GRE Psychology Subject Test
Study notes, worked examples, recall material, and practice questions across the GRE Psychology domains, with sources cited.
The syllabus
GRE Psychology preparation, organized into the content areas below.
- Biological
- Cognitive
- Social
- Developmental
- Clinical
- Measurement
Representative topics
- Neuroanatomy
- Learning
- Cognition
- Development
- Assessment
- Statistics
Study notes
Free to read, no account needed. Every exam fact and concept links to its official or open source.
- Memory Systems and ProcessesA free GRE Psychology note on encoding, storage, and retrieval, the Atkinson-Shiffrin stage model, working memory, proactive and retroactive interference, the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, and distributed practice.
- Research Methods and ValidityA free GRE Psychology note on experimental versus correlational designs, random assignment, the correlation coefficient, confounding variables, and the reliability and validity of psychological measures.
- Classical and Operant ConditioningA free GRE Psychology note on Pavlovian terminology (UCS, UCR, CS, CR), extinction and generalization, reinforcement and punishment, shaping, the four reinforcement schedules, and how observational learning differs.
- Neurons, Neurotransmission, and the Nervous SystemA free GRE Psychology note on resting and action potentials, the all-or-none law, synaptic transmission, agonists and antagonists, the major neurotransmitters, the divisions of the nervous system, and how the endocrine system differs.
- Lifespan Development: Theories and StagesA free GRE Psychology note on Piaget's cognitive stages, Erikson's psychosocial crises, Kohlberg's moral levels, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, attachment styles, parenting styles, and cross-sectional versus longitudinal designs.
- Social Influence, Attribution, and PersuasionA free GRE Psychology note on the fundamental attribution error, actor-observer and self-serving biases, conformity and obedience, groupthink and social loafing, cognitive dissonance, the elaboration likelihood model, and the bystander effect.
- Psychological Disorders and Their TreatmentA free GRE Psychology note on how disorders are defined and classified, the diathesis-stress model, the major diagnostic categories including positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, and the main families of psychotherapy and biomedical treatment.
- History and Schools of PsychologyA free GRE Psychology note on structuralism, functionalism, psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, behaviorism, humanism, and the cognitive revolution, with the figures, dates, and defining commitments each school is identified by.
- Biological Bases of Behaviour: Domain GuideThe whole biological domain of the GRE Psychology Test in one place: the all-or-none neuron, transmitter-by-receptor logic, the structure-to-function map of the brain, the two control systems, sleep architecture, and the psychophysics of sensation.
- Cognitive Psychology: Domain GuideThe cognitive domain of the GRE Psychology Test end to end: the stage model of memory and how it is forgotten, classical and operant learning with their schedules, selective attention, perceptual organisation, language milestones, and the heuristics that bias judgement.
- Developmental Psychology: Domain GuideThe developmental domain of the GRE Psychology Test in one place: the stage theories and what each stage is defined by, attachment and parenting, the moral reasoning ladder, and the design questions — cohort, attrition, sequential — that decide what a developmental finding can claim.
- Social Psychology, Motivation, and Emotion: Domain GuideThe social domain of the GRE Psychology Test in one place: attribution and its biases, dissonance and persuasion, conformity and obedience, group processes and bystander intervention, and the competing theories of motivation and emotion.
- Clinical and Personality Psychology: Domain GuideThe clinical domain of the GRE Psychology Test end to end: what makes a pattern a disorder, the DSM categories and the duration criteria that separate them, the four theories of personality, and why each therapy follows from the model of the disorder that generated it.
- Research Methods, Statistics, and Measurement: Domain GuideThe measurement domain of the GRE Psychology Test in one place: what each design licenses, the statistics that appear on the test and what they do not mean, reliability against validity, the theories and metrics of intelligence, and the ethical requirements of human research.
- History and Approaches: Domain GuideThe history domain of the GRE Psychology Test as a chain of reactions: what each school took as its subject matter and method, what it was rejecting, and how to read a modern research question back to the perspective that asked it.
Worked examples
Full solutions with the correct answer, the reasoning, and why each option is right or wrong. No account needed.
- Negative reinforcement or punishment?Classify a consequence from what changes in the environment and what happens to the behaviour afterward.
- Retrieval Cues and Encoding SpecificityA public GRE Psychology question showing why a recall failure is often a retrieval-cue problem rather than evidence that the memory was never stored.
- The All-or-None Law and Stimulus IntensityA public GRE Psychology question on how a neuron encodes a stronger stimulus, and why the answer cannot be a bigger action potential.
- Conservation and the Preoperational ChildA public GRE Psychology question on a classic conservation failure, and how to name the Piagetian stage and the specific construct without confusing centration with egocentrism.
- Two-Factor Theory and Misattributed ArousalA public GRE Psychology question that separates the two-factor theory of emotion from the James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, appraisal, and facial-feedback accounts.
- Positive and Negative Symptoms of SchizophreniaA public GRE Psychology question on sorting a case description into positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and medication side effects.
- IQ Scores and the Normal DistributionA public GRE Psychology question converting a Wechsler IQ score to a percentile with a z-score, and naming the empirical-rule errors that produce the wrong percentiles.
- Identifying Schools of PsychologyA public GRE Psychology question that reads a stated methodological commitment back to the school of psychology it defines.
Guides
Free articles for GRE Psychology test takers, each checked against official sources.
What these questions are built to catch
Every wrong answer in the GRE Psychology bank was written to catch one specific mistake, and each is recorded by name. The taxonomy sets out the named mistakes for this exam, grouped by the part of the syllabus each turns up in, with what to do differently. It describes how the questions were written, not how students perform.
Open the GRE Psychology section of the error taxonomySources
- GRE Subject Test Content and Structure — ETS. Accessed 2026-07-06. Use as a cited source for exam facts; do not imply affiliation or reproduce protected test material.
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