Three levels of explanation (group-level, individual-level,and mediating variables); Descartes (mind-body dualism, doctrine of innate ideas); The British associationist philosophers and their assumptions; John Locke's notion of the mind as tabula rasa; behaviorism and its assumptions; Freudian theory and its assumptions; experiments (independent and dependent variables; random assignment of subjects; control groups; determining cause-effect relationships); correlational studies -- their strengths and weaknesses; the correlation coefficent and its meaning; subjective vs. behavioral data; neurons and synapses -- their parts and their functions (soma, axon, dendrites: the "all-or-none" law, refractory period, action and resting potential; excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters; place and temporal codes); parts of the nervous system (central vs. peripheral; somatic and autonomic nervous system; sympathetic and parasympathetic branches); the brain and its parts (cerebral cortex, cerebellum, medulla and brain stem; lobes of the cortex; the somatosensory and motor areas of the cortex; Broca's and Wernicke's areas and language; the thalamus; the limbic system; the corpus callosum); the Bell-Magendie Law; right vs. left hemisphere of the brain and split-brain research; Darwin's theory of evolution and its main assumptions; the "war" between moths and bats; evolutionary "purpose" of classical conditioning; life as an information process (three levels: evolution and DNA; learning and the nervous system; culture and language); Classical conditioning (US and CS, UR and CR; extinction, generalization; contiguity vs. contingency theories); Operant conditioning (Thorndike's "law of effect"; Skinner's conception of reinforcement; positive and negative reinforcement; punishment and when it's effective; partial vs. continuous reinforcement); Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis; characteristics of human language; Skinner's conditioning approach vs. Chomsky's rule-learning approach to how language is learned; Binet's first intelligence tests and their purpose;  heuristics vs. algorithms; sensory, short-term, and longer-term memory; kinds of memory (e.g., episodic, semantic, procedural; mnemonic techniques; theories of forgetting; the Stanford-Binet test; the concept of the general or "g-factor" of intelligence; reliability and validity -- what they mean and how they apply to IQ tests; theories of emotion -- James-Lange, Cannon-Bard; Schachter-Singer two-component theory; Darwin's theory of emotional expressions; definition of emotion; Freudian theory of personality and its basic assumptions; (id, ego, super-ego); psychosexual stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital); defense mechanisms; traits theories of personality; the Big Five model traits; social learning theory of personality and what it implies about the consistency of behavior over situations; evidence on hereditary and genetics effects on personality; shared family environment vs. nonshared unique environment, and their effects of personality and intelligence; Asch's conformity experiments; Milgram's obedience experiments, research on the "bystander effect"; social facilitation research; deindividuation; groupthink