AP Psychology
review & study guide
Every unit of the course summarized, with each chapter linked to its lesson.
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This free AP Psychology review summarizes all 6 units of Achievable's AP Psychology course: what each covers, the points to remember, and its 26 chapters in order. Read a unit before its test, or work through the whole guide before exam day.
Each chapter links to its full lesson in Achievable, with the review quizzes and full-length practice exams.
Unit 1: Biology of behavior
4 chapters
Free unit
- Heredity and environment: Behavior and mental processes emerge from the interplay between inherited traits and life experiences, with heredity, environmental influences, and evolution all shaping them.
- Nervous system and neurons: The CNS and PNS coordinate bodily functions, while neurons and glial cells support signaling through reflex arcs, all-or-nothing firing, neurotransmitters, and drug effects.
- Brain and sleep: The brain includes structures for involuntary functions, movement, language, plasticity, and hemisphere specialization, and sleep follows a 24-hour circadian rhythm with NREM, REM, and sleep disorders.
- Sensation and perception: Sensation detects stimuli above threshold, and vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, pain, balance, and movement all depend on specific receptors and processing systems.
In this unit
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Unit 2: Cognition
5 chapters
- Perception and attention: Perception uses bottom-up or top-down processing, and schemas, perceptual sets, context, experiences, and culture shape interpretation, while attention and selective attention help filter stimuli.
- Organizing depth and motion: Gestalt principles organize input into wholes, depth cues and visual constancies support stable three-dimensional understanding, and apparent movement creates motion from static images.
- Thinking and memory encoding: Concepts, prototypes, algorithms, heuristics, biases, executive functions, and creativity shape thinking, while explicit, implicit, prospective memory, and encoding models explain how memories are formed.
- Storing retrieving and intelligence: Storage, retrieval, forgetting, and distortion involve rehearsal, cue matching, interference, and constructive processes, and intelligence is measured by IQ, Standardization, validity, reliability, Flynn effect, and mindset.
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Unit 3: Development & learning
5 chapters
- Developmental psychology: It studies growth and change over the lifespan, including stability vs. change, nature vs. nurture, and continuous vs. discontinuous development, using cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies.
- Lifespan development: Prenatal development is shaped by teratogens, maternal illnesses, genetic mutations, hormonal shifts, and other environmental factors, while infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood each bring distinct changes.
- Cognitive and social growth: Piaget, Vygotsky, language development, social learning, ecological systems theory, parenting styles, attachment styles, psychosocial stages, and identity formation all explain how development changes through interaction and learning.
- Conditioning and learning: Classical conditioning and operant conditioning explain how associations and consequences shape behavior, including extinction, stimulus generalization, stimulus discrimination, shaping, and reinforcement schedules.
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Achievable AP Psychology
The Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology exam assesses a student's understanding of key psychology concepts, theories, and research methods. Achievable's interactive online AP Psychology prep course makes complex topics simple and engaging. Our adaptive platform and AI tutor personalize your study plan, while memory science ensures effective AP prep that gets results.
3 full practice exams in the new 2025 format
390+ practice questions and FRQ prompts
Practice for both new free-response types
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Unit 5: Mental & physical health
6 chapters
- Health psychology: Health psychology explores how biological, behavioral, and social factors combine to affect health, illness, and overall wellness.
- Stress and coping: Stress contributes to increased vulnerability to disorders and diseases, and coping includes problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping.
- Positive psychology: Positive psychology investigates factors that enhance well-being, resilience, and emotional health, including gratitude, signature strengths or virtues, and posttraumatic growth.
- Psychological disorders and treatment: Psychological disorders are identified by dysfunction in daily functioning, personal distress, and deviation from societal norms, and treatment commonly uses psychotherapy, psychotropic medications, and other interventions.
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Unit 6: Science practices
2 chapters
- Concept application and methods: Biological, cognitive, behavioral, humanistic, and sociocultural perspectives are affected by cultural context and cognitive biases, while experiments determine causation and non-experimental methods are used when manipulation is unethical or impractical.
- Principles and ethics: Experimental and control groups, placebos, blind designs, random or convenience sampling, operational definitions, and scientific process, peer review, replication, generalizability, and falsifiability support high standards, while institutional reviews, informed consent, informed assent, confidentiality, anonymization, deception, confederates, and debriefing safeguard participants.
- Data and argumentation: Quantitative research uses numbers and statistics, qualitative research uses themes and patterns, statistical significance is p < 0.05, correlation coefficient is -1 to +1, and evidence-based reasoning uses empirical data, peer-reviewed studies, and critical evaluation.
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AP Psychology exam at a glance
- Questions
- 75 multiple-choice questions, 2 free-response questions
- Time
- 2 hours and 40 minutes
- Passing score
- 3
- Exam fee
- $99
More on the AP Psychology exam
- AP Psychology exam prep courseAchievable's course: online textbook, review quizzes and full-length practice exams.
- AP Psychology exam format, content and scoringWhat's tested, how long it takes, what it costs, and the score you need to pass.
- AP Psychology FAQThe questions asked most about the exam and preparing for it, answered.
- Best AP Psychology exam prep coursesHow the leading providers compare on content, format and price.
- AP Psychology study resourcesGuides and study advice from Achievable's instructors.
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Unit 4: Social psych & personality
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