Psyc Chapter 2: Psychological Research

Which correlation coefficient best represents a moderate relationship showing fewer anxiety symptoms in people who report higher life satisfaction?

-0.5

Dr. Mattar is interested in knowing more about brain injury to the occipital cortex, and he studies patients individually in order to gain in-depth knowledge about their behaviors. These studies would best be described as ________.

case studies

Sandra strongly believes that attending daycare is detrimental to children's development so she decides to write her psychology term paper on this topic. She does a literature search and finds several sources supporting her opinion, but she finds that the majority of research indicates that children attending daycare experience healthy development. She writes a paper using the sources that find negative associations with daycare attendance. This is an example of ________.

confirmation bias

A _______ is a variable that affects both variables of interest and may falsely give the impression of a cause and effect relationship.

confounding variable

The ______ group does not get the experimental treatment.

control

Spurling et al. investigated the effects of two vocabulary learning strategies on word retention two weeks later. In this example, learning strategy is the ________ variable and word retention is the ________ variable.

independent; dependent

A group of preschool-age children are enrolled in a study that plans to follow them over time in order to assess behaviors and other characteristics that may predict later development of schizophrenia. This is an example of a(n) ________ design.

longitudinal

Green et al. used a ________ from their ________ of interest in order to make a ________.

sample; population; generalization

Research shows that people who smoke cigarettes are more likely to get lung cancer than those who do not smoke. This research demonstrates that _________.

there is a relationship between smoking and lung cancer

Which of the following is not a characteristic of a good hypothesis?

It is complex

Magali and Jean-Gabriel have been asked to design a study investigating happiness across the lifespan. They decide their study will involve going to the mall and asking people of a variety of ages if they are happy or unhappy. What is the most serious flaw of this design?

They have not defined happiness or how it will be measured

Harrison et al. are conducting a study assessing the ability of depressed versus non-depressed participants to remember negative emotions in a short story about a family whose car breaks down. They plan to ask participants to read the story and then make a list of the emotions expressed in the story. Before beginning the study, they make a list of negative emotions (e.g., sadness and anger) that they will record from the participants' responses. In this example, negative emotions are the ________.

dependent variable

A major advantage of case studies is

detailed information

Which of the following research designs will allow cause-and-effect conclusion?

experimental

Patwardhan et al. report data from a study where they hired experimental confederates to attend speed dating events, posing as daters, and carefully take notes on the behaviors of the daters. What type of research design did they use?

naturalistic observation

A negative correlation means

one variable decreases as the other increases

An ________ is a description of how the researchers will measure the variables of interest.

operational definition

In order to maximize the chances that experimental groups represent the population of interest, researchers should conduct ________ and ________.

random sampling; random group assignment

Stan and Jenny are in a psychology course that requires them to repeat an experiment that researchers have conducted in the past, in order to determine whether they produce the same results. This is called ________.

reduplication

Devine et al. are interested in assessing whether active versus passive play causes a preference for sweet or salty foods in toddlers. They assign groups of children to either an active play, passive play, or no play group and record their food choices when presented with a variety of sweet and salty foods. In this study, ________ is the independent variable and ________ is the control group.

type of play; no play