GRE Psychology Reference Sheet

How to revise from this sheet

1. 1Cover the right-hand column and say the relationship out loud before reading it. Recognising a formula is not the same as recalling it, and only recall survives a timed section.
2. 2Work down a single domain at a time, then answer a few questions in that domain immediately. Recall that is never used decays fastest.
3. 3When an entry has a condition attached, rehearse the condition as part of the statement. Most exam traps are built on applying a correct formula outside its hypothesis.

ETS describes the GRE Psychology Test as approximately 144 multiple-choice questions with a total testing time of 2 hours.

Biological bases of behaviour

Structure to function, and transmitter to effect.

Neuron and action potential

dendrites receive, the soma integrates, the axon conducts, terminals release; the action potential is all-or-none and propagates faster along myelinated axons

Strength of a stimulus is coded by firing rate, never by the size of a single action potential.

Major neurotransmitters

acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junction; dopamine in reward and movement; serotonin in mood and sleep; GABA the main inhibitory transmitter; glutamate the main excitatory one; noradrenaline in arousal

Dopamine loss in the substantia nigra is associated with Parkinson's disease; GABA agonists have sedative effects.

Nervous system divisions

central (brain and spinal cord) and peripheral; the peripheral divides into somatic and autonomic, and the autonomic into sympathetic (arousal) and parasympathetic (recovery)

Sympathetic mobilises for action; parasympathetic restores. Naming the branch is often the whole question.

Brain structures

hippocampus for new declarative memories; amygdala for fear and emotional salience; hypothalamus for drive and homeostasis; cerebellum for coordination; occipital vision, temporal audition and language comprehension, parietal somatosensation, frontal planning and movement

Broca's area damage impairs production with intact comprehension; Wernicke's area damage does the reverse.

Endocrine system

the pituitary is the master gland under hypothalamic control; the adrenal glands release cortisol and adrenaline; the thyroid sets metabolic rate

Hormonal effects are slower and longer-lasting than neural ones — the standard contrast question.

Sleep and consciousness

non-REM stages progress to slow-wave sleep, then REM, in roughly 90-minute cycles; REM shows fast EEG activity with muscle atonia and most vivid dreaming

Slow-wave sleep dominates early in the night and REM periods lengthen towards morning.

Sensation

$$\frac{\Delta I}{I} = k$$

absolute threshold is the smallest detectable stimulus; the just-noticeable difference is a constant proportion of the stimulus (Weber's law); rods handle low light and cones colour

Trichromatic theory explains receptor-level colour coding; opponent-process theory explains afterimages.

Cognitive psychology

Process models and the named effects that test them.

Memory architecture

encoding, storage, retrieval across sensory, short-term or working, and long-term stores; long-term memory splits into explicit (episodic and semantic) and implicit (procedural)

Working memory holds a limited number of chunks briefly; chunking increases capacity without changing the limit.

Memory effects

serial position gives primacy and recency; spacing beats massing; encoding specificity and state-dependent retrieval; proactive and retroactive interference

Proactive interference is old material disrupting new; retroactive is the reverse. The order of the words is the mnemonic.

Conditioning

classical: neutral stimulus paired with an unconditioned stimulus becomes conditioned; operant: reinforcement increases and punishment decreases behaviour, with positive meaning added and negative meaning removed

Negative reinforcement increases behaviour by removing something aversive — it is not punishment.

Reinforcement schedules

fixed ratio, variable ratio, fixed interval, variable interval; variable ratio produces the highest and most extinction-resistant response rate

Ratio schedules count responses, interval schedules count time — read which the item describes.

Attention

selective attention filters input; divided attention costs performance; the cocktail-party effect shows unattended channels are partly processed

Automatic processes are fast and effortless but hard to inhibit, which is exactly what the Stroop task exploits.

Perception

Gestalt grouping by proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and common fate; perceptual constancy preserves size, shape, and colour across viewing conditions

Bottom-up processing builds from features; top-down applies expectations. Ambiguous figures dissociate the two.

Language and thought

phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, pragmatics; heuristics such as availability, representativeness, and anchoring produce systematic biases

Functional fixedness and confirmation bias are the two problem-solving obstacles named most often.

Developmental psychology

Stage theories, in order, with the transition that defines each.

Piaget

sensorimotor (object permanence), preoperational (egocentrism, no conservation), concrete operational (conservation, logical operations on concrete material), formal operational (abstract and hypothetical reasoning)

Assimilation fits new input to an existing schema; accommodation changes the schema.

Erikson

eight psychosocial crises from trust versus mistrust in infancy through integrity versus despair in late life, with identity versus role confusion in adolescence

Each stage is a conflict to resolve, not an ability to acquire — the contrast with Piaget is a standard item.

Attachment

the strange situation classifies secure, anxious-ambivalent, and avoidant attachment; Harlow's work showed contact comfort outweighs feeding

Attachment style is measured by reaction to reunion, not by distress at separation alone.

Kohlberg

preconventional (consequences to the self), conventional (social rules and approval), postconventional (abstract principles)

The level is judged by the reasoning offered, not by the choice made.

Developmental designs

cross-sectional compares age groups at one time and risks cohort effects; longitudinal follows one group and risks attrition; sequential designs combine both

Cohort effects are the standard confound offered as a distractor for cross-sectional findings.

Social psychology, motivation, and emotion

Situational explanations, and the classic studies attached to each.

Attribution

the fundamental attribution error overweights dispositional causes for others' behaviour; the actor-observer bias and self-serving bias shift with perspective and outcome

The pattern is consistent: we explain our own behaviour by the situation and others' by their character.

Conformity and obedience

Asch showed conformity to a unanimous incorrect majority; Milgram showed obedience to authority instructions; Zimbardo's prison study is cited for role adoption and criticised on method

A single dissenting ally sharply reduces conformity — the most frequently tested detail of Asch's work.

Group processes

social facilitation improves easy tasks and impairs hard ones; social loafing reduces individual effort in groups; groupthink suppresses dissent; group polarisation exaggerates the initial leaning

Diffusion of responsibility explains the bystander effect: more witnesses means slower help.

Attitudes and persuasion

cognitive dissonance motivates attitude change to match behaviour; the elaboration likelihood model distinguishes central from peripheral routes

Dissonance is strongest when the behaviour was freely chosen and weakly justified.

Motivation

drive-reduction and arousal theories; Yerkes-Dodson gives best performance at moderate arousal; Maslow's hierarchy orders needs; intrinsic motivation can be undermined by extrinsic reward

The optimal arousal level is lower for difficult tasks — the part of Yerkes-Dodson most often omitted.

Emotion theories

James-Lange places physiological response before emotion; Cannon-Bard makes them simultaneous; Schachter-Singer adds cognitive labelling of arousal

The three differ only in ordering and in whether cognition is required; the item usually describes one ordering.

Clinical and personality psychology

Disorder categories, treatment families, and personality models.

Classification

the DSM organises disorders by observable criteria including distress, dysfunction, and duration; a diagnosis requires the pattern to impair functioning

Diagnosis is criteria-based; a single symptom in isolation is not a disorder.

Major categories

anxiety disorders; obsessive-compulsive and related; trauma-related; depressive and bipolar; schizophrenia spectrum; personality disorders; neurodevelopmental disorders

Schizophrenia's positive symptoms are additions such as hallucinations and delusions; negative symptoms are reductions such as flat affect.

Perspectives on causation

biological, psychodynamic, behavioural, cognitive, humanistic, and sociocultural; the diathesis-stress model combines predisposition with environmental trigger

Items often describe a mechanism and ask which perspective it belongs to.

Treatment families

psychodynamic explores unconscious conflict; behavioural uses conditioning principles including systematic desensitisation; cognitive-behavioural targets thoughts and behaviour together; humanistic uses unconditional positive regard; biomedical uses medication

Match the technique to the family: exposure is behavioural, thought records are cognitive, free association is psychodynamic.

Personality models

the five-factor model (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism); psychodynamic structure of id, ego, superego; trait versus situational debate

The five factors are the model most likely to be tested by name; the initials OCEAN are the usual mnemonic.

Assessment

objective inventories such as the MMPI use standardised scoring; projective tests such as the Rorschach and TAT use ambiguous stimuli and have weaker psychometric support

The objective-versus-projective distinction, and the reliability contrast, is the usual question.

Research methods, statistics, and measurement

What a design licenses you to conclude, and what a statistic actually measures.

Designs and inference

only an experiment with a manipulated independent variable and random assignment supports a causal claim; correlational and quasi-experimental designs do not

Random sampling supports generalisation; random assignment supports causal inference. They are different guarantees.

Validity and reliability

reliability is consistency (test-retest, internal, inter-rater); validity is measuring the intended construct (content, criterion, construct); internal validity concerns causal inference and external validity concerns generalisation

A measure can be reliable and invalid, but never valid without being reliable.

Descriptive statistics

$$-1 \le r \le 1$$

mean, median, mode; standard deviation and variance; a correlation coefficient runs from -1 to 1 and measures linear association only

The square of the correlation gives the proportion of variance accounted for; r = 0.5 accounts for a quarter, not a half.

Inferential statistics

t-tests compare two means, ANOVA more than two, chi-square compares frequencies; a p-value is the probability of data this extreme if the null hypothesis were true

Type I error is a false positive at rate alpha; Type II is a false negative; power is one minus the Type II rate.

Intelligence and testing

Spearman's g, Cattell's fluid and crystallised distinction, Gardner's multiple intelligences, Sternberg's triarchic theory; standardised IQ scores use a mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15

Standardisation, norms, reliability, and validity are the four properties any test question is likely to probe.

Research ethics

informed consent, voluntary participation with the right to withdraw, minimisation of harm, confidentiality, and debriefing where deception was used; institutional review is required

Deception is permitted only when justified, minimised, and followed by debriefing.

History and schools of psychology

Name to school to central commitment, plus the milestones that mark each turn in the discipline.

Founding schools

Wundt and structuralism with introspection; James and functionalism; Watson and Skinner with behaviourism; Freud with psychoanalysis; Rogers and Maslow with humanism; the cognitive revolution restoring mental processes

Behaviourism's defining commitment is to observable behaviour only — the point every contrast question turns on.

Gestalt

perception is organised into wholes governed by grouping principles rather than assembled from isolated elements

Gestalt is a perception school, not a therapy school, despite the later therapy of the same name.

Modern perspectives

biological, evolutionary, cognitive, behavioural, psychodynamic, humanistic, and sociocultural, with the biopsychosocial model integrating levels

Most history items give a claim and ask which perspective would make it; match on the level of explanation.

Milestones

Wundt opened the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879; the American Psychological Association was founded in 1892; James published The Principles of Psychology in 1890; Watson's behaviourist manifesto appeared in 1913

The dates matter less than the order: laboratory method first, then functionalism, then the behaviourist turn away from introspection.

Broadening the discipline

Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman to earn a doctorate in psychology; Mary Whiton Calkins was the first woman to serve as president of the American Psychological Association; Francis Cecil Sumner was the first African American to earn a doctorate in psychology; Kenneth and Mamie Clark's doll studies informed the desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education

Items in this area pair a name with a first or with a single study, so revise the pairing rather than the biography.

Sources

Entries drawn from a cited source list it below. Standard results and numerical constants that no source in our registry covers are given as recall material without a citation rather than attributed to a source that does not support them.

1. 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.
2. Psychology 2e, Section 3.2: Cells of the Nervous System — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-15. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
3. Psychology 2e, Section 3.3: Parts of the Nervous System — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-15. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
4. Psychology 2e, Section 8.1: How Memory Functions — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-03. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
5. Psychology 2e, Section 6.2: Classical Conditioning — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-03. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
6. Psychology 2e, Section 6.3: Operant Conditioning — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-03. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
7. Psychology 2e, Section 9.2: Lifespan Theories — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-15. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
8. Psychology 2e, Section 12.4: Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-15. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
9. Psychology 2e, Section 15.2: Diagnosing and Classifying Psychological Disorders — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-15. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
10. Psychology 2e, Section 2.2: Approaches to Research — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-03. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.
11. Psychology 2e, Section 1.2: History of Psychology — OpenStax. Accessed 2026-08-15. OpenStax textbook content is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; attribute and avoid verbatim reuse beyond short cited references.