Psychology Grade 9-12

Trace the development of psychology as a scientific discipline evolving from other fields of study. •  • Identifying major subfields and career opportunities related to psychology

Identifying major subfields and career opportunities related to psychology

Explain how processes of the central and peripheral nervous systems underlie behavior and mental processes, including how neurons are the basis for neural communication. 

Describe the interconnected processes of sensation and perception.

Explain ways to promote psychological wellness.

Describe the physical, cognitive, and social development across the life span of a person from the prenatal through aging stages.

Describe the processes and importance of memory, including how information is encoded and stored, mnemonic devices, schemas related to short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory. 

Describe ways in which organisms learn, including the processes of classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational conditioning.

Describe how organisms think and solve problems, including processes involved in accurate thinking. 

Describe the qualities and development of language. 

Compare various states of consciousness evident in human behavior, including the process of sleeping and dreaming. • 

Describe the role of motivation and emotion in human behavior. 

Describe methods of assessing individual differences and theories of intelligence, including Charles E. Spearman's general (g) factor of intelligence, Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, and Robert J. Sternberg's triarchic theory of intelligence. 

Explain the role of personality development in human behavior. 

Describe major psychological disorders and their treatments. 

Describe how attitudes, conditions of obedience and conformity, and other influences affect actions and shape human behavior, including actor-observer, self-server, social facilitation, social loafing, bystander effect, groupthink, and group polarization. 

Describe various careers pursued by psychologists, including medical and mental health care fields, the business world, education, law and criminal justice, and research. 

Explain how culture and gender influence behavior. 

Describing early psychological and biological inquiries that led to contemporary approaches and methods of experimentation, including ideologies of Aristotle, John Locke, Wilhelm Wundt, Charles Darwin, William James, Frantz Fanon, and G. Stanley Hall

Differentiating among various modern schools of thought and perspectives in psychology that have evolved since 1879, including each school's view on concepts of aggression or appetite 

Illustrating how modern psychologists utilize multiple perspectives to understand behavior and mental processes 

Identifying major subfields and career opportunities related to psychology

Describing the type of methodology and strategies used by researchers in different psychological studies Examples: surveys, naturalistic observations, case studies, longitudinal studies, cross-sectional studies • cx

Contrasting independent, dependent, and confounding variables and control and experimental groups

Identifying systematic procedures necessary for conducting an experiment and improving the validity of results 

Describing the use of statistics in evaluating research, including calculating the mean, median, and mode from a set of data; conducting a simple correlational analysis using either calculators or computer software; and explaining the meaning of statistical significance

Describing how neurons communicate, including the role of neurotransmitters in behavior and the electrochemical process • 

Comparing the effect of drugs and toxins on the brain and neurotransmitters 

Describing how different sections of the brain have specialized yet interdependent functions, including functions of different lobes and hemispheres of the cerebral cortex and consequences of damage to specific sections of the brain • 

Describing different technologies used to study the brain and nervous system 

 Analyzing behavior genetics for its contribution to the understanding of behavior and mental processes, including differentiating between deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), chromosomes, and genes; identifying effects of chromosomal abnormalities; and explaining how genetics and environmental factors work together to determine inherited traits

Explaining the role of sensory systems in human behavior, including sight, sound, smell, touch, and pain 

Explaining how what is perceived can be different from what is sensed, including how attention and environmental cues can affect the ability to accurately sense and perceive the world 

Describing the role of Gestalt principles and concepts in perception

Describing physiological processes associated with stress, including hormones associated with stress responses 

Describing Hans Selye's general adaptation syndrome (GAS) 

Describing the flight-or-fight response in terms of the autonomic and somatic nervous systems 

 Contrasting positive and negative ways of coping with stress related to problem-focused coping, aggression, and emotion-focused coping 

Explaining approach-approach, approach-avoidance, and avoidance-avoidance conflicts • Identifying various eating disorders and conditions Examples: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, obesity

Outlining the stage-of-development theories of Jean Piaget, Erik H. Erikson, Sigmund Freud, Carol Gilligan, and Lawrence Kohlberg

• Distinguishing between surface and deep processing in memory development 

• Comparing ways memories are stored in the brain, including episodic and procedural 

• Identifying different parts of the brain that store memory 

• Differentiating among different types of amnesia 

• Describing how information is retrieved from memory 

• Explaining how memories can be reconstructed and misremembered

 • Identifying unconditioned stimuli (UCS), conditioned stimuli (CS), unconditioned responses (UCR), and conditioned responses (CR) 

• Describing the law of effect 

• Describing original experiments conducted by B. F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and Rosalie Rayner 

• Differentiating between reinforcement and punishment, positive and negative reinforcement, and various schedules of reinforcement 

• Describing biological limitations on operantly conditioned learning 

• Differentiating between observational learning and modeling 

• Analyzing watching violent media for effects on violent behavior

• Identifying the role of mental images and verbal symbols in the thought process 

• Explaining how concepts are formed 

• Differentiating between algorithms and heuristics 

• Analyzing different types of heuristics to determine effects on problem solving

• Identifying common phonemes and morphemes of language 

• Describing how understanding syntax and grammar affect language comprehension 

• Demonstrating how qualities of sign language are similar to spoken language 

• Describing how infants move from babbling to usage of complete sentences

 • Explaining how hearing loss in infants and children can affect the development of spoken language

Explaining states of sleep throughout an average night's sleep, including nonrapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) 

• Describing the mechanism of the circadian rhythm 

• Evaluating the importance of sleep to good performance 

• Comparing theories regarding the use and meaning of dreams 

• Analyzing the use of psychoactive drugs for effects on people, including the mechanisms of addiction, withdrawal, and tolerance • 

Evaluating the phenomenon of hypnosis and its possible uses

• Identifying theories that explain motivational processes, including cognitive, biological, and psychological reasons for motivational behavior, and Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and arousal theory 

• Describing situational cues that cause emotions, including anger, curiosity, and anxiety 

• Differentiating among theories of emotion 

• Identifying universally recognized emotions

• Describing different types of intelligence tests, including the Flynn effect 

• Describing how intelligence may be influenced by differences in heredity and environment and by biases toward ethnic minority and socioeconomic groups

• Differentiating among personality theories, including psychoanalytic, sociocognitive, trait, and humanistic theories of personality • 

Describing different measures of personality, including the Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness Personality Inventory (NEO-PI), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), and projective tests

• Differentiating between normal and abnormal behavior 

• Describing different approaches for explaining mental illness, including biological and medical, cognitive, and sociocultural models 

• Differentiating types of mental illness, including mood, anxiety, somatoform, schizophrenic, dissociative, and personality disorders

• Explaining the fundamental attribution error 

• Critiquing Stanley Milgram's work with obedience and S. E. Asch's work with conformity

• Identifying gender differences and similarities 

• Explaining ways in which gender differences are developed 

• Describing ways in which gender roles are assigned in different cultures