PSYCH Exam 1

The degree to which the effect, or findings, have been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life and daily routines.

Ecological validity

_________ methods in psychological research are approaches to data-gathering that are tied to actual measurement and observation

Empirical

For Lindsey's dissertation, she has e-mails sent out to people 4 times a day for 4 weeks. In these e-mails, she asks about current emotional experiences and activities. What method is she using?

Experience sampling

Dr. Magill is conducting research on whether giving monkeys ice cold water in the morning will cause them to be less aggressive during the day. He has several graduate students observing the monkeys and he regularly comments to the students that ice water is "definitely making a difference." As a result, the graduate students are less likely to rate minor aggressive incidents as true aggression. The research in this example has been compromised by ______.

Experimenter expectations

Which of the following is true of the frontal lobe?

It is involved in voluntary muscle movement

Katie and Lisa are roommates taking the same psychology class. They have a test in four days during a 10:30-11:30 class period. Both intend to study three hours, but because of different work schedules, Katie will study one hour for each of the next three days, and Lisa will study three hours the day before the exam. What could you predict about their performances

Katie perform better because she has spaced her studying over the three days before the exam

An article headline claimed that "Drugs Cause Homelessness" due to a positive relationship found between homeless populations and drug use. Educated psychologists thought this might be flawed, because they thought unemployment was influencing both drug use and homelessness. This is an example of:

a third variable

Which is the most important factor in encoding information to be remembered later

actively processing the meaning of the material

Hugh is studying for his geography test. He is in a hurry, so he focuses on the main points of the text and skips all of the examples that the authors provide to illustrate each main point. In this case, Hugh is using

an ineffective study strategy and will probably not retain many of the main ideas that he reads

The mathematical score that indicates how much two attributes are related to each other is called the

correlation coefficient

The ability to arrive at broad conclusions based on smaller ones is known as __________. It requires that the sample under investigation be representative of the larger population from which it was drawn.

generalizability

Looking for the best ways to help people monitor and control their blood pressure through behavioral changes would be the concern of psychologists within which subfield

health

Having more knowledge about a subject

helps your ability to learn new related information

Elizabeth was walking in the woods when she came across what she thought was a deadly coral snake. Her flight-or-fight response reacted as her blood pressure and pulse increased. This is the _______ division of the autonomic system

sympathetic

Before they travel across the synapse to bind with receptors on the postsynaptic membrane, chemical messengers are stored in what location on the presynaptic membrane?

synaptic vesicles

The central nervous system (CNS) is composed of:

the brain and the spinal cord

It is difficult to study the specialized abilities of the left and right cerebral hemispheres in the brains of normal individuals because

the two hemispheres share information quickly and completely.

when we develop ____ (groups of closely related phenomena or observations) in science, we must do so in a way that can be tested. Otherwise, there is no way to prove (or disprove) them

theories

What is one reason why scientific psychologists follow a specific set of guidelines to help them make decisions when doing research

to ensure they protect research participants from potential harm

One reason for using random assignment is:

to help ensure that participant characteristics don't become confounding variables

Students who have problems with anxiety so that it affects their learning, can be helped if they

write about their anxiety

Which of the following is the major problem involved in conducting a correlational study

Cause-and-effect conclusions cannot be drawn

What is the part of the brain that links together the two hemispheres, and is sometimes severed for people called split-brain patients?

Corpus callosum

Which of the following is an example of an empirical question that could be tested using systematic observation

Do native English-speaking Canadians take longer to learn Chinese or to learn Spanish

It is important to design research experiments that are associated with real-world situations in order to ______ findings to a larger population.

Generalize

Dr. Hart is interested in the role of relationships in preventing heart disease. As her patients come into her office in Bluebell, Alabama, she asks them two questions: Are you a in a relationship? Have you experienced any heart problems in the last 8 years? Based on her findings, she concludes that relationships cause cardiovascular (heart) problems. One issue with her methodology is that the results are not generalizable. What does this mean?

Her results may not be true for the entire population

Dr. Miller-Lewis is conducting research aimed at understanding how elderly people can best thrive when residing in an assisted-living facility. She has several logical ideas that can be tested in her research. These ideas, which might be thought of as educated guesses, are called

Hypotheses

What type of research highlights causality, allowing the cause to be separated from the effect

Laboratory experiments

How does forgetting facilitate learning?

Material that is partly forgotten and then re-learned is retained longer than material that is learned quickly and easily

How does a researcher know which methods she should use to test her hypothesis in psychological research

The best method depends on the question being asked as well as the resources that are available to the researcher.

Betty took part in a study where she was told the purpose was to further examine perceptual cognitive processes. Once the study was over, however, the researcher explained to her that the study's real purpose was to assess automaticity of stereotypes. This study is an example of research that used _________ in their methods to hide the true nature of the study. And we see that as a result, the researchers fully _________ participants afterwards.

deception and debriefed

What part of the neuron receives input in the form of chemical stimuli?

dendrites

Dr. Sharma wants to study the extent to which stress is related to suicidal ideation in people who suffer from depression. She gathers information about the level of stress, depressive symptoms, and suicidal thoughts a set of participants experience the day after they attend the funeral of a loved one. Because this study is assessing people under conditions that are not typical of everyday life, it is lacking in __________ validity.

ecological

Which of the following is NOT related to working-memory capacity

implicit learning

This module argues that forgetting may be an important part of learning. Which is a good example of this argument?

in order to learn more information we must be able to forget information that is incorrect and our minds would become cluttered with irrelevant information

Taylor walked into the psychology lab and was welcomed by the researcher. The first document given to him by the researcher described the research experiment and what it was to entail, which also required his signature

informed consent

An effective way to make sure that you will remember something a long time from now (such as in an upcoming exam) is to

review the material at regular intervals

Dr. Annistad conducts a correlational research study and calculates that the variables in question have a correlational coefficient of -.81. In this statistic, the number itself gives us information about the _____ of the relationship between the two variables

magnitude

The primary weakness of the case study method is

nongeneralizability

Personal experience is associated with _____, whereas, scientific method is associated with _____

opinion; fact

Elizabeth was walking in the woods when she came across what she thought was a deadly coral snake. Her flight-or-fight response kicked in immediately, but then she realized that this was a harmless king snake that resembled the coral snake. She began to calm down as her ______ system kicked in.

parasympathetic

Barbara is complaining that she has terrible abdominal pains. Several physicians have found nothing wrong with her. One physician gives Barbara a prescription for tablets with no real medication in them. "I think that this new medication will be very helpful for your abdominal infection," the physician tells Barbara. Within 24 hours of taking the fake medication Barbara reports that her abdominal pains have disappeared. This is called a ______.

placebo effect

You want to study the effects of gender on math achievement. However, you know that you cannot randomly assign some people to male and others to be female, so you cannot have a true experiment. In this scenario, what type of research design would you use?

quasi-experiment

Science is described as a cumulative process. This means that

science builds on prior discoveries

As soon as class is over, Karen goes to the Mountainlair, gets a cup of coffee and reviews the material from class, asking herself what she remembers, and then checking to see if she is correct from her e-text. Karen is utilizing ____ to enhance her learning

self-testing

The development of _________ has provided a new level of advantage for gathering information from research participants at specific times, often randomly selected, throughout a given day.

smartphones

Reading this question and selecting the correct answer reflects the operation of the _____ division

somatic

As a researcher, you decide that you are very interested in peoples' everyday behavior (i.e., daily social interactions and activities). Therefore, you decide to use an electronically activated recorder, or EAR device, to capture the acoustic diary of participants' days as they naturally unfold. In this scenario, you are:

studying daily behavior

Dr. Fikshunal is interested in how our bodies respond to being excluded from a group. Therefore, she decides to monitor the heart rate and cortisol levels of participants as they engage in their environment and indicate experiences when they felt ostracized. In this scenario, Dr. Fikshunal is:

studying daily physiology