AP Psych

Preventing Groupthink

-welcome various opinions/open debate -invite critiques of developing plans -assign people to identify possible problems

Atkinson-Shiffrin Information Processing Model

3 stage model or a 3 box model of memory consisting of short term long term and sensory multistore model of memory was adapted through this

Which of the following accurately describes a major change in perspective in the field of developmental psychology over the past twenty-five years?

A shift from an emphasis on childhood and adolescence to an interest in development over the life span

Which of the following characterizes a behavioral approach to psychology?

A study of how reinforcement affects learning

Which of the following scenarios best demonstrates the role of context effects in memory?

Amy studied for a vocabulary test in the same classroom and at the same time of day as the normal class, and she performed better on the test than students who studied in different classrooms under different conditions.

Which of the following approaches to psychology emphasizes observable responses over inner experiences when accounting for behavior?

Behaviorist

What is the best way to ensure that results of a study are generalizable to a population?

By using a random selection of people in that population

Which of the following scenarios is an example of retroactive interference?

Carl tries to remember the name of his first boss, but he cannot because he keeps thinking of the name of his current boss.

Which of the following is a term for a variable that researchers do not control and that can affect the results of a study?

Confounding variable

Brad hears a report on the evening news that diets low in carbohydrates are beneficial to one's health. Considering this advice, he begins such a diet. Later he hears another report condemning low-carbohydrate diets as harmful to one's health. If Brad engages in belief perseverance, how would he respond to this new information?

Continue to believe in the beneficial effects of low-carbohydrate diets

Maki is a three-month-old living in a household of Japanese speakers. Which of the following best describes how her ability to discriminate phonemes will develop?

Currently, she will likely be able to discriminate the phonemes \l\ and \r\; after she reaches about eight months of age, she will have begun to lose the ability to discriminate these phonemes.

The two sentences "Elena won the race" and "The race was won by Elena" share which of the following structures?

Deep

According to Benjamin Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis, which of the following is true?

Different languages predispose those individuals who speak them to think about the world in different ways.

Dr. Rudolph's class has a big test coming up next week. Which of the following students is using a rehearsal strategy that is most likely to lead to memory consolidation?

Elizabeth studies for a half hour before she goes to bed each night the week before the exam.

There is a strong positive correlation between ice cream sales and instances of snakebites. Which of the following is the most likely explanation for this correlation?

Hot weather is related to both ice cream sales and snake activity.

Multistore Model of Memory

Information that moves through multiple types of storage

In which of the following types of research are the same children tested periodically at different points in their development?

Longitudinal

In their discussions of the process of development, the advocates of nature in the nature-nurture controversy emphasize which of the following?

Maturation

The belief that human behavior is the result of unconscious drives and conflicts represents which of the following theoretical perspectives?

Psychoanalytic

An individual's recall tends to be better for information that is personally relevant primarily due to which of the following phenomena?

Self-reference effect

The chart above illustrates which of the following psychological concepts?

Serial position effect

Which of the following studies has had the most profound impact on ethical issues in psychological research?

Stanley Milgram's study of obedience

Which of the following concepts refers to the structure and organization of a sentence?

Syntax

Marjorie's little brother tends to bother her when he is bored. Marjorie wants to figure out which toy will keep her brother occupied the longest so he will not bother her. She conducts a study where each day at 6P.M. for a week she gives her brother a different toy and on one of the days she gives him no toys to play with. She measures the amount of time he spends playing with each toy before he comes to bother her. Which of the following is the independent variable in this example?

Type of toy

Which of the following best describes the primacy effect?

When people have better recall of things that occur at the beginning of a sequence

When is it permissible for a psychologist to share a client's test scores with another person?

When the client provides written permission to share results

3 year old Timmy learns to open the doors in his house by pulling on the handle. One day while out shopping with his mom, Timmy tries to pull open the door to the grocery store which had a push door. Timmy is confused about why the door won't open. This demonstrates that Timmy has developed which of the following as a door opening strategy?

a mental set

Kathy is learning how to cook. She follows every direction on each recipe step by step to make sure her food tastes good. Which of the following describes the problem-solving approach that Kathy is using?

algorithm

Dr. Larson was interested in whether classical music helps students perform better on a test. Dr. Larson randomly assigned half of the study's participants to a group that listened to classical music while taking a test. The other half of the participants did not listen to music while taking a test. The research design Dr. Larson used is

an experiment

John suffered a head injury in an accident five years ago. He now has clear memories of events that occurred before the accident, but he has great difficulty remembering any of the experiences he has had since the accident. John's symptoms describe

anterograde amnesia

Which of the following is an example of a prelinguistic event?

babbling

Dr. Patel is conducting a study to test a hair-growth shampoo she is developing. She instructs fifty participants to use the hair-growth shampoo once daily for a month and another fifty to use a regular shampoo once a day for a month. Dr. Patel measures the participants' hair length at the beginning and the end of the thirty days. Which of the following is the dependent variable?

change in hair length

In experimental psychology, a significant difference refers to a

difference not likely due to chance

A teacher asks students to be creative and try to think of as many uses for a brick as possible. By listing 50 uses, most of which the class finds new and unusual, Susan is displaying

divergent thinking

While the teacher was going over the directions for an assignment in English class, Mary was busy working on her math homework that was due the next period. Later that night when Mary tried to work on her English assignment she was confused about what to do. Her recall problem is most likely due to

encoding failure

In memory experiments on free recall, the recency effect refers specifically to the

enhanced recall of items at the end of a list of words

In a research study, informed consent is a concern of

ethics

A researcher uses debriefing when he

explains the true purpose of a study immediately after the study is complete

An important difference between humanistic and psychoanalytic approaches is that humanistic psychologists believe in the importance of

free will

Mark runs out of wrapping paper for the Christmas presents that he bought for his family. Rather than go back out to the store to buy more he decides to use the colorful comic strips pages out of the newspaper. This solution indicates that Mark was able to overcome

functional fixedness

On a fishing trip, Ed realizes that he has mistakenly packed the sewing box instead of the tackle box. He wants to fish but returns home because he does not have any line or hooks. Ed's failure to realize that sewing thread can be used as fishing line and that a bent needle can be used as a hook is an example of

functional fixedness

Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that help solve problems and reduce mental effort are called

heuristics

A group of friends watched a recent episode of a crime investigation show and concluded that they would have been able to figure out who was responsible for a crime more proficiently than did the television investigators. The friends' overestimation of their ability to determine who committed the crime is most likely due to a reasoning error known as

hindsight bias

Which of the following perspectives argues that every person has the potential to become self-actualized?

humanistic

A survey shows that children who have encyclopedias in their homes earn better grades in school than children whose homes lack encyclopedias. The researcher concludes that having encyclopedias at home improves grades. This conclusion is erroneous primarily because the researcher has incorrectly

inferred causation from correlation

A study can be regarded as scientific only if

its conclusions can be verified or refuted by subsequent studies

What is memory?

learning that persists over time information and/or experiences that are encoded, stored and retrieved

Groupthink

mode of thinking where the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives

When the word "walk" is changed to "walked," the suffix "ed" is an example of a

morpheme

Jane Goodall lived among wild chimpanzees intermittently for decades, studying their social and family systems while keeping her interaction with the chimpanzees to a minimum. Her research method can most accurately be described as

naturalistic observation

top-down processing

our makes quick judgments with incomplete information based on expectations and experience, in most cases this works t our advantage but in certain circumstances this can lead to perceptual errors

Two-year-old Jia tells her grandmother that she "sweeped" the floor yesterday. The scenario illustrates that children

overgeneralize the use of grammatical rules

Yun was learning English as an adult. She found that she had trouble with some of the sounds in English because those sounds were not part of her native Chinese. The difficulty she was having involved

phonemes

Cognitive theorists emphasize the

powerful unconscious impulses that motivate behavior

In elementary school, Lisa learned to speak some Japanese in addition to English. As a sophomore in high school, Lisa took a class in Chinese. She found that some of the new vocabulary was difficult to learn because her earlier Japanese vocabulary was competing with the new Chinese words. This situation best illustrates

proactive interference

7 year old Mary gets lost at the mall and can't find her mother. Out of the crowd of people she picks out an elderly woman to ask for help because she assumes the woman is safe to ask and will be kind and helpful. Which problem solving method did Mary most likely use?

representativeness heuristic

The most distinctive characteristic of the experimental method is that it

seeks to establish cause-effect relationships

An evolutionary psychologist would explain that humans desire social interaction, social acceptance, and social affiliation due to a need for

survival

The phrase "likes dog my swim to" sounds incorrect because it does not adhere to the rules of

syntax

selective attention

the ability to focus our conscious awareness towards or away from a particular stimuli

Cognitive psychologists are most likely to study

the acquisition of knowledge, planning, and problem solving

When asked which of two countries they would rather visit on vacation, one that they have heard of and the other unknown to them, participants are more likely to pick the country that is more familiar. Which of the following best explains this finding?

the availability heurisitc

self-fulfilling prophecy

the biased beliefs of an individual/group are made into a reality by the behavior of the individual/group

A prototype is best defined as

the hypothetical "most typical" instance of a category

Elizabeth Loftus' research on memory construction and the misinformation effect would be most useful in casting doubt on which part of a legal case

the memory of eyewitnesses

Several people witness an assault. When the police arrive they ask the group of witness what color shirt the suspect was wearing. In front of the group, one eyewitness confidently answers that he was wearing a blue shirt, even though it was actually green. Later, when interviewed separately, each eyewitness states that they recall seeing a blue shirt. This memory error is the result of

the misinformation effect

The generalizability of a study increases when

the sample is more representative of the population

Maeve wants to change her college major but has decided not to because she is close to finishing. She believes that the time she has spent in her current program will be wasted if she changes now. Maeve is experiencing

the sunk-cost fallacy

Professor Ahad has forty-three students in section one of the psychology classes she teaches and fifty-two students in section two. Section one meets at eight a.m. and, section two meets at one p.m. Professor Ahad gives all of her students the same final exam, and those in section two score significantly higher than those in section one. Professor Ahad concludes that her section one students are academically inferior to students in section two. The biggest problem with Professor Ahad's conclusion is that

time of day is a confounding variable in this scenario.

Social Loafing

when an individual exerts less effort on a group assignment and is relying on others in the group to do the work

Social Facilitation

when an individual shows an increased effort level or improved performance when being observed by others

Benjamin Whorf's Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis argues that

The lexicon of a language shapes the way and individual thinks and interprets experiences

Research on a critical period during the acquisition of second languages indicates that which of the following statements is true?

The older an individual is, the more difficulty he or she will have with second-language pronunciation.

An instructor conducted an experiment to determine the effects of two different methods of study on the amount students learned in introductory physics. The results showed that the average amount learned by the group using one method was greater than the average amount learned by the group using the other. However, the difference was not statistically significant. Which of the following is the most appropriate conclusion to be drawn?

There is a possibility that the difference between the two groups occurred by chance.

Which of the following best describes the response of members of the American Psychological Association to ethical issues in research?

They have developed codes of ethics for research with both human participants and animal subjects.