Everything covered

The foundations every later course assumes: perspectives, methods, the brain, sensation, learning, memory, cognition, emotion and motivation.

How other people change what we think, feel and do — conformity, obedience, attitudes, attribution, prejudice, groups, aggression and relationships.

Diagnosis, the DSM framework, and the major disorder categories — plus the cognitive models of Beck and Padesky that underpin modern therapy.

Attention, memory, problem solving, decision making, language and the biases that shape all of them.

Piaget, Vygotsky, attachment (Bowlby and Ainsworth), Erikson, adolescence and lifespan change.

Neurons, neurotransmitters, brain structures, the nervous and endocrine systems, genetics and brain imaging.

Variables, hypotheses, experimental and correlational design, sampling, validity, reliability, ethics and qualitative methods — one of the two subjects students most often fail.

Descriptives, spread, correlation, t-tests, ANOVA, regression, p-values, confidence intervals and effect size — taught through interpretation, which is how exams test it.

Freud and the psychodynamic tradition, trait theory and the Big Five, humanistic and social-cognitive approaches, and how personality is assessed.

Classical and operant conditioning, reinforcement and punishment, schedules of reinforcement, and Bandura's observational learning.