AP Psychology Flashcards

This flashcard collection follows the redesigned AP Psychology curriculum: Biological Bases of Behavior (brain structures, neurotransmitters, sleep, sensation), Cognition (memory, thinking, language, intelligence), Development and Learning (Piaget, Erikson, classical and operant conditioning), Social Psychology and Personality (attribution, conformity, Big Five, Freudian theory), and Mental and Physical Health (disorders, therapy approaches, stress).

Cards cover the three highest-scoring categories on the exam: terminology (definitions of key concepts), researchers (Pavlov, Skinner, Bandura, Milgram, Asch, Loftus and many more), and application (matching a scenario to the right theory). The preview above shows five sample cards across these categories. The full deck lives inside the Sticky app and reviews on a spaced repetition schedule.

AP Psych is the AP course where flashcards do the most work. The exam is roughly two-thirds vocabulary and theory recall, with the remaining third asking you to apply those terms to a scenario. That mix is purpose-built for spaced repetition.

1. Learn researchers with their findings. Do not memorize "Bandura" alone. Memorize "Bandura: Bobo doll experiment, observational learning." Cards that pair a name with a single-sentence finding stick far better than name-only cards.
2. Distinguish similar concepts on dedicated cards. The exam loves to test the difference between classical vs operant conditioning, fluid vs crystallized intelligence, anterograde vs retrograde amnesia, and reinforcement vs punishment. Make a card for each pair.
3. Use scenario cards for application practice. Once you have the vocabulary down, build cards that present a short scenario and ask which concept applies. This trains the application skill directly.
4. Review for 15 to 20 minutes daily. Distributed practice (the spacing effect) outperforms massed cramming for material with this much vocabulary load.
5. Add free response practice in the final month. Released FRQs from College Board train the writing skills flashcards alone cannot build.

Score breakdowns from recent exams highlight a few topics that come up almost every year. Prioritize cards on these:

• Memory systems: sensory, short-term, long-term; encoding, storage, retrieval; the forgetting curve and interference
• Classical and operant conditioning: Pavlov, Skinner, reinforcement schedules, generalization vs discrimination
• Brain structures and functions: hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, hemispheric specialization
• Neurotransmitters: dopamine, serotonin, GABA, glutamate, acetylcholine and what each does
• Major disorders and DSM categories: anxiety, mood, dissociative, schizophrenia spectrum, neurodevelopmental
• Research methods and statistics: experimental design, validity, reliability, correlation vs causation

For a unit-by-unit breakdown with the most likely free response themes, see the AP Psychology Study Guide.

Few AP courses load this much vocabulary on students in a single year. AP Psychology has more named theorists, named experiments, and named disorders than nearly any other AP. That volume is what makes traditional study methods break down. There are too many terms to keep in working memory by re-reading alone.

Spaced repetition fixes the volume problem by moving each term into long-term memory through repeated, well-timed retrieval. Combined with active recall (the cognitive process of pulling an answer from memory rather than recognizing it on a page), flashcards turn AP Psych's biggest weakness (volume) into a manageable daily routine.