AP Psychology Unit 5 ReviewMental and Physical Health

AP Psychology Unit 5, Mental and Physical Health, is the unit where everything from the course comes together to answer one question: what happens when behavior and mental processes go wrong, and how do we make them right? It covers stress and health psychology, positive psychology, how psychologists define and classify psychological disorders, the symptoms and causes of ten categories of disorders, and the treatments (talk therapies and biological interventions) used to address them. The single biggest idea is the biopsychosocial model, the assumption that biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors interact to produce both illness and wellness. Unit 5 is worth 15-25% of the AP exam, tied for the largest weight in the course.

What this unit covers

Stress, health, and coping

• Health psychology studies how behavior and mental processes affect physical health. Stress is the headline example because it raises susceptibility to disease, including hypertension, headaches, and immune suppression.
• Not all stress is bad. Eustress motivates you (a big game, a deadline that gets you moving), while distress wears you down. Stressors range from major traumas to daily hassles that pile up, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can affect health across the entire lifespan.
• Selye's general adaptation syndrome (GAS) describes the body's stress response in three phases. Alarm kicks in first (fight-flight-freeze), resistance follows as you confront the stressor, and exhaustion arrives when resources run out. You are most vulnerable to illness during exhaustion.
• Tend-and-befriend theory adds that some people respond to stress by caring for others and seeking social connection rather than fighting or fleeing.
• Coping comes in two flavors. Problem-focused coping attacks the stressor itself (make a study plan, fix the conflict). Emotion-focused coping manages your reaction to it (deep breathing, meditation, medication that calms the emotional response).

Positive psychology

• Positive psychology flips the usual script. Instead of asking what goes wrong, it asks what produces well-being, resilience, and positive emotions.
• Expressing gratitude measurably increases subjective well-being. People who use their signature strengths report more happiness.
• Character strengths are organized into six categories of virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
• Posttraumatic growth is the finding that some people come out of trauma with deeper relationships, new perspective, or greater personal strength. Trauma does not have to end in disorder.

Defining and explaining disorders

• Three factors flag a behavior pattern as a possible disorder: dysfunction (it interferes with daily life), distress (it causes suffering), and deviation from social norms. Norms are cultural, so the same behavior can be read differently across societies.
• Diagnosis cuts both ways. A label can open the door to treatment and self-understanding, but it can also invite stigma, and diagnosis has historically intersected with racism, sexism, ageism, and discrimination. Psychology has been used both to harm and to help.
• Each psychological perspective explains disorders differently. Behavioral says maladaptive learned associations, psychodynamic says unconscious childhood conflicts, humanistic says blocked growth, cognitive says maladaptive thinking, and biological says genes and brain chemistry. Most psychologists take an eclectic approach and combine perspectives.
• Two interaction models tie it together. The biopsychosocial model says any disorder potentially involves biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. The diathesis-stress model says disorders emerge when a genetic vulnerability (the diathesis) meets stressful life experiences. Think of it as a loaded spring that only releases under pressure.

The disorder categories

• The exam focuses on a specific set of disorders. For each one, know the hallmark symptoms and the likely causes (biological, learned, cognitive, sociocultural, or some mix).
• Schizophrenia spectrum disorders deserve extra attention. Positive symptoms add something abnormal (delusions, which are false beliefs, and hallucinations, which are false perceptions, plus disorganized thinking, speech, or motor behavior). Negative symptoms take something away, like flat affect.
• Several categories trace directly to stress and trauma: PTSD (hypervigilance, flashbacks, insomnia, emotional detachment), dissociative amnesia with or without fugue, and dissociative identity disorder.
• Personality disorders come in three clusters. Cluster A is odd or eccentric (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal), Cluster B is dramatic, emotional, or erratic (includes antisocial), and Cluster C is anxious or fearful. They are enduring, inflexible patterns starting in adolescence or early adulthood.

Treating disorders

• Meta-analyses show psychotherapy is generally effective, and psychologists use evidence-based interventions. Successful therapy also requires a therapeutic alliance (trust between therapist and client) and cultural humility.
• Each perspective has a treatment toolkit. Psychodynamic therapy uses free association and dream interpretation. Cognitive therapy uses cognitive restructuring and targets Beck's cognitive triad (negative thoughts about yourself, the world, and the future). Behavioral approaches include applied behavior analysis and exposure therapies like systematic desensitization, which pair relaxation with a fear hierarchy.
• Group therapy adds peer support and shows you that others share your struggles, though with less individual attention than one-on-one therapy.
• Biological interventions include psychoactive medications (antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, lithium for bipolar disorder, antipsychotics) that work on specific neurotransmitters. Side effects matter, like tardive dyskinesia, a dopamine-related movement disorder from antipsychotics. More invasive options include psychosurgery (lesioning) and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation).
• Effective psychotropic medication drove deinstitutionalization, the mass release of patients from hospitals and asylums in the late twentieth century.
• Hypnosis can help with pain and anxiety, but research does not support using it to recover accurate memories or regress in age.

Unit 5, Mental and Physical Health at a glance

Why Unit 5, Mental and Physical Health matters in AP Psych

This unit is the application layer of the whole course. The biological, cognitive, learning, and social material you studied earlier was never just trivia. It was building the toolkit psychologists use to explain why disorders develop and how treatments work. Unit 5 is where you prove you can use those perspectives, not just recite them.

• It carries the heaviest possible exam weight (15-25%, tied with Unit 1), so the return on study time here is enormous.
• It centers the course's core theme that behavior comes from interacting causes. Diathesis-stress and the biopsychosocial model are the clearest statements of nature-and-nurture interaction in the entire course.
• It addresses psychology's ethical and sociocultural responsibilities, including the historical mistreatment and stigmatization of people with mental illness and the APA ethical principles (nonmaleficence, fidelity, integrity, respect for rights and dignity) that govern treatment today.

How this unit connects across the course

• Neurotransmitters, brain structures, and the sympathetic nervous system (Unit 1) come back everywhere here. The fight-flight-freeze alarm reaction runs on the systems you learned in Unit 1, and psychoactive medications work by interacting with specific neurotransmitters.
• Maladaptive thinking from the cognitive perspective (Unit 2) explains depressive and anxiety disorders, and cognitive therapy fixes disorders by restructuring thought. The hypnosis-and-memory finding also echoes Unit 2's lesson that memory is reconstructive, which is exactly why hypnotically "recovered" memories are unreliable.
• Classical and operant conditioning (Unit 3) explain how phobias and compulsions are learned, and they power treatments like exposure therapy, systematic desensitization, and applied behavior analysis. ACEs also extend Unit 3's developmental theme that early experience shapes later outcomes.
• Personality theory and social perception (Unit 4) set up personality disorders and the stigma discussion. Defining disorders partly by "deviation from social norms" only makes sense after you understand how norms and attributions work.

Key thinkers and models

• Hans Selye: Described the general adaptation syndrome, the three-phase stress response of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.
• Shelley Taylor: Proposed the tend-and-befriend theory, the idea that some people respond to stress with caregiving and social connection.
• Martin Seligman: Founder of positive psychology, the study of well-being, resilience, and character strengths.
• Sigmund Freud: His psychodynamic perspective traces disorders to unconscious childhood conflicts, treated with free association and dream interpretation.
• Carl Rogers: His humanistic perspective sees disorders as blocked personal growth and grounds client-centered approaches to therapy.
• Aaron Beck: Developed cognitive therapy and the cognitive triad, negative thoughts about oneself, the world, and the future.
• Joseph Wolpe: Developed systematic desensitization, an exposure therapy that pairs relaxation with a step-by-step fear hierarchy.

Unit 5, Mental and Physical Health on the AP exam

Unit 5 makes up 15-25% of the AP exam, which means it can be the single largest chunk of your score. On the multiple-choice section, expect questions that hand you a description of symptoms and ask you to identify the most likely disorder, or that ask which perspective a given explanation or treatment comes from (a therapist using free association is psychodynamic, a fear hierarchy is behavioral exposure). Stimulus-based questions may present research data on stress, treatment effectiveness, or well-being and ask you to interpret it.

On the free-response section, this unit feeds both question types. The Article Analysis Question can present a study on a Unit 5 topic, like coping strategies or therapy outcomes, and ask you to identify the method, variables, and ethical considerations and evaluate the conclusions. The Evidence-Based Question asks you to build a claim from multiple research sources, and disorder and treatment research fits that format naturally. The skill being tested is rarely recall alone. You apply concepts to scenarios, match symptoms to categories, link treatments to the perspectives that produced them, and reason about evidence.

Essential questions

• Where is the line between normal struggles and a psychological disorder, and who gets to draw it?
• How do biological vulnerability, life experience, and culture interact to produce mental illness or mental health?
• Why do different psychological perspectives produce such different explanations, and treatments, for the same disorder?
• Can the science of well-being do as much for people as the science of illness?

Key terms to know

• Eustress: Positive, motivating stress that can improve performance.
• Distress: Negative, debilitating stress linked to illness and impaired functioning.
• Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Early-life stressors that can affect health and behavior across the lifespan.
• General adaptation syndrome: The three-phase stress response of alarm, resistance, and exhaustion, with illness most likely during exhaustion.
• Problem-focused coping: Managing stress by directly working to solve the stressor itself.
• Emotion-focused coping: Managing stress by regulating your emotional reaction, such as through meditation or deep breathing.
• Posttraumatic growth: Positive psychological change that can follow the experience of trauma.
• Diathesis-stress model: The idea that disorders develop when a genetic vulnerability combines with stressful life experiences.
• Biopsychosocial model: The assumption that biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors together explain psychological problems.
• Eclectic approach: Drawing on multiple psychological perspectives to diagnose and treat a client.
• Positive symptoms: Added abnormal experiences in schizophrenia, like delusions and hallucinations.
• Cognitive triad: Beck's pattern of negative thoughts about oneself, the world, and the future in depression.
• Therapeutic alliance: The trusting, collaborative relationship between therapist and client that helps therapy succeed.
• Deinstitutionalization: The late twentieth century release of patients from hospitals and asylums, driven by effective psychotropic medications.

Common mix-ups

• Delusions vs. hallucinations: Delusions are false beliefs (someone is persecuting me); hallucinations are false perceptions (hearing voices). Both are positive symptoms of schizophrenia, "positive" meaning added, not good.
• Major depressive disorder vs. Bipolar I and II: Depressive disorders involve only depressive episodes. Bipolar disorders cycle between depression and mania. If mania appears anywhere in the scenario, it is not a depressive disorder.
• Obsessions vs. compulsions: Obsessions are the intrusive thoughts; compulsions are the repetitive behaviors performed to neutralize them. The thought comes first, the behavior responds to it.
• Anorexia vs. bulimia: Both are feeding and eating disorders involving altered food consumption, but they are distinct diagnoses; do not treat them as interchangeable on a symptom-matching question.
• PTSD vs. dissociative disorders: Both can stem from trauma, but PTSD features hypervigilance and flashbacks, while dissociative disorders feature breaks in memory or identity, like fugue or multiple identities.