Psych 290 Final

Suppose that researchers performed a study to estimate the heritability of optimism. If the correlation between identical twins' optimism was 0.60 and the correlation between fraternal twins' optimism was 0.40, the heritability of optimism would be equal to which of the following?

0.40

Which of the following is a correct statement about the relationship between reliability and validity?

A measure that is not reliable *cannot* be valid.

Lorna is a 45-year-old professor. As she steps back and think about her life, she gets the feeling that she has not really accomplished much and she's concerned about her contribution to society. t this point in her life, she feels driven to help others and to find greater meaning in life. According to Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, Lorna is experienced the crisis of ____

Generativity vs Stagnation

Why did Freud believe that psychotherapy was beneficial for treating psychological problems?

He thought that talking helped people gain insight into their problems, which could lead to improvement.

According to what you learned in lecture, which of the following distinguishes "healthy" self-esteem from narcissism?

Healthy self-esteem is more stable from day-to-day compared to narcissism

Which of the following is an accurate statement about the heritability?

Heritability estimates apply to groups, not individuals.

As a child, Brett loved when his parents had friends over. He would entertain the adults by doing magic tricks and telling inappropriate jokes. Now that he is an adult, Brett loves to throw his own parties and he entertains his friends with stories about his most recent adventures. Brett's behavior at different stages of his life is an illustration of which of the following personality development?

Heterotypic continuity

Kluckhohn and Murray's definition of personality proposes that personality can be analyzed at 3 different levels. Based on this definition, humans' need to form social bonds would be an example of ___ level of analysis; the fact that some people have more difficulty forming these bonds than others would be an example of the ___ level of analysis.

Human nature; individual and group differences

Which approach to personality psychology is based on the premise that, to understand a person, you must understand his or her unique, subjective view of reality?

Humanistic

Danielle's friends are pestering her to come out and play, but she hasn't finished her homework yet. She knows that once she finishes her homework, she'll be able to play all she wants, but she really can't bear to wait that long. If Danielle goes out to play before finishing her homework, she will be demonstrating which of the following personality constructs?

Impulsivity

Compared to earlier versions, the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) contains whoch of the following?

A smaller number of discrete personality disorder diagnoses

Suppose you are working to develop a new measure of sociability unreliable measure, and you would like the 2nd version to be more reliable than the first. Which of the following strategies would be most useful for improving the reliability of your measure?

Adding more items related to sociability to your measure

According to David Winter's research on presidential motives, presidents were more likely to become involved in a scandal if they had high levels of which motive?

Affiliation

Which of the following is a disadvantage of experimental research designs?

All of the above: It can be difficult to know whether you have actually manipulated what you have intended to manipulate; Experiments often require at least some deception of research participants; Experiments can create unnatural contexts that have low external validity; Many constructs relevant to personality psychologists cannot be manipulated

Which of the following is a critique of the Five-Factor Model of personality?

All of the above: The 5-Factor approach to personality is not theory-driven; The Big 5 dimensions are too broad to be very useful; The Big 5 dimensions are not comprehensive enough; The 5-Factor Model does not explain *why* individual differences exist.

Imagine that Danielle has a genetic predisposition towards aggressive behavior. This predisposition makes her more likely to play violent video games, which ultimately reinforces and increases her aggressive behavior. Which of the following would best explain the increase in Danielle's aggressive behavior over time?

An active gene-environment transaction

Jesse's teacher believes that he is intelligent, so she challenges him with extra assignments and generally encourages his curiosity. At the end of the school year, Jesse performs better on the school's achievement test than any other student. According to the textbook, Jesse's enhanced performance is most likely to be due to which of the following?

An expectancy effect

Imagine you are scrolling through your Facebook feed when you notice that four of your best friends are making plans to go ice skating this weekend. None of them mentions you in their plans, and you feel very excluded. If someone could look at your brain activity right in this moment, which part of your brain would *most* likely be activated in response to this situation?

Anterior Cingulate

According to the dimensional approach to emotion, all emotional experience can be categorized according to which of the following dimensions?

Arousal (activation) and pleasantness

Which of the following distinguishes Axis I from Axis II psychological disorders in the DSM?

Axis II disorders are more ego-syntonic than Axis I disorders

You learned about the case if Nancy Seaman, a woman who was charged with first-degree murder for killing her husband. According to the ____ approach to personality, we could explain Nancy's behavior in terms of ____.

Cognitive; her emotional response to a life-threatening situation

Jean Twenge has conducted research on lifespan differences in narcissism. Her findings suggest which of the following?

College students today are more narcissistic than college students 20 years ago

Ashley believes that her parents only value her when she gets good grades, wears stylish clothes, and an attractive boyfriend. Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers would argue that Ashley has developed ____.

Conditions of worth

Research suggests that people with higher levels of ___ tend to be physically healthier and to live longer lives.

Conscientiousness

Sam Gosling studies personality judgments based on living spaces. In one study, he asked people to rate the personality of undergrad students based on the appearance of those students' dorm rooms. If raters had a high level of agreement about the students' levels of conscientiousness based on their dorm rooms, their judgements could be said to have a high level of ____; if raters' judgements were correlated with the room owner's self-ratings, their judgments could be said to have a high level of ____.

Consensus; accuracy

Imagine that you are sitting in traffic on your way to an important appointment with your new boss. As the clock ticks by, you're feeling more and more worried about what your boss will think of you and you are frustrated that you don't have any control over the situation. Which of the following biological substances might you expect to be elevated in this situation?

Cortisol

Eva is working on her final project for her painting class. She's been continuously thinking about the project, even during her other classes, b/c she hopes to someday contribute to society as a famous artist. In this scenario, Eva's desire to complete her final project would be an example of a(n) ___; her desire to become a famous artist would be an example of a(n) ____.

Current concern; personal striving

Brandon is a successful accountant whose services are in high demand during tax season. Even though he always gets his clients' returns filed accurately and on time, he spends the first few weeks of April consumed with anxiety that he will miss his deadlines, lose his most important clients, and be fired from his accounting firm. Brandon's (successful) use of anxiety and a fear of disaster to manage his stress and improve his performance is an example of which of the following?

Defensive pessimism

Modern attachment theory has retained which of the following elements of traditional psychoanalytic theory?

Early relationships with parents form models for later romantic attachments.

Which of the following is considered a defining characteristic of borderline personality disorder?

Emotional instability

Recent research suggests that early life experiences can influence whether or not genes are expressed in behavior. For instance, a person may have a genetic predisposition to develop depression, but those genes may only be "turned on" if he or she has experienced childhood trauma. This process, by which non-genetic factors influence gene expression, is called ____.

Epigenetics

Jason, an American college student, visited a small village in Mexico for a summer abroad program. When he returned from his visit, he told his family that he found that villagers' way of life very odd and inferior to that of his own in America. Jason's belief about the Mexican villagers can best characterized by which of the following phenomena?

Ethnocentrism

Which of the following has been proposed as a critique of the evolutionary approach to personality?

Evolutionary ideas are difficult to test experimentally

When it comes to personality judgment, research suggests that people who are more ___ are most likely to be judged accurately?

Extraverted

You read an article by Kramer and colleagues about emotional contagion (transfer of emotional states) on Facebook. Researchers manipulated the emotional content of users' news feeds, showing them slightly more negative or positive posts, and measured the effect of this manipulation on their own Facebook posts. This study was criticized b/c many people believed that the research was not conducted in an ethical manner. Based on your knowledge of research ethics and this study, what was the main ethical concern?

Facebook users could not voluntarily withdraw their participation in the study b/c they did not know that the study was occurring.

Nick and Rachel are in the second grade. Nick is the most agreeable student in the class, and Rachel is the least. BY the end of the year, most students have become more agreeable than they were at the beginning of the year. However, Nick is still the most agreeable student in the class, and Rachel is still the least. In terms of agreeableness, the students in Nick and Rachel's class are exhibiting which of the following kinds of change/stability?

Mean-level change and rank-order stability

ProfessorAlexander wants to understand how conscientiousness is related to physical health. When she reads the literature, she sees that many studies find that people are more conscientious tend to be healthier; however, other studies find that people who are *less* conscientious tend to be healthier. Professor Alexander decides to find every study she can find on this topic; she combines them and computes an overall effect size so that she can reach a stronger conclusion about the association between conscientiousness and physical health. Which of the following research methods is Professor Alexander using?

Meta-analysis

In which of the following ways do traits differ from motives?

Motives are less stable over time compared to traits.

In Harley's lecture on positive psychology, you learned about a longitudinal study of nuns whose autobiographies were coded for various kinds of emotional content. Which of the following best describes the findings of this study?

Nuns who used more positive emotion words in their lived longer lives.

According to your textbook, which of the following makes the smallest contribution to a person's overall level of happiness?

Objective life circumstances

According to your textbook, which of the following is NOT an effective strategy for improving your self-knowledge?

Observing the behavior of others

According to the textbook, the personality trait of conscientiousness is most strongly correlated with which of the following?

Occupational success

Suppose a researcher finds that openness to experience is correlated -0.30 with a person's likelihood of owning a cat. Based on this correlation, we can infer that ____.

Open people are less likely to own cats

Which of the Big 5 personality factors tends to be the *least* reliable and the subject of the most debate among personality psychologists?

Openness to experience

In her controversial book, The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris argued that which of the following shared environmental influences has a relatively small effect on children's personality development?

Parenting

The "end of history illusion" refers to which of the following?

People generally underestimate how much their personalities will change in the future relative to how much change they perceive in the past

Which of the following is NOT an accurate statement about personality development in adulthood?

Personality is "set like plaster" by age 30

The ___ is responsible for higher cognitive functions such as self-regulation, decision-making, and planning; the left side of this brain region is associated with the experience of ___ emotion.

Prefrontal cortex; positive

Which of the following refers to the psychodynamic assumption that everything a person does has a specific cause?

Psychic determinism

According to research presented in lecture, therapeutic interventions have been shown to have which of the following effects on personality development?

Psychotherapy is most effective in producing changes in emotional stability compared to other dimensions of personality.

Sofia's boyfriend Henry recently broke up with her. She was very committed to their relationship, and very surprised by the break-up. Her friends notice that when she discusses the break-up, she has started to describe it as of her own doing, and she talks about how relieved she is not to be dating Henry anymore. Sofia's friends, who are psychology majors, suspect that Sofia is using which of the following defense mechanisms?

Reaction formation

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) uses ____ to assess aspects of personality and is an example of ____ data.

Reaction times; behavioral

Talhem and colleagues examined regional differences in individualism and collectivism within China. Which of the following was one of their hypotheses?

Regions that have historically relied on wheat farming should be more individualistic than regions that have relied on rice farming.

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, once people have satisfied their ___ needs, their ___needs tend to become more important.

Safety; belongingness

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the ego functions to ____

Satisfy the urges of the id while acknowledging the constraints of the real word

An exceedingly strange individual who strongly believes she has direct contact with extraterrestrial life might have which of the following personality disorders?

Schizotypal

Robins and Beer conducted a longitudinal study of students entering college. They asked students to self-report their high school GPAs and classified those who overestimated their academic ability as "self-enhancers." Which of the following is an accurate statement about the fate of self-enhancers in this study?

Self-enhancers showed a decrease in self-esteem over their four years in college compared to other students.

According to researcher Colin DeYoung who has organized the Big Five according to their possible biological bases, the personality trait of neuroticism is most closely associated with which of the following biological substances?

Serotonin

Cross-cultural research demonstrates that there are many more words for "shame" in Chinese than there are in English. According to the lexical approach to identifying basic emotions, what can we infer about shame in these two languages based on this information?

Shame is more likely to be a basic emotion in Chinese than in English

A person diagnosed with a personality disorder would be most likely to experience which of the following?

Significant interpersonal problems

Anna is taking a personality test and she responds "false" to the statements " I am always on time to appointments and meetings," "I always try my best at work," and "I never talk about people behind their backs." Based on her answers to these statements, we might conclude that Anna would score *low* on which of the following?

Social desirability

According to the sociometer theory of self-esteem, low self-esteem might serve as a warning signal for which of the following?

Social rejection

From an evolutionary perspective, which of the following can help to explain why seemingly maladaptive traits like psychopathy might persist in a given population?

Some seemingly maladaptive traits may actually be adaptive when only a small % of the population has them

According to the culture of honor, people's responses to insults can be predicted by the economic circumstances of their particular culture (i.e, whether they historically relied on herding or farming economies). Research on the culture of honor suggests that ____.

Southern US participants are moe likely to respond aggressively to insults compared to Northern US participants

According to interactionist theories of personality, personality characteristics are *least* likely to predict behavior in which kinds of situations?

Strong situations with a high degree of constraint behavior

Oscar is doing research on the psychological effects of manipulating the pictures people see on Instagram. After analyzing his data, he finds that people who see more positive images report significantly lower levels of self-esteem. If Oscar were worried about making a *Type 1 error* in his research, he would be most concerned about which of the following?

That his findings were statistically significant but may actually be due to chance

Which of the following is NOT an example of a projective measure of personality?

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

Which of the following is used to measure autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity?

The eye blink startle response

If a psychologist describes a research finding as statistically significant, what does he or she typically mean?

The finding is unlikely to have occurred by chance?

The lexical approach to identifying important personality traits makes which of the following assumptions?

The most important traits in a language will have the most words to describe them.

Which of the following has been found in research on basic emotions?

There is cross-cultural recognition of a number of basic emotion expressions.

According to Carol Dweck's research, people differently in the extent to which they believe that intelligence is fixed versus changeable. Which of the following is true of people who believe that intelligence is malleable (also known as "incremental" theorists)?

They tend to see failure as an opportunity for growth

Imagine that you are at a party and your best friend introduces you to a guy named Larry. You and your friend talk to Larry for an hour, and you both notice the disparaging comments that he repeatedly makes about women. Later, you and your friend discuss your impressions of Larry, and you find that you disagree about whether or not he is sexist. Your friend thinks that Larry's comments were warranted and that he is actually pretty funny. You think that his comments were mean-spirited and sexist. According to the Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM) of personality judgment, the disagreement between you and your friend arises b/c you and your friend differ in the ____ stage of personality judgment.

Utilization

Which of the following is a key principle of object relations theory?

We relate to significant others through our mental images of them, and these images may not necessarily reflect reality.

Research using the typological approach to personality has identified which of the following personality "types" across studies and samples?

Well adjusted, over controlled, and undercontrolled

A good measure of personality should be, among other things, generalizable. Many psychological experiments at universities are performed on participants enrolled in North American Introductory Psychology courses. Often, results from these studies may not be generalizable b/c the participants tend to be "WEIRD". What does "WEIRD mean in this context?

"WEIRD" is an acronym meaning Western. Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic

Cross-cultural research on the Big 5 suggests which of the following?

In some cultures, there is evidence for 6 or 7 major personality factors.

In a study described in lecture, Nalini Ambady and her colleagues asked raters to make personality judgments based on 10-second silent video clips of unfamiliar graduate student instructors. They then compared the raters' judgments with the instructors' end-of-the-semester evaluations. Which of the following best describes the findings of this study?

Instructors whose personalities were rated more favorably had higher end-of-the-semester evaluations.

Which of the following is an advantage of the Q-sort approach to personality assessment?

It can provide information about the structure of personality within a person

Electroencephalography (EEG) is one technique used to measure brain activity. Which of the following is a major limitation of this technique?

It is difficult to determine precisely which regions of the brain are active.