Psych Exam 3 (Modules 11-15)

Five-Factor Model

(also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Family Stress Model

A description of the negative effects of family financial difficulty on child adjustment through the effects of economic stress on parents' depressed mood, increased marital problems, and poor parenting.

Subjective age

A multidimensional construct that indicates how old (or young) a person feels and into which age group a person categorizes him- or herself

Chutes and Ladders

A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.

Authoritative

A parenting style characterized by high (but reasonable) expectations for children's behavior, good communication, warmth and nurturance, and the use of reasoning (rather than coercion) as preferred responses to children's misbehavior.

Conscientiousness

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.

Agreeableness

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.

Extraversion

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.

Openness to Experience

A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.

Neuroticism

A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.

Autobiographical narratives

A qualitative research method used to understand characteristics and life themes that an individual considers to uniquely distinguish him- or herself from others.

Factor analysis

A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.

Effortful control

A temperament quality that enables children to be more successful in motivated self-regulation.

Inhibitory functioning

Ability to focus on a subset of information while suppressing attention to less relevant information.

Crowds

Adolescent peer groups characterized by shared reputations or images.

Identity diffusion

Adolescents neither explore nor commit to any roles or ideologies.

Homophily

Adolescents tend to associate with peers who are similar to themselves.

Which of the following is a potential problem with Piaget's theory of cognitive development?

All are potential issues.

Which of the following is true of the impact of divorce on children?

Although divorce is associated with adjustment problems for children, it is not associated with long-term adjustment

Self-perceptions of aging

An individual's perceptions of their own aging process; positive perceptions of aging have been shown to be associated with greater longevity and health.

Security of attachment

An infant's confidence in the sensitivity and responsiveness of a caregiver, especially when he or she is needed. Infants can be securely attached or insecurely attached.

Psychometric approach

Approach to studying intelligence that examines performance on tests of intellectual functioning.

A parenting style that encourages children to be independent but still places limits on their behavior is called

Authoritative

Nick and Brenda are attentive parents. They are encouraging and warm, yet they are firm with boundaries, and make sure the rules of the home are clearly communicated. When their children make mistakes, Nick and Brenda try to use the mistakes a learning experiences, even when punishment is administered. What kind of parenting style is this?

Authoritative

Phonemic awareness

Awareness of the component sounds within words.

Facets

Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth.

Continuous distributions

Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.

Which of the following is being tested in Ainsworth's Strange Situation?

Child's response when parent returns

Theory of mind

Children's growing understanding of the mental states that affect people's behavior.

Hedonic well-being

Component of well-being that refers to emotional experiences, often including measures of positive (e.g., happiness, contentment) and negative affect (e.g., stress, sadness).

If a boy believed that the only variable that affected the distance a ball traveled when thrown was the force with which it was thrown and then conducted a biased "experiment" that proved his assumption which developmental phenomenon according to Piaget is involved?

Concrete operations

Which of the following personality traits has been found to predict important life outcomes, such as job success, health, and longevity?

Conscientiousness

Memory recall, processing speed, and inhibitory functioning are all cognitive abilities that ____ in older adulthood.

Decreases, or get worse

Clues to the important roles both nature and nurture play in development is seen in infants as they begin to gain the ability to actively perceive the distance from themselves to objects in the environment. This ability is also known as what term?

Depth perception

What do information processing theories focus on?

Describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time

Intra- and inter-individual differences

Different patterns of development observed within an individual (intra-) or between individuals (inter-).

Piaget's stage theory can be described as which of the following?

Discontinuous and qualitative

Temperament

Early emerging differences in reactivity and self-regulation, which constitutes a foundation for personality development

Personality traits

Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.

Personality

Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.

Hans Eysenck suggested that two traits are the most important traits of the Five-Factor Model. More recently, Jeffrey Gray has suggested that these two traits are important because they are related to fundamental reward and avoidance systems in the brain. Which two traits of the Five-Factor Model are Eysenck and Gray referring to, and how do they map onto the reward and avoidance systems?

Extroverts approach rewards while Neurotic individuals avoid punishment.

Due to the chronic conflict and anger in their relationship Bernadette's parents decided to get a divorce. However, they are now having trouble paying Bernadette's school fees to allow her to continue attending class at Spoke's Elementary School. Which of the following models is designed to describe the potential negative effects caused by these circumstances?

Family Stress Model

Shannon decided to become Catholic after attending one mass service. She did not look at any other religions. This describes which type of identity formation?

Foreclosure

Davina attends school regularly and has made great strides in her understanding of material in her science classes. Being able to reason more like a mature adult, Davina is in which of Piaget's developmental stages?

Formal operational

According to the Lexical Hypothesis, which of these traits do not "go together"?

Generous - Selfish

Differential susceptibility

Genetic factors that make individuals more or less responsive to environmental experiences.

Allison has been described by her parents, teachers, and friends as hyperactive. Therefore, her parents try to modify her environment by taking her to the park and signing her up for sports teams in order to fit her temperament. This is an example of which of the following:

Goodness of fit

Quantitative changes

Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree's girth.

Cohort

Group of people typically born in the same year or historical period, who share common experiences over time; sometimes called a generation (e.g., Baby Boom Generation).

According to Piaget, the developmental processes that explain children's cognitive development are measured by:

How children reason, with fundamental changes tin thinking occurring in each stage

Age identity

How old or young people feel compared to their chronological age; after early adulthood, most people feel younger than their chronological age.

Successful aging

Includes three components: avoiding disease, maintaining high levels of cognitive and physical functioning, and having an actively engaged lifestyle.

Foreclosure

Individuals commit to an identity without exploration of options.

Identity achievement

Individuals have explored different options and then made commitments.

Global subjective well-being

Individuals' perceptions of and satisfaction with their lives as a whole.

Heterogeneity

Inter-individual and subgroup differences in level and rate of change over time.

Infants develop a confidence regarding the sensitivity and responsiveness of their caregivers. This security of attachment has been recognized as a cornerstone of social and personality development for which of the following reasons?

Knowing a child's attachment predicts his/her emotional intelligence, strength of friendships, and positivity of one's self-concept.

Qualitative changes

Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget's posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages.

_________ studies are useful to developmental researchers interested in aging as they are not as confounded with cohort, time of study, or historical effects as are other methods.

Longitudinal

Average life expectancy

Mean number of years that 50% of people in a specific birth cohort are expected to survive. This is typically calculated from birth but is also sometimes re-calculated for people who have already reached a particular age (e.g., 65).

Working memory

Memory system that allows for information to be simultaneously stored and utilized or manipulated.

Lilly is trying different sports throughout the summer to determine which team she would like to try out for in high school. Lilly would likely fall in which of Marcia's identity statuses?

Moratorium

___________ is the desire to make significant accomplishments by mastering skills or meeting high standards.

Need for achievement

Social network

Network of people with whom an individual is closely connected; social networks provide emotional, informational, and material support and offer opportunities for social engagement.

Kyle has a reputation for being very calm during an emergency. He copes very well with stress and is able to think clearly and make effective decisions. Which of the Big 5 factors of personality would Kyle likely score low in?

Neuroticism

Playing Chutes and Ladders gives children opportunity to be exposed to spatial, kinesthetic, verbal, and time-based cues on the size of numbers. Understanding the properties that indicate the size of numbers is also known as what?

Numerical magnitudes

The acronym for the five-factor model is:

OCEAN

According to Carstensen, the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory explains what about older adults and their social support?

Older adults restrict their social life to include emotionally close friends

Gender schemas

Organized beliefs and expectations about maleness and femaleness that guide children's thinking about gender.

What resolution have developmental psychologists come to when it comes to the nature vs. nurture debate?

Our biological endowment, along with our social and physical environments, interact to determine developmental outcomes

Psychological control

Parents' manipulation of and intrusion into adolescents' emotional and cognitive world through invalidating adolescents' feelings and pressuring them to think in particular ways.

Walter Mischel (1968, 2009) pointed out this apparent fact about the predictability of individuals' behavior through personality tests:

People's behavior varies greatly situation by situation, but tests can reveal their average behavior across many situations.

Preoperational reasoning stage

Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.

Sensorimotor stage

Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.

Marcellus has an 8-year old daughter. He showers her with love and gifts and generally lets her make her own decisions. Baumrind (2013) would suggest that Marcellus has a(n) ____ parenting style.

Permissive

Children's _______________ in pre-K and Kindergarten is the strongest predictor of reading ability in third and fourth grade.

Phonemic awareness

Concrete operations stage

Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.

Formal operations stage

Piagetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults.

Which of the following is NOT a challenge associated with peer relationships during childhood?

Poor conflict management

Adam is upset that his twin brother Ryan has two pieces of pie while he only has one. His Mom rightly states that it's the same amount of pie it's just that Ryan's piece fell apart into two pieces as it was transferred onto the plate. Still not satisfied, Adam begins to throw a temper tantrum. In a moment of desperation, Adam's Mom cuts his piece in half saying: "There, Adam, now you have two pieces!" This worked. Adam is now happy. What Piagetian Stage is Adam in?

Preoperational

Conservation problems

Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about.

Longitudinal studies

Research method that collects information from individuals at multiple time points over time, allowing researchers to track cohort differences in age-related change to determine cumulative effects of different life experiences.

Cross-sectional studies

Research method that provides information about age group differences; age differences are confounded with cohort differences and effects related to history and time of study.

When Rachel, a toddler, visits a neighbor's home with her mother, she explores the room where the adults are sitting, but she will not leave the room. When her mother leaves to inspect the garden, she gets agitated and later rushes to her immediately when mother returns. Rachel's behavior demonstrates _____ attachment.

Secure

Meika explores her environment by crawling to a new toy and putting it in her mouth. Which stage of Piaget's cognitive development model is she demonstrating?

Sensorimotor

Moratorium

State in which adolescents are actively exploring options but have not yet made identity commitments.

Family adversity, abuse, and parental psychopathology are predictors of _____________ during adolescence.

Suicide

HEXACO model

The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.

Object permanence task

The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.

Depth perception

The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.

Conscience

The cognitive, emotional, and social influences that cause young children to create and act consistently with internal standards of conduct.

Which of the following statements best describes brain changes during adolescence and may be related to risky behavior?

The dopamine system develops before the prefrontal cortex.

Nurture

The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children's development.

Nature

The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.

Lexical hypothesis

The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.

Goodness of fit

The match or synchrony between a child's temperament and characteristics of parental care that contributes to positive or negative personality development. A good "fit" means that parents have accommodated to the child's temperamental attributes, and this contributes to positive personality growth and better adjustment.

What measure might a psychologist use to demonstrate that an infant does not know that his teddy bear exists when it is removed from his field of vision?

The object permanence task.

Person-situation debate

The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.

Social referencing

The process by which one individual consults another's emotional expressions to determine how to evaluate and respond to circumstances that are ambiguous or uncertain.

Numerical magnitudes

The sizes of numbers.

Deviant peer contagion

The spread of problem behaviors within groups of adolescents.

Processing speed

The time it takes individuals to perform cognitive operations (e.g., process information, react to a signal, switch attention from one task to another, find a specific target object in a complex picture).

Although older adults experience cognitive decline, they perform just as well as younger adults on tasks that require expert knowledge because:

Their life experience compensates for slower processing speed.

Information processing theories

Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.

Sociocultural theories

Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children's development.

Life span theories

Theory of development that emphasizes the patterning of lifelong within- and between-person differences in the shape, level, and rate of change trajectories.

Life course theories

Theory of development that highlights the effects of social expectations of age-related life events and social roles; additionally considers the lifelong cumulative effects of membership in specific cohorts and sociocultural subgroups and exposure to historical events.

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory

Theory proposed to explain the reduction of social partners in older adulthood; posits that older adults focus on meeting emotional over information-gathering goals, and adaptively select social partners who meet this need.

Piaget's theory

Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.

Convoy Model of Social Relations

Theory that proposes that the frequency, types, and reciprocity of social exchanges change with age. These social exchanges impact the health and well-being of the givers and receivers in the convoy.

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of secure attachment?

These are all characteristics of secure attachment.

Independent

Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.

Crystallized intelligence

Type of intellectual ability that relies on the application of knowledge, experience, and learned information.

Fluid intelligence

Type of intelligence that relies on the ability to use information processing resources to reason logically and solve novel problems.

Recognition

Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information with the assistance of cues.

Recall

Type of memory task where individuals are asked to remember previously learned information without the help of external cues.

Continuous development

Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.

Which factor is not one of Rowe and Kahn's three criteria of successful aging?

a career with financial success

Istvan is well liked by his friends because he is trusting, considerate, compassionate, loyal, and easy to get along with. Which of the Big 5 factors of personality would Istvan likely score high in?

agreeableness

Factor analysis allowed personality theorists to:

analyze the correlations among traits and identify the most important ones

Hector is a strict father who demands and expects obedience from his children. What is his style of parenting known as?

authoritarian

One element that shapes personality is temperament, which is related to self-regulation and is:

biologically based

Personality refers to ______.

characteristic ways that people differ from one another

A person does not "have" or "not have" a personality trait but instead can possess varying amounts of it. This is because personality traits reflect ____________________ rather than distinct personality types.

continuous distributions

Gary is not fast when completing a vocabulary test but if given enough time can get nearly 100% on the test. While Gary's old age may influence his reaction time, his _______ intelligence is fully intact due to his large amount of life experience and knowledge.

crystallized

According to research referenced in your text, babies who are _____ tend to elicit more sensitive and affectionate care from their parents compared with babies who lack these attributes.

easygoing and attractive

Julee's mom has noticed that her daughter has been especially good at resisting the cookies in the kitchen so she doesn't spoil her dinner each night. Julee knows if she can wait until after dinner she can eat two cookies. This successful experience of motivated self-regulation can also be referred to as what?

effortful control

Sheldon is a 25 year-old, unmarried man who is not really sure what he wants to do with his life. In what stage of development is Sheldon?

emerging adulthood

Research on cognitive abilities in late adulthood suggests that as we age,

fluid intelligence will decline and crystallized intelligence will remain steady.

The relation of nature to nurture is the same as the relation of _______.

genetics to environment

Erikson believed that individuals should strive to reach identity formation during adolescence. This is similar to what stage in Marcia's identity theory?

identity achievement

Chris doesn't know who he should be, so he doesn't commit to any identity or belief. Chris is experiencing __________.

identity diffusion

The five-factor model is called the __________________, which theorized that all important personality characteristics should be reflected in the language that we use to describe other people.

lexical hypothesis

As people age there are changes in cognitive function, personality, social relationships, and other areas. ____________ use life milestones, membership in cohorts, and exposure to historical events to understand aging.

life course theories

Wayne likes to travel to learn about new cultures. Whenever he returns from a trip he brings home a piece of art from that culture to add to his collection. Which of the Big 5 factors of personality would Wayne likely score high in?

openness

Farrah is in kindergarten and is learning about _____. To track her progress, her teacher presents her with pairs of words and asks her which of them rhyme.

phonemic awareness

Beth's father often invalidates her feelings and pressures her to think in certain ways. What is the term for parents' manipulation of adolescents' emotional and cognitive world?

psychological control

Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development suggests that a child's thinking is fundamentally different - more advanced - in each stage than it was in the previous stage. This demonstrates the concept of _____ change.

qualitative

Personality traits are defined as:

relatively enduring dispositions in behavior that characterize individuals across varying types of situations

Peer relationships are an important part of children's social development. Peer acceptance is a source of affirmation and _____________ whereas peer rejection is a source of bullying and victimization.

self-esteem

Risky behavior may be due, in part, to an underdeveloped part of the adolescent brain that controls ________.

self-regulation

In elementary school, Caroline mostly played with one or two girls at a time. Now that she's in high school, her friendship circle has gotten larger and includes boys. This is an example of what kind of change?

social

Jane is just learning to ride a tricycle. While riding on the sidewalk the surface changes from smooth concrete to bumpy brick. Jane is unsure if she should continue and looks at her mother who is smiling and urging her forward. This is an example of:

social referencing

"Age is just a number" and "You are only as old as you feel!" are two common clichés that demonstrate the concept of __________ age.

subjective

The HEXACO model proposes:

there is a sixth dimension to the Five-Factor model