PSYC 1101 & 1103 sec 001D-003D, Fall 2019: EXAM 2 STUDY GUIDE

EXAM 1: THURSDAY 10/31/19 5:00-6:15, SCHN 151; #2 LEAD PENCIL REQUIRED!

REVIEW SESSION: Tuesday 10/29/19 6:45-8:00-ish PM, AUST 108; bring questions to have answered, etc.

ON THIS EXAM: Chapters 11, 12, 17
Sex & Gender Ch. 11
Personality Ch. 12
Personality Past & Present
Assessing Personality
Health Psychology Ch. 17
Stress and Well-Being

The second exam will cover everything from AFTER the first exam material (i.e., it is NOT CUMULATIVE back to the beginning of the semester!), through the Health Psychology / Stress topics that we get through on Tuesday 10/29, plus some material found only in the reading and not in lecture (see below).

The second exam will have about 40 multiple choice questions drawn from lecture and textbook material and will be do-able in one hour (or less). Don't expect the multiple choice format to mean you'll just be looking through a list of alternatives trying to recognize some familiar information. The emphasis throughout will not be merely on rote memory for facts and definitions, but rather on conceptual understanding of the material and its use in hypothetical situations. For example, unfamiliar questions related to the lecture content may be included, requiring an application of the knowledge you have gained so far. But not in a scary way. You will benefit from studying as if this were partly an essay exam, even though there will be only multiple choice questions on it!

Check the web page for PSYC 1101 / 1103 at http://media.pluto.psy.uconn.edu/psyc1101.html, and in the "Links and Readings" section you can get to the posted PowerPoint slides -- which are by no means an exhaustive account of all the course material, and which don't contain all the detail you will need, but they do serve as an approximate outline of the material and a reminder of some key concepts to know. All required links in the web page "Links and Readings" section are highlighted in white boxes (and listed below, as well); all the rest are just for fun. On the class page you can also find my study tips page (quite long, pretty useful).

Lecture vs. text:
The lecture material is primary; use the text as a resource to support and elaborate the lecture topics.

If something is covered in lecture, you will be responsible for the lecture coverage and all of the required text coverage of that topic as listed on the syllabus, unless I specifically tell you to omit certain pages (see below).

If something is NOT covered in lecture but is included in the assigned text reading, you will be responsible for the text coverage of that topic. But there will be far fewer questions on that type of material than on the first two categories just described, so you can allocate your study time accordingly.

Page numbers for all required reading are listed on the syllabus, and have been modified on this study guide to be more specific.

The King text isn't just a really long story that you read straight through repeatedly. You should read all the assigned material, probably at least twice. But then also use the index to find answers to particular questions that come up in your notes and your reading. Use the summary points at the end of the chapters, and the contents at the beginning of chapters, to help you identify what's there and how it's organized.

What to study:
Start with the slides and the readings listed on the syllabus (Chapters 11, 12, and 17, and selected pages from Ch. 10), and then here are my comments and additions:

Sex and Gender slides: my slides mixed with a friend's detailed slides.

Personality Intro and Freud slides: from the beginning of the topic of Personality all the way through Freud's psychoanalytic theory, criticisms, and legacy. Note that some topics in the early slides were textbook-only topics on the first exam (temperament, attachment); for the second exam I'll limit any questions to what appears on the slides, and they will be very minimal.

Personality Approaches and Assessment slides including the Dispositional Approach (Type Theories, Trait Theories), Humanistic Approach, and Social Cognitive Approach; then ending with Personality Assessment tests.

Stress slides - coverage of Health Psychology is limited to the topic of stress, including Robert Sapolsky's findings about stress based on examining the social lives of baboons in Kenya.
NOTE: there are some slides here that receive minimal attention in class, and that will be reflected on the exam as well.

Topics in the assigned reading not explicitly covered in lecture that you should get from the textbook:

Personality and Behavior Genetics - couple of paragraphs on p. 418
Though the topic may be addressed in Tuesday's class, you should definitely study the pages on Stress (Ch. 17 pp. 568-575) regardless of lecture coverage.

Modified page readings to be more specific and helpful:
Note these pages in Ch. 10:

334-335 in Ch. 10 ("Motivation and Emotion") describes Maslow's hierarchy of needs in much the same terms as the slides and lecture did, but may be useful if you want to see it written out

Here I've indicated which pages you do NOT have to read from the assigned chapters 11, 12, and 17:

Ch.11 Gender, Sex, and Sexuality - you can skip pp. 361(bottom)-364(top) "Biological Approaches" and "Evolutionary Psychology"; then for our purposes the chapter ends on p. 367 and you don't have to read beyond that
Ch.12 Personality - you can skip pp. 416-418(top) "Personality and the Brain" and resume reading "Personality and Behavior Genetics" which is only a couple of paragraphs on p. 418; then for our purposes the chapter ends with fig. 10 on p. 422 and you don't have to read beyond that
Ch. 17 Health Psychology - read only pp. 568-575 on Stress, and most likely not all of that will even be covered in Tuesday's class -- we'll see!

Names to know (roughly in order of appearance in this course):

Sigmund Freud (founder of psychoanalysis, 1900s)
Karen Horney
Carl Jung
Gordon Allport
Hans Eysenck
Abraham Maslow
Carl Rogers
Walter Mischel
Julian Rotter
Albert Bandura

I recommend knowing names, not because I will necessarily ask a question like "which of these things did Carl Rogers do?" (though I certainly could), but more generally because knowing names is helpful in remembering the content associated with the names. For instance, associating the name Albert Bandura with the concept of self-efficacy gives you another piece of information to help distinguish it from other concepts in the social cognitive perspective like locus of control, which might otherwise all blend together more confusingly.

General recommendations about studying:
I would make two recommendations about studying for all the exams in this class (and possibly in other classes):

1) First, a common experience is for students to have read the textbook, web links, and their notes, and feel quite secure that they understand everything -- but then not see that understanding reflected in their exam scores. Consider why that might be: looking at the material and having a feeling of understanding is a rather passive way to confirm your knowledge. I too can look at the text, web links, and notes, and feel like I understand them all, yet let's be honest, my understanding is probably quite a bit deeper than yours despite the similarity of the feeling. What you should aim for is not just recognition and sensibleness, but real familiarity and comfort, where you feel like you could actually explain the topic clearly to a fellow student who had a question about it, or even to someone who had no knowledge of it (e.g. a parent or roommate). Not that you literally need to deliver practice lectures to an audience, but maybe that's something to try to imagine, to see where your gaps and shortcomings might be.

2) Second, the multiple choice format often leads students to expect a kind of recognition test where terms are matched up with definition a, b, c, or d, or maybe a concept is described as being about a, b, c, or d. But multiple choice questions (mine included) can require you to think hard about comparisons or contrasts between perspectives, or ways that one idea implies or is linked to another, or applications of the topics to particular situations. For this reason, I find flashcards and the like to be of limited use, maybe good for memorizing what "egocentrism" is for or what the psychodynamic persepctive says, but flashcards tend to focus on isolated pieces of information rather than how concepts are related to one another. It makes sense, for example, to know not just what "egocentrism" means but also which developmental stage it appears in, which it goes away in, how it can be measured, examples, etc., and you're better off studying those questions as interconnected information rather than separate facts. Separate facts are much more confusable than integrated knowledge of the topic. These topics are all addressed explicitly this way in class, so I'm not implying that you need to creatively come up with these explanations; just don't assume that a superficial memory of a term and what it means will suffice. Sometimes students ask me if they just need to know the major points of what we covered, and unfortunately the answer is, no, that's not enough: you need to know the details too.

For these two reasons I usually suggest that the way to think about my exams is to pretend you're studying for an essay exam rather than a multiple choice exam. That way you realize you don't only need to know what the concepts mean, but you also have to be able to link them together and understand why and how they're connected. And you want to know this at a level where you'd be able to produce such an explanation in an essay, because even though you don't have to actually write it, that type of preparation will allow you to make the connections that the questions ask you to make. Students have sometimes said they don't think my questions are too difficult, really -- just that they make you think through them to figure them out instead of instantly answering or not answering correctly. That's exactly my intention.