MCAT content library / Psychology & sociology
Connect behavior, cognition, social interaction, institutions, demographics, and inequality to evidence. This collection contains 71 primary lessons from the completed DDQX MCAT content map.
Use the topic groups for lookup or choose a short study path when you want a sequence.
Browse topic groups
- Sensation and perception (7)
- Learning and behavior change (4)
- Cognition and consciousness (9)
- Emotion and stress (2)
- Individual influences on behavior (10)
- Social influence (5)
- Self and identity (2)
- Social thinking (3)
- Social interaction (7)
- Social structure and institutions (8)
- Demography and social change (9)
- Social inequality and health (5)
- Study paths
Sensation and perception
- Sensory thresholds, adaptation, and habituation
- Signal detection: separate sensitivity from the decision rule
- Perception: organize the same input in different ways
- Vision from retinal input to features and pathways
- Hearing: translate vibration into an auditory code
- Touch, pain, body position, and balance
- Taste, smell, and evidence for chemical signals
Learning and behavior change
- Classical conditioning: learn the predictive relationship
- Operant learning: consequences and response patterns
- Observational learning and reciprocal social influences
- Persuasion: message, audience, and processing conditions
Cognition and consciousness
- Attention under competing demands
- Problem solving, heuristics, and belief revision
- Memory systems, encoding, and neural plasticity
- Retrieval, interference, and reconstructed memory
- Cognitive development across tasks and the lifespan
- Intelligence theories and patterns of measured ability
- Consciousness, sleep stages, and circadian patterns
- Psychoactive effects, reward, and addiction
- Language learning, cognition, and brain evidence
Emotion and stress
Individual influences on behavior
- Personality explanations and the situations they must explain
- Psychological disorder categories, context, and reported rates
- Motivation: compare needs, drives, arousal, and incentives
- When attitudes and behavior change one another
- What brain methods can tell us about behavior
- Behavioral genetics: separate inherited variation from context
- Physiological development and changing behavior
- Anxiety, trauma-related responses, and compulsive behavior
- Mood episodes, psychotic symptoms, and biological explanations
- Nervous-system disorders: connect functional changes to evidence
Social influence
- An audience, a group, and individual performance
- Conformity, authority, and social control
- Norms, sanctions, and learning social expectations
- Group decisions: preference shifts and suppressed alternatives
- Deviance, labels, and collective behavior
Self and identity
- Self-concept, self-efficacy, and perceived control
- Identity development through people, groups, and culture
Social thinking
- Attribution: weigh the person and the situation
- Stereotypes, prejudice, stigma, and cultural interpretation
- Expectations, performance context, and warranted conclusions
Social interaction
- Statuses, roles, and conflicting expectations
- Groups and networks: distinguish membership from connections
- Self-presentation, emotion signals, and audience
- Social bonds, helping, and aggression in context
- Discrimination: separate individual actions from institutional rules
- Organizations, bureaucracy, and concentrated decision power
- Animal social behavior: costs, benefits, and signals
Social structure and institutions
- Sociological explanations and levels of analysis
- Education, expectations, and unequal opportunities
- Power, authority, economic organization, and work
- Health, illness, and medicine as a social institution
- Culture, symbols, and shared meaning
- Family, kinship, and changing household roles
- Religion as a social institution
- Cultural change, contact, and transmission
Demography and social change
- Sex, gender, orientation, and demographic measures
- Race, ethnicity, and changing social classification
- Migration, population change, and immigration status
- Population pyramids and demographic change
- Fertility and mortality: choose the right denominator
- Aging, cohorts, and the life course
- Social movements: grievances, organization, and strategy
- Globalization: interdependence and competing explanations
- Urbanization, neighborhood change, and population composition
Social inequality and health
- Social class, status, and different forms of capital
- Social reproduction, mobility, and claims of meritocracy
- Poverty, exclusion, and intersecting social positions
- Spatial inequality, environmental exposure, and access
- Health disparities and health-care disparities
Study paths that use this section
From measurement to learning
Use behavioral evidence to distinguish adaptation, predictive associations, consequences, and learning from a model.
From social structure to health inequality
Apply sociological explanations to resources, mobility, place, and unequal health outcomes.
View the 6-lesson path
- Sociological explanations and levels of analysis
- Social class, status, and different forms of capital
- Social reproduction, mobility, and claims of meritocracy
- Poverty, exclusion, and intersecting social positions
- Spatial inequality, environmental exposure, and access
- Health disparities and health-care disparities
Connect the ideas
After reviewing a lesson, change one condition in its worked application and predict the result before reopening the feedback. For study design, graphs, uncertainty, and multi-figure reasoning, use Research & Data.