AP Psychology: Extra Credit Project, 2014
You may choose from the following list of extra credit projects and may do one per semester. You should do the project duringthe corresponding unit. Sign up with me before you start, and I will schedule your oral. Plan early!
(worth up to) 3% (up to) 2% (up to) 1.5 % (up to) 1% (up to) .5%
book reporttopic articles reportdebatespeaker, demo, orapplication / current research person or issue report physiology notes interview event
volunteer work update (see me)video clips presentation essay question (with activity
rubric, 2 samples) chapter notes update (see me)
**IMPORTANT: if you want to vary any, bargain, or do something original, check with me first. I will tell you the project’s potential value.
- Read, fully summarize, explain, analyze, and give your reactions to a BOOK dealing with a psychological issue, both written and orally. Relate the book to psychology. Design a visual to emphasize the main issues during your oral. I need to okay your choice and see the book before you start reading. Show me the book, and I will tell you what it’s worth.
- Design, run, videotape (if possible), and present psychological RESEARCH. (See the research handout at freewebs.com/jcraigecr for details.)
- Select and carefully read related TOPIC ARTICLES (examples: the controversy over intelligence, issues with antidepressants, animal research, repressed memories -- check with me). Summarize and compare / contrast the articles written and orally, and give an ending evaluation. Design a visualportraying the issue to show with your oral. Include photocopies of your articles in the written report. Note: articles must be at least three pages long. Internet sources should be from significant sites.
- Do a report on a famous PERSON or ISSUE in psychology. Use at least two sources to write a biography and explanation of the person's concepts and contributions or to fully explain the background and viewpoints involved in the issue. This report will be written and presented orally, and it includes a visual aid. Please include the photocopied short / main sources and a bibliography. Note: articles must be at least three pages long. Internet sources should be from significant sites. If you increase the number of sources, this report may increase in value. Check with me.
- Do VOLUNTEER WORK at a psych-related agency. Keep a journal. Turn in the journal and a signed form from the agency verifying the hours worked. Orally explain what you did, what memorable events occurred, any problems you had with doing it, your reactions, etc. Be candid. Note: you must do at least 6 hours of work for the agency.
- Write an original ESSAY QUESTION using the AP test format. Write the rubric and two sample essays illustrating differing scores. Present both. Provide copies for the class.
- Prepare and present one side of an issue in a DEBATE. You may use my books or equivalent as a basis, and supplement as needed. You need to pair with someone, both read the articles, decide who will take which side, plan your argument / counterargument / summation, and set a debate date. Visual required.
- Update all physiology notes from 6 chapters of the book. Get existing notes from the web site. Give your update to me to put on the web site. See me first.
- Arrange for a SPEAKER, DEMONSTRATION (such as a polygraph test, hypnotherapy), or INTERVIEW in a field related to psychology. You introduce the speaker and give a brief background on the issue. Please get the person and the topic okayed and then scheduled with me. Send a thank-you note within a week after the presentation; give it to me to mail. IMPORTANT: tell me when he or she is available, but give me at least one week's notice. I will then work the class around the speaker's schedule. You may use a videotape instead of an in-class speaker.
- Watch and take notes on a topical show such as a Discovery documentary on aging, a Dateline on autism, or a 60 Minutes segment on memory. Show the important VIDEO CLIPS only (about 2-4 clips, about 15 minutes total) and explain the rest of the information orally. Note: I reserve the right to keep the tape.
- Choose, adapt, and present an ACTIVITY or ROLE PLAY demonstrating some aspect of psychology. You may create your own, use one from my sources, or pick one from the book’s web site (worthpublishers.com/myers8e). Note: these sources will not leave the room. Arrange a time with me to choose one, and if you need, I will photocopy it for you. Get your topic approved by me before starting.
- Update CHAPTER NOTES. Check with me for available chapters. Sign up with me. Complete the notes the day before the test at the latest. Email them to , or give them to me on a CD or flash drive to post on the web site.
- Apply a psychological principle to a CURRENT EVENT (such as the psychological effects of serving in Afghanistan). You research and apply the issue to the psychological principle written and orally. Include the article.
Suggested Books: (you are not limited to these… check with me)
IMPORTANT: Many of these books get into highly diverse philosophical issues, and some contradict each other in their approaches and solutions. This list simply represents some of the works available. The fact that a book is on this list does not mean I necessarily endorse its viewpoint. Read critically.
A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness
(Duke)
A Child Called It (Pelzer)
A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)
A Grief Observed (C.S. Lewis)
A Guide to Treatments that Work (Nathan and Forman)
Anger: the Misunderstood Emotion (Travis)
Anxiety Free (Leahy)
An Unquiet Mind (Jamison)
A Primer of Jungian Psychology (Hall, Nordby)
A Primer on Sleep and Dreaming (Cartwright)
A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of a
Crisis (Ackerman)
A Way of Being (Rogers)
Alcohol and Crime (Greenfeld)
Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates Itself (Feinberg)
Art of the Will (Rank)
Awakenings (Sacks)
Bad Childhood, Good Life (Schlessinger)
Being Happy (Tuffley)
Biological and Cognitive Constraints on Learning (Kimble)
Blink (Gladwell)
Body Language (Fast)
Born on a Blue Day (Tammet)
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life (Amen)
Child Abuse (Kempe and Kempe)
Childhood and Society (Erikson)
Children in Danger: Coping with the Consequences of Community Violence (Garbarino, Dubrow, Kostelny)
Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness
(Foulkes)
Choice Theory (Glasser)
Choosing Joy (Null)
Codependence (Whitefield)
Cognitive Therapy of Depression (Beck, Shaw, Rush,
Emery)
Confessions of a Sociopath – A Life Spent Hiding in Plain
Sight (Thomas)
Connect (Harrell and Hill)
Contagious Optimism (Mezzapelle)
Cooperation and Competition (Johnson and Johnson)
Coping with Loss (Nolen-Hoeksema and Larson)
Courage to Heal (Buss, Davis)
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (Harris)
Creativity (Csiksentmihalyi)
Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
Criminal Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide (Bell, Bilby,
Cook)
Daydreaming (Barth)
Depression (Beck)
Dibs in Search of Self (Axline)
Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human
Thought and Action (Hilgard)
Don’t Panic (Wilson)
Doors of Perception (Huxley)
Driven to Distraction (Hallowell and Ratey)
Dying to Be Thin (Sacker)
Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
Emotion Revealed (Ekman)
Emotional Intimacy (Masters)
Escape from Freedom (Fromm)
Everything in Its Place (Summers)
Fasting Girls: the History of Anorexia (Brumberg)
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Jeffers)
Feeling Good (Burne)
Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience
(Csikszentmihalyi)
Focus (Halvorson, Higgins)
For One More Day (Albom)
From Panic to Power (Bassett)
From Placebo to Panacea: Putting Psychiatric Drugs to the
Test (Fisher and Greenberg)
From Sad to Glad (Kline)
Games People Play (Berne)
Getting Control – Overcoming Your Obsessions (Baer)
Girl, Interrupted (Kaysen)
Groupthink (Janis)
Hallucination (Sachs)
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
He (Johnson)
Happy People (Freedman)
Head First: the Biology of Hope (Cousins)
Healing the Child Within (Whitfield)
Healing the Shame That Binds You (Bradshaw)
The High Price of Materialism (Kasser)
His Needs, Her Needs (Harley)
How to Break Your Addiction to a Person (Halpern)
How the Mind Works (Pinker)
House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on
Myth (Dawes)
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (Carnegie)
How to Think Like a Psychologist (McBurney)
How to Think Straight About Psychology (Stanovich)
How We Know What Isn’t So: the Fallibility of Human
Reason in Everyday Society (Gilovich)
Human Emotions (Izard)
Hypnosis, Will, and Memory: a Psycho-legal History
(Laurence and Perry)
Ideology and Insanity (Szasz)
I'm Ok—You’re Ok (Harris)
Imperfect Control (Viorsk)
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development (Gilligan)
Industrial/organizational Psychology: Understanding the
Workplace (Levy)
Intuition (Myers)
IQ – a Smart History of a Failed Idea (Murdoch)
Jeopardy in the Courtroom: a Scientific Analysis of
Children’s Testimony (Ceci and Bruck)
Just Checking (Colas)
Kids’ Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America’s
Children ((Anderson)
King Lear (Shakespeare)
King Solomon's Ring (Lorenz)
Language and Mind (Chomsky)
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life (Seligman)
Learning, Remembering, Believing: Enhancing Human
Performance (Druckman and Bjork)
Life Strategies (McGraw)
Listening to Prozac (Kramer)
Living with Schizophrenia (Emmons, Geisler, Kaplan,
Harrow)
Living the Truth (Ablow)
Love and Addiction (Peele)
Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Man and His Symbols (Jung)
Man's Search for Meaning (Frankl)
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (Gray)
Mapping the Mind (Carter)
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung)
Midlife Myths (Hunter and Sundel)
Mind Wide Open (Johnson)
Mindsight (Siegel)
Multiple Intelligences (Gardner)
Multiple Personality: An Exercise in Deception (Aldridge-
Morris)
Multiple Views of Multiple Intelligence (Gardner)
Nature’s Mind: the Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions,
Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence (Gazzaniga)
Nature’s Thumbprint: The New Genetics of Personality
(Neubauer and Neubauer)
Neurosis and Human Growth (Horney)
Nonverbal Sex Differences (Hall)
Now Discover Your Strengths (Buckingham and Clifton)
Obedience to Authority (Milgram )
On Becoming a Person (Rogers)
On Being a Therapist (Kotler)
On Death and Dying (Kubler-Ross)
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey)
Opening Skinner’s Box (Slater)
Ordinary People (Guest)
Owning Your Own Shadow (Johnson)
People Skills (Bolton)
Perception Without Awareness (Bornstein and Pittman)
Perfect Chaos (Johnson, Johnson)
Personality and Social Intelligence (Cantor and Kihlstrom)
Personality in Adulthood (McCrae and Costa)
Phobias (Saul)
Pioneers of Psychology (Fancher)
Power Sleep (Maas)
Prozac Backlash (Glenmullen)
Prozac Nation (Wurtzel)
Psycholinguistics (Foulkes)
Psychology in America (Hilgard)
Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith (Myers, Jeeves,
Wolterstorff)
Reality Therapy (Glasser)
Remembering Well (Sargeant and Unkenstein)
Reviving Ophelia – Saving the Souls of Adolescent Girls
(Pipher)
Schizophrenia Genesis: the Origins of Madness (Gottesman)
Searching for Memory (Schacter)
She (Johnson)
Shyness (Zimbardo)
Spontaneous Happiness (Weil)
Strange Brains and Genius (Pickover)
Stress Inoculation Training (Meichenbaum)
Surviving an Eating Disorder (Siegel, Brisman, Weinshel)
Sybil (Schreiber)
The Antecedents of Self-esteem (Coopersmith)
The Antisocial Personalities (Lykken)
The Art of Loving (Fromm)
The Atoms of Language: the Mind’s Hidden Rules of
Grammar (Baker)
The Attraction Paradigm (Byrne)
The Awakening (Chopin)
The Beast: a Journey Through Depression (Thompson)
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature
(Pinker)
The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing (Rappaport)
The Courage to Create (May)
The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime (Haddon)
The End of Sanity: Social and Cultural Madness in America
(Gross)
The Far Reaches of Human Nature (Maslow)
The Gestalt Approach (Perlz)
The Gift of Fear (DeBecker)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)
The Introvert Advantage (Lange)
The Lenses of Gender (Bem)
The Lives of a Cell (Thomas)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Sacks)
The Manufacture of Madness (Szasz)
The Meme Machine (Blackmore)
The Mindful Way Through Depression (Williams, Teasdale,
Segel, Kabat-Zinn)
The Myth of Repressed Memory (Loftus and Ketcham)
The Nature of Adolescence (Coleman)
The Nature of Prejudice (Allport)
The Nature of the Child (Kagan)
The New Passages (Sheehy)
The Nightmare (Hartmann)
The Not So Big Life (Susandra)
The Nurture Assumption (Harris)
The Paradox of Gender (Maccoby)
The Power of Intention (Dyer)
The Power of Positive Thinking (Peale)
The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and
Madness Controversy (Ludwig)
The Promise of Sleep (Dement)
The Psychology of Control (Ladd)
The Psychology of Everyday Things (Norman)
The Pursuit of Happiness (Myers)
The Road Less Traveled (Peck)
The Quiet Room (Schiller, Bennett))
The Rising Curve: Long Term Gains in IQ (Neisser)
The Seat of the Soul (Zukav)
The Secret of Letting Go (Finley)
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (Covey)
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (Branden)
The Social and Economic Circumstances of Adults with
Social Learning Theory (Bandura)
The Social Psychology of Creativity (Amabile)
The Story of Psychology (Hunt)
The Synaptic Self (LeDoux)
The Talking Cure (Vaughan)
The Thief of Happiness (Friedman)
The Three-Pound Universe (Hooper and Teresi)
The Trauma Toolkit (Pease Bennett)
The Undiscovered Self (Jung)
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman)
Touched with Fire; Manic-depressive Illness and the Artistic
Temperament (Jamison)
Toxic People (Glass)
Toxic Psychiatry (Breggin)
Turn of the Screw (James)
Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (Crews)
Understanding Culture’s Influence on Behavior (Brislin)
Understanding Sleep and Dreaming (Moorcraft)
Unmasking the Face (Ekman and Friesen)
Urban Stress (Glass and Singer)
Walden Two (Skinner)
The War Against Parents (Hewlett and West)
Wet Mind: the New Cognitive Neuroscience (Kosslyn and
Koenig)
What’s Age Got to Do with It? (Ferrin)
The Wheel of Life (Kubler-Ross)
When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough (Kushner)
When Food Is Love (Roth)
When I Say No, I Feel Guilty (Smith)
When Panic Attacks (Burns)
White Oleander (Fitch)
Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of
Belief (Newberg and D’Aquili)
Why Marriages Succeed or Fail (Gottman)
Why Spanking Doesn’t Work (Marshall)
Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (Hauser)
Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the
Psychopaths Among Us (Hare)
Wounded Minds (Liebert, Birnes)
Your Memory: a User’s Guide (Baddeley)
Unflappable (Michaels)
Ungifted – Intelligence Redefined (Kaufman)
Suggested Project List: Categories, People(you are not limited to these… check with me)
Addiction
Adler, Alfred
Adolescence
Advertising
Aggression, violence
Aging
AIDS
Ainsworth, Mary
Alcoholism
Alport, Gordon
Amnesia
Anger
Animal experimentation /
ethics
Anxiety
APA
Art therapy
Asch, Solomon
Autism
Bandura, Albert
Battered women / men?
Behavior modification
Behaviorism
Binet, Alfred
Body language
Brainwashing
Child abuse
Chomsky, Noam
Color: psych. effects
Communication
Compulsive behavior
Conditioning
Conformity
Consciousness
Cognitive dissonance
Creativity, genius
Criminals
Crowding
Cults
Death and dying
Defense mechanisms
Dement, William
Depression
Development
Divorce
Dreams
Drugs
Eating disorders
Ebbinghaus, Karl
Ellis, Albert
Erikson, Erik
ESP
Fantasies
Freud, Sigmund
Fromm, Eric
Gardner, Howard
Gender identity, roles
Gestalt psych.
Gilligan, Carol
Goleman, Daniel
Grief
Group behavior
Hallucinations
Happiness
Harlow, Harry
Heredity and
environment
Holistic healing /
alternative therapies
Homosexuality
Horney, Karen
Humanistic psych.
Hypnotherapy
Industrial psych.
Insanity
Intelligence
IQ testing
James, William
Jung, Carl
Kinsey, Alfred
Kohlberg, Lawrence
Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth
Laing, R.D
Language and thought
Learning
“Little Albert”
Lorenz, Konrad
Love
Marriage
Maslow, Abraham
May, Rollo
Mead, Margaret
Meditation
Memory
Mental disorders
Mental institutions
Mental retardation
Milgram, Stanley
Mob psych.
Motivation
Murder
Myers, David
Neurosis
Norms and norm carriers
Nutrition and mentality
Pain
Paranoia
Pavlov, Ivan
Peer pressure
Perlz, Fritz
Personality disorders
Phobias
Phrenology
Piaget, Jean
Play therapy
Prejudice
Prison
Rogers, Carl
Schacter, Stanley
Schizophrenia
Self-image
Seligman, Martin
Sensation and perception
Sexuality
Skinner, B.F
Social psychology
Sports psychology
Stress
Suicide
Symbolism / archetypes
Szasz, Thomas
Terman, Louis
Transactional Analysis
Trauma
Twelve-Step Programs
Van Gogh, Vincent
Watson, John
Wechsler, David
Whorf, Benjamin
Wundt, Wilhelm
Zimbardo, Philip
AP Psychology: Research
As a project choice, you may design, run, analyze, and present the results of an experiment.
Many of the techniques you use will depend upon your design, either creating and testing something original, or using / varying previous research. You will make a hypothesis concerning a population, and then determine the best procedure to test for cause and effect. This test will include experimental and control groups, and will be designed to clearly isolate the independent and dependent variables from confounding variables. You will determine the method to achieve random or representative samples (not your friends; perhaps every third person who walks by, at several, very different locations).