Midterm 1 Website Quiz Review

Which of these correlations has the least predictive value?

+0.10

When the U.S. Supreme Court was deliberating on whether to require schools to integrate black children and white children, their decision to strike down laws permitting segregated schools was greatly influenced by the "Doll Test," conducted by

Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark

All of the following are female secondary sex characteristics except

Ovaries

Cognitive Psychology

Sensory input-->Participant processing information-->report, press button, etc.

Thinning of the top layer of the cortex in adolescence is a good indicator of the neurodevelopmental process called

synapse rearrangement

Alzheimer's disease is dementia that is caused by

the build-up of amyloid in and outside of acetylcholine neurons

Your uncle tells you about an interesting magazine article explaining that humans use only 10 percent of their brains. As a student of psychology, your response should be:

"Well, research actually shows that almost all of the brain is continually active."

Which of the following demonstrates the concept of habituation?

A baby glances at a familiar stuffed animal, then stares at a new one

A 70-year-old woman who is given a touch-screen tablet becomes hopelessly frustrated when she tries to use it. Which of the following best explains her lack of success?

A decline in fluid intelligence keeps her from reasoning abstractly when confronted with an unfamiliar object

Which statement is consistent with research on cognitive processing and aging?

Crystallized intelligence continues to grow throughout the aging process

Before the mechanisms behind PKU were known to science, infants that inherited the genes for the disorder almost always

Developed mental impairments

Which theory outlines a series of stages that occur throughout the lifespan and involve tension between conflicting ways of interacting with others?

Erikson's psychosocial theory

According to Erikson's theory of psychosocial development, which question best corresponds with an adolescent's search for identity?

How can I fit in socially with the people around me?

Which type of neuron is most common in the brain?

Interneuron

Lila is 18 months old and is no longer surprised when her mother hides her ball, only to reveal it again in a different position in front of her. What cognitive milestone is Lila displaying?

Object permanence

The procedure by which researchers test whether a child has developed a theory of mind is called the

Sally and Anne test

A child finds a five-dollar bill beside her teacher's desk. Which scenario describes the application of preconventional moral reasoning?

The child is afraid she'll get in trouble if she takes the money, so she gives it to her teacher

Which developmental milestone characterizes menarche?

The onset of menstruation

The action potential of a neuron is best compared to

a heavier bowling ball knocking down more pins than a lighter ball does

Gerard's mother has noticed that he becomes very upset when she leaves for work in the morning. When she gets home, he is resistant to her attempts to bond with him. Gerard is displaying

ambivalent attachment

When a child learns new information about the world that fits with her schema, it is called _______. When a child learns new information that requires her to change her schema, it is called _______.

assimilation; accommodation

Piaget's theory of development has been referred to as _______ because in his view, children adapt to the world by actively building and organizing their experiences.

constructivism

Preoperational children are often described as _______ because they do not understand that different people can have different points of view.

egocentric

Dizygotic twins

grow from separate zygotes

Kohlberg constructed his theory of moral reasoning by asking people to decide how a fictional character, Heinz, should respond to a moral dilemma. Kohlberg was most interested in the

reasoning by which people reached their decisions

A self-report measure of the personality trait of agreeableness produces very similar scores each time the same person completes it. It is also strongly correlated with whether family members describe a person as friendly and cooperative. This measure appears to be

reliable and valid

Two reflexes that help an infant receive nourishment are the _______ reflex, or the turning of the head in response to a brush of the cheek, and the _______ reflex, primarily for intake of breast milk.

rooting; sucking

At about eight months of age, as a part of normal attachment development, infants begin to show

stranger anxiety

Which neurotransmitter would you be most likely to find in the synaptic cleft between a motor neuron and a muscle?

Acetylcholine

In cases where only one of two identical twins develops schizophrenia, all of the following factors may be responsible except

Birth order

Which single gene effect do men display more often than women?

The inability to distinguish red from green

Twins who do not share 100 percent of their genes are called

dizygotic

A technique that tracks blood flow to measure brain activity is

positron emission tomography (PET)

After a skydiving accident, an MRI showed damage to Rose's cerebellum. She is most likely to have difficulty with

practicing yoga

Following a head injury, Maria experienced a dramatic personality change. She now gambles heavily, swears and yells at work, and has difficulty planning ahead. She most likely experienced damage to her

prefrontal cortex

The fusion of your father's sperm and your mother's egg is referred to as

fertilization

Heritability estimates tell us

the degree to which variations in a population can be attributed to genetics

The sensation of a fly landing on your arm is weaker than the sensation of being hit with a dodgeball because

the dodgeball triggers more action potentials per second from each sensory neuron

Epigenetics is most concerned with

the expression of a particular gene as influenced by external inputs

Twin studies of the heritability of schizophrenia generally show that

the heritability of schizophrenia is about 50 percent

The median is a better measure of central tendency than the mean for which of the following distributions?

10, 12, 13, 14, 106

In an analysis testing differences between an experimental and a control group on the dependent variable, a p-value of 0.07 means there is a

7 percent chance that differences between the two samples are due to chance alone

A professor wanted to learn more about the body image concerns of young teenage girls. She randomly selected 200 girls from local middle schools to complete her questionnaire. These girls were

A representative sample

What is the primary difference between a hypothesis and a theory?

A theory is a collection of data-based hypotheses

Which statement regarding brain development is true?

Children's brains are much more plastic than adults' brains

Each of our _______ consists of tightly coiled DNA.

Chromosomes

A doctor needs a brain imaging technique that shows brain structure but not brain function. Which technique should the doctor choose?

Computed tomography (CT)

During neural development, the nervous system generates more cells than it ultimately needs. Over half of the extra cells

Die though a natural process before birth

Schizophrenia most often presents itself at what stage?

Early adulthood, when people begin to face the world on their own

Which approach would be most appropriate for testing the hypothesis that taking practice tests improves learning more than studying alone does?

Experimental research

What is a mainstream psychologist most likely to think about Sigmund Freud?

Freudian theory is untestable and not grounded in science

Which of the following perspectives argues that human behavior develops in certain ways because it serves a useful purpose?

Functionalism

The process by which a cell directs a gene to make a certain protein is called

Gene Expression

A quarter in your hand casts a different image on your retina than a quarter taped to the wall across the room, yet you know that the quarters have exactly the same dimensions. This phenomenon would be best explained by a

Gestalt psychologist

On an empathy questionnaire, Group 1 had a mean score of 117 with a standard deviation of 14. Group 2 had a mean score of 96 with a standard deviation of 23. Therefore, _______ scored higher on average and their scores were _______ spread out than scores from _______.

Group 1; less; Group 2

Which of the following is a myth of psychology?

Heritable traits, such as IQ, cannot be altered by experience

How is natural selection related to psychology?

Humans behave as they do in part because that behavior promotes survival

Which statement best describes a valid gene—environment interaction on behavior?

Identical twins adopted by different families often display behaviors typical of their adoptive families

Students _______ would be the most representative sample for a study of competitiveness in high school.

In a required health class

What is the key difference between twin studies and adoption studies?

In adoption studies, twins are separated at birth, adopted, and raised apart

Xander has taken a medication that is an endorphin antagonist. Which side effect is most likely?

Increased pain sensitivity

In experimental research, which of the following variables is controlled by the researcher?

Independent

A researcher presents his participant with a series of flashing lights at varying intervals. After each presentation of a light, he asks the participant to fully describe her internal experiences, a method known as

Introspection

What do studies of maternal nurturing behavior in rats suggest about humans?

Maternal neglect early in life may have lasting impacts on a person's ability to cope with life's challenges

Which is the correct order of measures of central tendency, from lowest to highest, for a positively skewed distribution?

Mode, median, mean

How do gene mutations contribute to evolution?

Natural selection favors beneficial mutations, so they survive and are passed on to future generations

The effects of PKU are epigenetic because

PKU is harmful only if a child ingests significant amounts of phenylalanine

A depressed teenager treated with medication begins feeling better immediately, even though the medication typically takes weeks to work. This is an example of a _______ effect.

Placebo

The mind and behavior

Psychology is best defined as the study of

A researcher testing a new medication for attention deficit disorder randomly assigns half of the participants to get the actual medication and half to get a sugar pill. Neither the researcher nor the participants know who is getting what. This study design will

Reduce unconscious bias

Which situation is most consistent with the results of twin studies of schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is more likely to materialize in a twin who experiences extreme stress

Which confounding variable is teased out when psychologists study the traits of identical twins?

Similar environments shared by relatives

Which statement reflects a reasonable attitude for a good student of psychology to have toward any claim about human behavior?

Skepticism is advisable until an idea is proven right

Which of the following approaches to psychology did Edward Titchener advocate in the late 1800s?

Structuralism

A news organization wanted to predict who would win the next U.S. presidential election. They sent an opinion poll to every fifteenth person on a list of students enrolled at a nearby college. Which of the following is the study population?

Students at this particular college

To identify the most popular exhibits at a science museum, visitors were asked every day for six weeks to rate how much they enjoyed each exhibit. The data were analyzed to look for age and sex differences in exhibit preferences. This was an example of

Survey research

The idea that children are born with no knowledge or "content" whatsoever and are "filled" by life experiences is called

Tabula rasa

Kobe, a native English speaker, has moved to Germany and is learning to speak German. Which brain region is likely to show the greatest plasticity?

Temporal lobe

Why are dominant, yet harmful, alleles like the huntington's gene so rare in our genomes?

The carrier does not survive long enough to pass on the allele

You take a job selling magazine subscriptions from home because the recruitment video says the average earnings per employee are $90,000 a year. You work 60 hours a week for a year and earn $30,000. An Internet search reveals that hundreds of people have had the same experience with this and other work-at-home schemes. How can companies legitimately claim that the average salary is $90,000 if most employees make less than $30,000?

The mean salary reflects the presence of outliers

Which statement about vesicles is accurate?

They empty neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft

According to the social brain hypothesis, each of us can deal effectively with social interactions with roughly 150 people. This implies that

We are capable of maintaining social networks of up to 150 people throughout our lives

The year 1879 might be thought of as the beginning of psychology as a science because that is the year

Wilhelm Wundt developed and opened the first psychology laboratory

A research team was investigating the impact of stereotypes on performance. In one group, women read a magazine article about why the structure of men's brains makes them better at math. In the second group, women read a magazine article saying there are no biological differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women. All women in the study then took a challenging math test. Researchers scored the number of items women answered correctly. In this study, which of the following was the dependent variable?

Women's scores on the math test

To prove that electrical stimulation can produce intense feelings of anxiety, the mad scientist would stimulate his victim's

amygdala

A neuron with _______ would be expected to have the slowest-moving action potential.

an unmyelinated, thin axon

Neurotransmitters influence the polarization of a neuron by

causing receptor channels to open, allowing positively charged sodium ions to flow into the neuron

After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer, Kaela had her thyroid removed. The effects of this are likely to include

changes in metabolism

Twins who share a certain physical or behavioral trait are _______ for that trait.

concordant

An unethical experimenter wants to test the relationship between discomfort and aggression. On a hot day, she turns off the air conditioning in one dorm and leaves it on in another, then has her research assistants count occurrences of verbal aggression in common areas of the buildings. Students in the air-conditioned dorm would be the _______, and students in the overheated dorm would be the _______.

control group; experimental group

The key purpose of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) is to

determine whether a proposed study is ethical

In the experiment with dull and bright rats, Cooper and Zubek demonstrated a gene—environment interaction by showing that when navigating the maze

dull rats raised in enriched environments eventually performed as well as bright rats

You feel sick after eating leftovers you found in the back of the refrigerator. Occam's razor would favor the hypothesis that you have

food poisoning

A researcher plans to study changes in patients' brain activity as Alzheimer's disease progresses by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygen content. The appropriate brain imaging technique to use is

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

A researcher would most likely use _______ to investigate which brain areas are active during speech.

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Even though your body changes and you develop new physical and behavioral characteristics, your _______ never changes.

genotype

In the final stages of synaptogenesis, neurons

grow dendrites and axons

Inhibitory synapses

hyperpolarize neurons

A scientist has inserted an electrode into the frontal lobe of a monkey. Electrical stimulation would most likely cause the monkey to

make a kicking motion

A correlation of −0.80 between meditation and anxiety symptoms would indicate

meditation predicts lower levels of anxiety

Neural development begins with rapid division of nerve cells in a process called

neurogenesis

The study of the nervous system is called

neuroscience

A patient has a dangerously low heart rate and is having difficulty breathing. The neurotransmitter that would be most helpful to him is

norepinephrine

After her stroke, Mei was able to hear, smell, and taste normally. However, she had difficulty with her vision. She most likely experienced damage to her

occipital lobe

One reason dysfunctional alleles can have such specific effects on the workings of our sensory systems is that

our sensory systems rely on the functioning of more than one protein

"Green is the prettiest color" is a _______ hypothesis because it is _______.

poor; not testable

In Plato's cave allegory, a prisoner was temporarily unchained and allowed to see the fire at the mouth of the cave. When he returned to the chains, the other prisoners

refused to believe him

Vision researchers have shown that a person will fail to develop visual perception abilities if light does not stimulate the eye early in development. This is evidence of _______ during development.

sensitive periods

Computed tomography (CT) scans

show brain structures but not areas of brain activity

A researcher would be most likely to find a negative correlation between _______ and _______.

shyness; party attendance

Dopamine is most directly involved in

signaling pleasure

The peripheral nervous system is divided into the _______ nervous system and the _______ nervous system.

somatic; autonomic.

Genes regulate protein synthesis by

specifying which amino acids will be joined together, and in what order

Whether depression levels are truly lower in a treatment group than in a control group is assessed by determining the _______ of the difference in scores between groups.

statistical significance

Any substance that can potentially harm the fetus during birth is called a

teratogen