EPPP Cheat Sheet: Key Concepts for All 8 Domains (2026)

This EPPP cheat sheet covers all eight Part 1 domains on one page, ordered by the exam weights ASPPB publishes. Each block holds the core terms, formulas, and rules that EPPP prep keeps coming back to, written as short as they can be while still being right. Print it, or keep it open next to your practice questions.

One honest note first. ASPPB publishes how much each domain is worth. It does not publish which specific topics show up most. Any sheet that claims to list "the most tested EPPP topics" is guessing. So this one is ordered by domain weight, and the concepts inside each block come from the core of our lesson library, not from a leaked list.

How to use this sheet

1. Read a line, cover it, and explain it out loud in your own words.
2. Anything you can't explain goes in your error log.
3. Then test yourself. A cheat sheet shows you what you have seen. Practice shows you what you can use. The free EPPP practice questions post has 50 questions with full rationales, grouped by domain.

Domain	Weight
Assessment and Diagnosis	16%
Ethical, Legal, and Professional Issues	16%
Treatment, Intervention, Prevention, and Supervision	15%
Cognitive-Affective Bases of Behavior	13%
Growth and Lifespan Development	12%
Social and Cultural Bases of Behavior	11%
Biological Bases of Behavior	10%
Research Methods and Statistics	7%

For how to turn these weights into a study order, see EPPP domain weights.

Assessment and Diagnosis (16%)

• Standard scores. z-score: mean 0, SD 1. T-score: mean 50, SD 10. Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ: mean 100, SD 15. Stanine: mean 5, SD 2.
• The normal curve. About 68% of scores fall within 1 SD of the mean, and about 95% within 2 SDs. An IQ of 70 sits 2 SDs below the mean.
• Reliability coefficient. Read it as true score variance. A coefficient of .80 means 80% of the differences in scores are real and 20% is error. Reliability comes out higher when the sample covers a wide range of ability.
• Sensitivity = TP / (TP + FN): of the people who have the condition, the share the test catches. Specificity = TN / (TN + FP): of the people who don't, the share the test correctly clears. Both hold steady across settings. Predictive values shift with prevalence.
• MMPI-2 validity scales. L (Lie): an obvious attempt to look good. K (Defensiveness): a subtler attempt to look good. F (Infrequency): overreporting, which can mean faking bad, severe pathology, or random answering.

Ethical, Legal, and Professional Issues (16%)

• Multiple relationships (APA Standard 3.05). You hold a professional role with someone and, at the same time or by promise, another relationship with them or someone close to them. Not automatically unethical. In the code's words, multiple relationships that "would not reasonably be expected to cause impairment or risk exploitation or harm are not unethical."
• Former clients (Standard 10.08). No sexual intimacies for at least two years after therapy ends, and after that only in "the most unusual circumstances."
• Tarasoff. The California case behind the duty to protect: when a client makes a serious threat of violence against an identifiable person, the psychologist may need to act to protect that person. State laws differ on the details, so learn the principle.

Treatment, Intervention, Prevention, and Supervision (15%)

• OCD. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is the gold-standard treatment, alone or inside CBT.
• Beck's cognitive distortions. Arbitrary inference means drawing a negative conclusion without evidence ("They haven't texted back, so they must be angry at me").
• Ellis's A-B-C-D-E. Activating event, Belief, Consequence, then Disputation of the irrational belief, and the Effect: a more rational belief replaces the old one. The belief at B, not the event at A, drives the consequence.
• Levels of prevention. Primary stops a problem before it starts and usually targets everyone. Secondary catches it early. Tertiary manages an existing condition so it doesn't get worse.
• Stages of change. Precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. Match the intervention to the stage. More in stages of change for the EPPP.

Cognitive-Affective Bases of Behavior (13%)

• Operant conditioning. Reinforcement increases a behavior. Punishment decreases it. "Positive" means something is added, "negative" means something is taken away. So negative reinforcement is relief: something unpleasant goes away, and the behavior that removed it goes up.
• Premack principle. Use a high-frequency behavior to reinforce a low-frequency one ("first this, then that").
• Serial position effect. Items at the start of a list (primacy) and the end (recency) are remembered better than the middle.

Growth and Lifespan Development (12%)

• Piaget. Sensorimotor (birth to 2): object permanence. Preoperational (2 to 7): symbolic play, egocentrism, no conservation yet. Concrete operational (7 to 12): conservation and logic about concrete things. Formal operational (12 and up): abstract, hypothetical reasoning.
• Ainsworth's Strange Situation. Four patterns: secure, insecure/avoidant, insecure/resistant (ambivalent), and disorganized/disoriented. Secure goes with sensitive, responsive caregiving. Resistant goes with inconsistent caregiving. Avoidant goes with rejecting, intrusive, or overstimulating caregiving.

Social and Cultural Bases of Behavior (11%)

• Fundamental attribution error. Blaming other people's behavior on their personality while ignoring their situation.
• Bystander effect. Diffusion of responsibility grows with the number of people present. A victim is most likely to get help when only one person is there.
• Cognitive dissonance. When beliefs clash with each other or with actions, the result is uncomfortable tension, and people are motivated to reduce it.
• Berry's acculturation strategies. Integration, assimilation, separation, marginalization. Integration goes with the least stress, marginalization with the most.

Biological Bases of Behavior (10%)

• MAOIs. Combined with tyramine (found in aged and fermented foods), they can cause a hypertensive crisis. That's why they come with diet restrictions.
• Broca vs. Wernicke. Broca's area (frontal lobe) handles speech production. Damage causes expressive, nonfluent aphasia. Wernicke's area handles understanding speech. Damage causes receptive, fluent aphasia: normal rhythm and grammar, words that don't make sense.
• Acetylcholine and memory. ACh is essential for memory in the hippocampus. Low ACh there contributes to the early memory loss in Alzheimer's disease, which is why cholinesterase inhibitors (which slow ACh breakdown) are used to treat it.
• Chronic stress. Cortisol that stays high for weeks or months is linked to memory problems through its effect on the hippocampus.

Research Methods and Statistics (7%)

• Type I error. Rejecting a null hypothesis that is true, a false positive. Its probability is alpha, usually set at .05 or .01.
• Type II error. Retaining a null hypothesis that is false, a missed effect. Its probability is beta. You lower it by raising statistical power.
• ANOVA vs. several t-tests. Every extra test raises the odds of a "significant" result by luck. With more than two groups, run one ANOVA.

What a cheat sheet can't do

A definition you can recite is not the same as one you can use. Most EPPP-style practice questions, ours included, put the concept inside a short case, and the hard part is spotting which concept the case is really about. This sheet can't train that.

Practice can. Take the free 100-question EPPP practice exam: all 8 domains, scored as you go, an explanation after every answer, no signup. Every line on this sheet you miss there goes to the top of your review list.