larger cortical areas may not be, so importance does not track size.
Corpus callosum and hemispheric communication	Definition: The bundle of fibres connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. Why it matters: Severing it leaves each hemisphere working with information the other cannot access, which is what made split-brain research informative.
Electroencephalography	Definition: Recording electrical activity from the scalp. Why it matters: It has excellent timing and poor spatial resolution, so it shows when something happened far better than where.
Neurotransmitter roles in behaviour	Definition: Different transmitters are associated with different behavioural functions, such as movement and reward, mood, arousal, and inhibition. Watch out: One transmitter is never responsible for one feeling, since each acts at many sites through many receptor types.
Sensation and perception distinguished	Definition: Sensation is the detection of physical energy by receptors. Perception is the organization and interpretation of that input. Example: Two people receive the same pattern of light from an ambiguous figure and see different objects.
Bottom-up and top-down processing	Definition: Bottom-up processing builds a percept from sensory features. Top-down processing uses expectation and prior knowledge to interpret it. Example: Reading handwriting that is illegible in isolation but obvious within a familiar phrase.
Classical conditioning	Definition: Learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to elicit a response after being paired with a stimulus that already produces it. Example: A cat running to the kitchen at the sound of a drawer that is always opened before feeding.
Observational learning	Definition: Learning by watching others and the consequences their behaviour produces. Why it matters: It requires no direct reinforcement of the learner, which is why behaviour can be acquired before it is ever performed.
Encoding, storage and retrieval	Definition: The three stages of memory, getting information in, holding it, and getting it back out. Why it matters: A failure can occur at any stage, so forgetting a name may mean it was never encoded rather than that it has been lost.
Procedural memory	Definition: Memory for how to perform a skill, expressed through action rather than description. Why it matters: It is often difficult to verbalize, which is why explaining a well-practised skill can interfere with performing it.
Concept and prototype	Definition: A concept is a mental grouping of similar items. A prototype is the best example of that category. Why it matters: Items resembling the prototype are categorized faster, which is why an unusual member of a category is recognized more slowly.
Overconfidence	Definition: Greater certainty in one's judgements than accuracy warrants. Why it matters: It is largely unrelated to actual accuracy, which is why feeling sure is weak evidence of being right.
Drive-reduction theory	Definition: The account that a physiological need creates a drive that motivates behaviour to restore balance. Why it matters: It explains hunger and thirst well and explains curiosity poorly, since exploration raises rather than reduces arousal.
Components of emotion	Definition: Emotion is generally described as having physiological, expressive and cognitive components. Why it matters: Theories of emotion differ mainly in the order they place these in, so the components are the common ground.
General adaptation syndrome	Definition: A three-stage description of the response to prolonged stress, moving through alarm, resistance and exhaustion. Why it matters: It describes a common pattern regardless of the stressor, which is what made it influential.
Nature and nurture in development	Definition: The question of how inherited and environmental influences combine to produce a characteristic. Why it matters: The modern framing is interaction rather than proportion, so asking which matters more is treated as the wrong question.
Piaget's sensorimotor stage	Definition: The first period, in which understanding is built through action and sensation. Key development: Object permanence, the understanding that things continue to exist when out of sight.
Attachment	Definition: An enduring emotional bond between an infant and a caregiver. Why it matters: Evidence indicates it forms around comfort and responsiveness rather than around feeding alone.
Psychodynamic approach to personality	Definition: An approach emphasizing unconscious processes and early experience as determinants of personality. Watch out: Its central claims are difficult to test directly, which is the principal scientific criticism made of it.
Self-report personality inventories	Definition: Questionnaires in which people describe their own characteristics, scored against comparison groups. Watch out: They are open to social desirability, which is why some include measures designed to detect it.
Attribution	Definition: The process of explaining the causes of behaviour, either in terms of the person or of the situation. Why it matters: The explanation chosen shapes the response, so the same act draws sympathy or blame depending on the attribution made.
Conformity	Definition: Adjusting behaviour or judgement to match a group. Why it matters: It occurs even when the group is plainly incorrect, which is why the classic demonstrations used unambiguous tasks.
Bystander effect	Definition: Reduced likelihood that any individual helps as the number of witnesses increases. Why it matters: The chance that someone helps may not fall, while the chance that any particular person does clearly falls.
Defining a psychological disorder	Definition: Definitions generally combine deviation from a norm, personal distress, and impaired functioning, none of which is sufficient alone. Why it matters: Each criterion fails in some case, which is why the boundary is described as a judgement rather than a measurement.
Anxiety-related conditions as a category	Definition: A grouping unified by persistent anxiety or fear that is disproportionate and interferes with functioning. Why it matters: The grouping is by the central feature rather than by cause, which is why several different accounts of origin coexist within it.
Psychodynamic therapy as an approach	Definition: An approach seeking insight into unconscious conflicts and their origins in earlier experience. Why it matters: Its aim is understanding rather than symptom removal, which is why its outcomes are assessed differently from briefer approaches.

이 덱 소개

Psychology terms fail in pairs. Negative reinforcement against punishment, random assignment against random sampling, sensory adaptation against habituation, proactive against retroactive interference, positive symptoms against desirable ones. Each pair is easy to define separately and easy to swap under time pressure, and swapping them is the difference between an answer and a near miss. So these 300 cards are built on the distinction as much as the definition. All 300 open with a definition, 195 add why it matters, 54 carry a short original scenario in place of an abstract restatement, and 52 name the term this one is most often confused with and say what separates them. The weighting is 38 cards each on biological bases and cognition, 35 on research methods and statistics, 33 on social psychology, 30 on disorders and treatment, 28 each on sensation and perception, learning, and development, 22 on motivation and emotion, and 20 on personality. The disorders section describes what the categories are, how classification works, and the models used to explain them. It does not turn symptoms into a diagnosis, because that is a judgement for a qualified professional and no flashcard can make it. Cards are tagged by area and sub-topic, so you can drill just the conditioning schedules, just the attribution biases, or just the memory effects, and the pairs that keep swapping keep coming back until they stop.

자주 묻는 질문

What is on each card?: A term on the front. On the back, a definition on all 300, then on 195 the reason it matters. 54 carry a short original scenario rather than an abstract restatement, and 52 name the term this one is most often mixed up with and say what separates them. Each line is labeled, so the back reads as a short structured answer.
How does it handle the disorders and treatment material?: At the level of what the categories are and how they are explained: how classification systems work, the biopsychosocial and diathesis-stress models, what unifies each grouping, and the main theoretical accounts. Treatment appears as schools of approach, such as behavioural, cognitive and humanistic. It does not map symptoms onto a diagnosis and does not compare treatments, because those are judgements for a qualified professional.
Which areas get the most cards?: Biological bases 38 and cognition 38, then research methods and statistics 35, social psychology 33, disorders and treatment 30, sensation and perception 28, learning 28, development 28, motivation and emotion 22, and personality 20. The weighting follows where terminology is densest and most confusable rather than where the reading is longest.
Why so many cards on research methods?: Because method questions are answerable from principle rather than recall, so they repay study more per card than any single content area. The 35 cards cover design, the statistics needed to read a result, measurement quality, and research ethics, including why several classic studies would not be approved today.
How is it organized for studying one area at a time?: Every card carries an area tag and a finer sub-topic tag, across research methods, biological bases, sensation and perception, learning, cognition, motivation and emotion, development, personality, social psychology, and disorders and treatment. Filter by a tag to drill one area, or by the finer tag for a single block such as conditioning, memory, or attribution.
Can I import the whole deck on the free plan?: Yes. Importing a saved deck runs no new AI generation and spends no AI credits, so the free plan imports every card. You can study, edit and delete them afterwards.
Will importing it twice create duplicates?: No. Cards you already have are skipped and only cards added in a revision come through. Including re-imports after deleting it, one official deck can be imported three times per account.
Can I edit the cards after importing?: Yes. Once imported they are your cards: edit either side, delete the ones you already know cold, retag them, or move them into another deck.

AP® and Advanced Placement® are trademarks registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, this deck. No official questions or course framework text are reproduced, and every card is written by Memly. Compiled 2026-08-22.