Psychology Degree Study Guide 2026
Everything you need to pass the Psychology Degree exam in one place: the exam format, every topic to study, real practice questions with explanations, flashcards, and full-length practice tests. Free, no sign-up needed.
📋 Psychology Degree Exam Format at a Glance
📚 Psychology Degree Topics to Study (95)
✍️ Sample Psychology Degree Questions & Answers
1. Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments revealed that the percentage of participants who delivered the maximum shock level was approximately:
In Milgram's original study, approximately 65% of participants delivered the maximum 450-volt shock, demonstrating the powerful influence of authority.
2. A researcher finds that as ice cream sales increase, drowning rates also increase. This most likely reflects:
This classic example illustrates spurious correlation — hot weather drives both ice cream consumption and swimming (drowning risk), making them correlated without causation.
3. Which memory system is responsible for remembering how to ride a bicycle or type on a keyboard?
Procedural memory is a type of implicit long-term memory for motor skills and learned procedures that operates largely outside conscious awareness.
4. Social loafing is most likely to be reduced when:
Social loafing diminishes when individual contributions can be identified and evaluated, as accountability restores personal responsibility.
5. The 'encoding specificity principle' (Tulving & Thomson, 1973) predicts that recall will be best when:
Memory retrieval is maximized when the cues available at retrieval match the context present when the memory was originally encoded.
6. A major change from the DSM-IV-TR to the DSM-5 was the removal of the multiaxial system. What was a primary rationale for this change?
The primary rationale for removing the multiaxial system was to harmonize the DSM with the World Health Organization's ICD, which does not use axes. This change aimed to create a more unified, global system for diagnosis and data collection. The DSM-5 combined the former Axes I, II, and III into a single list of diagnoses, while psychosocial and environmental factors (formerly Axis IV) and disability (formerly Axis V) are now noted separately using a nonaxial format.