psych final questions

Remembering how to ride a skateboard, even though it has been a few years since you last used one, is a subtype of _____ memory termed _____.

implicit; procedural memory

Montrell is busy paying bills online, and he fails to notice that his child has just used crayons to draw circles on the wall. This failure to perceive BEST illustrates _____ blindness.

inattentional

Positive reinforcers _____ and negative reinforcers _____ the future probability of the behavior that led to these respective consequences.

increase; increase

Amarah received a gift for her birthday that she did not like. It was a DVD for a movie that she has already seen and thought was horrible. However, Amarah expressed a high level of excitement and thanks to the person who bought her the gift, demonstrating the display rule of:

intensification

Because a brown bear is partially obscured by a car, Nick assumes that the car is closer to him than is the bear. Nick is depending on the cue called:

interposition

Presented with a stimulus, student observers in Wundt's lab were asked to report on their "raw" sensory experience, a technique known as:

introspection

Megan has a habit of standing in front of the television, even though other people behind her are also trying to watch the television. Megan seems unaware that people cannot see the television through her head. Megan:

is demonstrating egocentrism

An advantage of techniques utilizing devices such as an electronically activated recorder to assess personality is that:

it assesses personality during participants' normal interactions.

Janice is told that a new medication her physician wants her to try is 80% effective. Brandon is told that the same medication has a 20% failure rate. Who is most likely to be optimistic about the new medication?

janice

After sustaining a hard tackle, a football player has sudden paralysis in his right arm and right leg. What is your BEST guess about where a brain injury occurred?

left hemisphere

If children observe their older brothers fighting in the neighborhood, Bandura would suggest that the younger siblings would:

likely behave aggressively, too.

To a pilot, the long, straight runway appears to converge to a single point in the distance. This is an example of the monocular depth cue known as:

linear perspective

Not providing a reinforcer every time a response occurs:

may strengthen the behavior

Anthony Philip's homeroom teacher seats her pupils in alphabetical order. By the end of the school year, Anthony's best friends had become Jake Parker and Aaron Porter. This is BEST explained by the phenomenon called:

mere-exposure effect.

When we solve a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current problem, we are engaged in:

analogical problem solving

While gardening, Greg tripped over a coil of wound-up hose and fell face first on the pavement. He suffered damage to the hippocampal region in his brain. While recovering in the hospital, he consistently greeted his friends and family as though he was seeing them again after ages, even though he had seen them the previous night. He often forgot what he did during the day. However, he could still recall adventures from his teenage years without effort. Greg MOST likely has:

anterograde amnesia

Across all cultures, women tend to find men more attractive who:

are older than them.

Baby Denisha learned to call her family's dog a "woof woof." Her parents were surprised when she pointed to a cow and said, "Woof woof!" Jean Piaget would say that Denisha was making use of the process of:

assimilation

Tammy names her baby Evan because she really loves the name. A year later, Tammy comes home upset after picking Evan up from day care. When her husband inquires as to the problem, Tammy responds that there is another child at the day care named Evan. Her husband doesn't really see the problem, but Tammy elaborates that they might as well have named their baby Joe Smith because Evan is such a common name. Her husband does a quick Internet search and convinces Tammy that Evan isn't even in the 20 most popular baby names for boys. Tammy appears to be a victim of the:

availability heuristic

Eleven-month-old Ashley plays without a fuss when her mother leaves and on her return ignores her. Ashley is demonstrating which type of attachment style?

avoidany

Stimuli that are presented slightly below the absolute threshold will:

be detected less than 50% of the time.

What did the experimenter in the Milgram obedience studies do to get the participants to continue shocking the learner?

calmly instructed the participants to continue

A researcher showed children a crayon box and opened it to reveal candy instead of crayons. Then she closed the box and asked the children what the next child would think was in it. Most 3-year-olds probably said _____, and most 5-year-olds probably said _____.

candy; crayons

In which research method do we study one exceptional individual in depth and try to carefully draw conclusions about others based on the evidence?

case study

Viktor sustained injuries to the back of his head after an especially rough tackle during a recent football game. After the game, he had difficulty with balance and coordinated movements and experienced problems with walking and riding a bike. Which brain structure was probably damaged?

cerebellum

Split-brain patients were simultaneously shown the word key in the left visual field and the word chain in the right visual field. They were then asked what word was projected onto the screen. Patients will respond that they saw the word:

chain

Meg orders food at the counter of her favorite fast-food restaurant. The employee who takes her order steps aside and another employee then takes Meg's money. Although the two employees look somewhat different, Meg perceives that the same person took both her order and her money. This failure to perceive BEST illustrates _____ blindness.

change

Due to differences in the regularity of the counting system, children in _____ can MOST easily deconstruct two-digit numbers.

china

Objects that cast a GREATER retinal disparity are perceived as being:

closer

The Big Five Factor Model includes _____ as one the five dimensions of personality.

agreeableness

Which computational procedure sorts traits into a small number of underlying dimensions?

factor analysis

Which factor is a defining characteristic of passionate love?

feeling of euphoria

Simone is 20 weeks pregnant. This means that her developing baby is in the _____ stage of development.

fetal

Alexa suffers from a developmental disorder that developed from heavy alcohol use by her mother while she was pregnant. Alexa likely suffers from:

fetal alcohol syndrom

When you read, the written words and the illustrations are perceived as _____; the white of the page itself is perceived as _____.

figures; ground

Students who do relatively little work until just before an upcoming exam and then engage in a burst of studying are displaying a response pattern similar to the one engendered by a _____ schedule of reinforcement.

fixed-interval

From an evolutionary perspective, which feature of effective learning helps avoid any food that has made you sick in the past?

food-sickness association formed after only a single pairing

When an internet company succeeds in getting customers to purchase a 1-week trial subscription for a small amount of money, they are much more likely to get those customers to subsequently purchase a more expensive subscription. This is termed the:

foot-in-the-door technique.

In the ultimatum game, a person who feels that she is being cheated by another player usually will:

forego her monetary prize to punish the other player.

Elsa and Ariela were discussing what might happen to gender relations if the United States were to elect a woman as president. It is likely they are in the _____ stage of cognitive development.

formal operational

Jumping onto subway tracks to save a stranger's life is an example of:

genuine altruism

After deciding that the defendant is guilty, a jury returns a much more severe sentencing recommendation than those held by individual jurors at the outset of deliberations. This is an example of:

group polarization

The "blind spot" is so called because it:

has neither rods nor cones.

Isabel was voted the "Most Beautiful" in her high school graduating class. Compared with her peers, Isabel also is likely to:

have more friends than are her less-attractive peers.

Humanistic psychologists focused on the importance of

healthy growth potential

The subcortical brain structure that is critical for the creation of new memories is the:

hippocampus

Rats that traversed a maze for 10 consecutive days with no reward showed no evidence of learning the maze. When reinforcement was provided beginning on the 11th day, Tolman reported that these rats:

immediately demonstrated mastery of the maze.

A researcher interested in investigating the attitudes and opinions of a large sample of people is most likely to use which research method?

survey

Level of positivity is to _____ as level of energy is to _____.

valence; arousal

Sam, a used car salesman, doesn't know how many customers he will have to approach until someone buys a car, but he does know it is possible that the very next customer will buy a car. Sam's sales behavior is reinforced according to which type of reinforcement schedule?

variable ratio

The _____ stream travels across the occipital lobe into the lower levels of the temporal lobe and includes brain areas that represent an object's _____.

ventral; shape and identity

For which of the following distributions of scores would be median most clearly be a more appropriate measure of central tendency than the mean?

10, 22, 8, 9, 6

While there is some disagreement among psychologists, research has suggested that the facial displays of at least _____ emotions are universal.

5

_________________is the primary neurotransmitter involved in voluntary motor control.

Acetylcholine

Jeff is 33 years old, intelligent, and outgoing. In college, he majored in English and was very concerned with current political issues. Which statement MOST likely describes Jeff?

Jeff is a bank teller

_____ can be described as instances of helping others who share similar genes.

Kin selection

Which statement about learning is FALSE?

Learning is based more on genetics than experience.

_____ are designed to reveal inner aspects of individual's personalities by analysis of their responses to a standard series of ambiguous stimuli.

Projective tests

Janine and Alicia are identical twins that were raised apart. Research would suggest that they are more similar than chance in:

all personality dimensions.

In a neuron, what happens when an action potential reaches the axon terminals of the neuron?

The action potential stimulates the release of chemical substances.

On her first visit to a psychiatrist, Lucinda was asked to look at a set of 10 pictures and make up a story about each one. Her psychiatrist was likely using the:

Thematic Apperception Test.

Why are researchers so careful about drawing conclusions regarding statistical significance (p<.05)?

They want to make sure an observed difference is not due to chance.

Opiate prescription painkillers exert their pain-killing and euphoric effects by binding to the mu-opioid receptor and functioning similarly to the brain's endogenous endorphins. Opiate prescription painkillers function as:

agonists

A couple has just started to date. In light of Dutton and Aron's (1974) suspension bridge study results, which activity might increase their attraction to each other?

Watching a scary movie.

You probably can detect a weight difference between a 1-ounce and a 2-ounce envelope. But if you pick up a 20-pound package, you'd probably need another package that weighs at least 20.5 pounds before detecting a difference between the first package and the second package. This description illustrates:

Weber's law.

Suppose that students were given two tests. Before the tests, students were told that men usually do better than women do on test A but not on test B. Which set of results would be predicted by the literature on stereotype threats?

Women performed more poorly than men did on test A but did just as well as men did on test B.

Stan is studying for a test when a friend drops by to invite him to go to a party. What might his id say to him?

You need to blow off some steam—let's party!"

Abby is a psychologist who studies personality. Which instrument would she MOST likely use in asking people about how they act or think in particular situations?

a self-report inventory

According to Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, the major task confronting 15-year-old (an adolescent) Tony is to develop:

a sense of who he is

Isabel, who just had her 1st birthday, sees a butterfly and exclaims, "Bird!" "No, that's a butterfly," says her grandmother. The next time Isabel sees a butterfly, she says, "Butterfly!" According to Piaget, Isabel has just shown:

accommodation

Janice is in her garage cleaning it out when she suddenly hears a loud noise. She instantly stops moving. This is an example of a(n) _____ tendency.

action

Which factor is a defining characteristic of companionate love?

affection toward one another

Misty is standing at the edge of a large field of flowers. She perceives the flowers lower in her visual field as _____ than are the flowers higher in her visual field due to _____.

closer; relative height in the image

Although the neon sign on the gas station window actually reads "CLO ED" because a letter has burned out, Hector perceives it as reading "CLOSED" because of the Gestalt principle of:

closure

The length of a light wave determines its:

color

The smell of a particular perfume scent causes Juan's heart to flutter because he associates it with his girlfriend. The perfume is a(n):

conditioned stimulus

Following the scientific discovery that a specific brain structure is significantly larger in violent individuals than in those who are not violent, a news headline announced; "Enlarged Brain Structure Triggers Violent Acts." The headline writer should most clearly be warned about the dangers of

confusing correlation with causation

The understanding that the quantitative properties of an object are invariant despite changes in the object's appearance is referred to

conservation

Extinction will proceed MOST rapidly if behavior previously had been maintained under a(n) _____ schedule of reinforcement.

continuous

Morality is determined primarily by the extent to which it conforms to social rules in the _____ state of moral development.

conventional

Membership to groups minimizes the risks associated with:

cooperation

Which sequence of eye parts through which light passes on its way to the brain is correct?

cornea, pupil, lens, retina

Which of the following statistical measures is most helpful for indicating the extent to which high school grades predict college grades?

correlation coefficient

After a stroke, a patient appears to be unable to understand words spoken to her. The patient can produce speech but cannot seem to comprehend it. What is a likely explanation for these symptoms?

damage to Wernicke's area

A researcher who deceives participants about the goals of the research needs to fully inform them of the true nature of the study later, according to which ethical principle of human experimentation?

debriefing

According to B. F. Skinner, the BEST way to train a rat to press the bar in the Skinner box is to begin by:

delivering a food reward if the rat turns in the direction of the bar.

Which procedure is BEST for determining whether newborns have noticed a visual object?

determining if habituation is reversed if the object changes

A person is more likely to help a stranger in an emergency situation when she is the only one there to provide help, relative to a situation where others also could potentially render aid. This bystander intervention effect is due to a more general phenomenon termed:

diffusion of responsibility

Brittany is daydreaming in class when her instructor asks her a question. Brittany finds that, even though she was not paying attention, she can replay in her "mind's ear" the instructor's last words, taking advantage of a process called:ec

echoic memory

Attachment is defined as a(n) _____ bond that forms between newborns and their primary caregivers.

emotional

Charles Darwin developed the universality hypothesis, which suggests that:

emotional expressions have the same meaning for everyone.

Sean sits in the same seat in his psychology class for lecture every day. On final exam day, he chooses the same seat, in an effort to recreate the way in which psychology information was initially encoded. He is attempting to use _____ to his benefit.

encoding specificity

You are taking a biology class. During the lecture, you listen, take notes, and think about how the information is related to you. These are examples of _____ information into memory. When you rehearse this information, you are facilitating _____. During a test, you must remember the information, which is called _____.

encoding; storage; retrieval

Sci-fi fans can generally easily classify a new character in a movie as an alien, despite the fact that aliens come in all shapes and sizes. This ability is BEST predicted by:

exemplar theory

Groups usually do NOT capitalize fully on the _____ of their members.

expertise

Jenny remembers her 16th birthday party vividly and recalls how her parents surprised her with a new car. This is an example of a(n) _____ memory.

explicit

Hans Eysenck's original theory of personality identified two trait dimensions, emotional stability versus instability and:

extraversion versus introversion.

Dr. Ramirez, a radiologist, uses a very liberal criterion when she reads CT scans. She recommends a biopsy for every possible case of cancer. This decision strategy _____ the chances of missing a true cancer and _____ false alarms.

minimizes; leads to many

The SMALLEST meaningful units of language are called:

morphemes

The insulating layer of fatty material that covers the axon of many neurons is called the:

myelin sheath

When a patient has multiple sclerosis, the patient cannot easily transmit information from neuron to neuron, which leads to difficulties with movement. The transmission of neurons is slowed down as a result of a deteriorating:

myelin sheath

A celebrity makes an insensitive tweet and, as a consequence, loses thousands of followers. As a result, he is less likely to make insensitive tweets in the future. This illustrates which behavioral process?

negative punishment

A teenager swears at the dinner table, and as a result, her parents take away her gaming system for a week. The teenager is now much less likely to swear at the dinner table, illustrating:

negative punishment.

If psychologists discovered that wealthy people are less satisfied with their marriages than poor people are, this would indicate that wealth and marital satisfaction are

negatively correlated

When 3-year-old Ariel threw a tantrum over the candy she wanted, her mother gave it to her so that Ariel would calm down. Although counterproductive in the long run, in that moment, the mother's behavior was being _____ by _____.

negatively reinforced; the end of the tantrum

Chemicals that pass information across the synapse between neurons are called:

neurotransmitters

The spaces between sections of myelin on an axon are termed the:

nodes of Ranvier

In the prisoner's dilemma, what strategy will produce the GREATEST individual benefit?

not confessing when the other player confesses

Three-month-old Shantel has not yet acquired object permanence and, as a result, she will:

not search for a toy that has been covered with a blanket.

In the hypothesis "Students who study a list of terms in the morning, just after waking up, will recall more terms than students who study the list just before falling asleep," what is the dependent variable?

number of items remembered

When Tom's sister burned herself playing with matches, she cried for a long time. A by-product of this experience was that Tom also learned not to play with matches. Tom's learning experience is an example of:

observational learning

Scott suffered a concussion during his last rugby match. Following the concussion, Scott suffered from partial blindness even though his eyes were not physically damaged. Which lobe was MOST likely affected by the concussion?

occipital

With respect to the electrical charge present in a neuron, when a neuron is at rest, the inside:

of the cell has a negative charge relative to the outside

Which drug would NOT constitute a drug antagonist?

one that blocks the reuptake of a neurotransmitter

Sixteen-year-old Haley uses a tanning bed several times a week. When asked if she is concerned about skin cancer, she answers that she is not, and then adds that older people with fairer skin are much more likely to get skin cancer than she is. Haley's answer illustrates:

optimism bias

The electrical charge of a neuron at rest is largely the result of a chemical "pump" that pulls _____ from outside to inside the neuron, and _____ from inside to outside the neuron.

potassium; sodium

Even when participants are assigned to completely meaningless groups, it is highly likely that they will exhibit:

preferential treatment to members of their own group.

Although Alexander is careful to treat all of his employees fairly, he secretly feels that those who graduated from his business school are more competent than are those who graduated from rival schools. This example illustrates:

prejudice

After reading through the Introductory Psychology text, Professor White can only remember the titles of the first three chapters. This BEST illustrates the _____ effect.

primacy

Memory for motor skills (e.g., how to play a guitar) that you clearly know, even if you cannot describe them, is known as _____ memory.

procedural

Jessica and Ashley are talking about Carla. Jessica says that she does not like Carla because she is loud and annoying. In fact, "loud" and "annoying" are adjectives that many people use to describe Jessica. Which defense mechanism is Jessica using?

projection

The concept that we classify new objects by comparing them to the "best" or "most typical" member of a category is referred to as:

prototype theory

Infants learn to control their shoulders before they learn to control their elbows, illustrating the _____ rule.

proximodistal

Mrs. Alfieri believes that her husband's angry outbursts against her result from his unconscious hatred of his own mother. Mrs. Alfieri is looking at her husband's behavior from a(n)__________________ perspective.

psychoanalytic

To assess the effect of televised violence on aggression, researchers plan to expose one group of children to violent movie scenes and another to nonviolent scenes. To reduce the chance that the children in one group have more aggressive personalities than those in the other group, the researchers should make use of

random assignment

When Lisa received a paper with a D grade, she immediately told her friends (and herself) that it didn't matter because she had intended to drop the course all along. Which defense mechanisms is Lisa using?

rationalization

An infant in a visual perception experiment is shown a computerized screen 8 inches from her face that repeats the same visual pattern of wavy line stimuli. How will the infant MOST likely respond?

over time she will look at it less and less

Transduction involves converting _____ signals from the environment to _____ signals sent to the central nervous system.

physical; neural

A shy and timid child works up the courage to raise his hand to answer a question in class. The teacher calls on him, and the child delivers an excellent answer. The teacher exclaims, "That is the best answer I have heard all week! Great job! Come up to the front of the room to get a sticker!" Unfortunately, the child found all of this attention unpleasant and no longer answers questions in class. His behavior of answering questions was:

positively punished.

During an action potential (when a neuron is sufficiently stimulated), _________ charged_________ ions rush into the cell, causig a change in the membrane potential of the neuron.

positively; sodium

In one study, researchers showed infants moving circles, moving circles with scrambled facial features, and moving circles with regular facial features. The researchers measured eye gazes. Which objects do you think the infants tracked?

regular faces for the longest time.

Jason looked up a telephone number on his desktop computer, but his cell phone is in another room. The easiest and perhaps MOST effective technique he can use to remember the number until he can get to his phone is:

rehearsal

Keeping information in short-term memory by mentally repeating it is called:

rehearsal

Rita has meetings all week. She finds that by Friday, she cannot clearly remember the meetings that she had earlier in the week because she confuses them with the meetings she had on the last two days of the week. This illustrates:

retroactive interference

Isabel, a newborn, turns her head toward a stimulus that strokes her cheek. Isabel is showing the _____ reflex.

rooting

One of the dangers of groupthink is the group's tendency to:

sacrifice the soundness of a decision to achieve interpersonal harmony.

The movement of an electrical signal within a neuron is termed

saltatory conduction

Oden relates important psychology terms to his past experiences and knowledge when studying for an exam. Which strategy is he using?

semantic encoding

You walk into a store that has a distinct perfume smell. After shopping for 20 minutes, you no longer notice the perfume smell. This is an example of:

sensory adaptation.

In recalling U.S. presidents, Channing can list the first five presidents and the last five presidents but cannot remember many of the presidents in between. This BEST illustrates the _____ effect.

serial position

Charlotte looks up a phone number on the Internet and says the number three times to herself. As she reaches for her phone to dial the number, she is distracted by noise coming from outside her office. When the noise ceases after about 30 seconds, she picks up the phone but finds that she cannot remember the number. This is due to the limits of _____ memory.

short-term

Professor Anderson believes that Mary's failing grade on her most recent examination was due to her having three other exams that day. Professor Anderson is making a(n) _____ attribution.

situational

People clap more softly when they are part of a large audience than when they are part of a small audience, illustrating the phenomenon of:

social loafing

When placed in a cage with a soft cloth "mother" and a wire "mother" equipped with a feeding nipple, socially isolated rhesus monkeys:

spent more time hanging on the soft cloth mother, even though the wire mother provided nourishment.

Whenever Andrea goes to the library to study, she takes a Red Bull energy drink with her and drinks it while she studies. As the semester progresses, she notices that she does considerably better on an exam when she drinks a Red Bull during it. She MOST likely does better because of:

state-dependent retrieval

Lisa ate raw oysters for the first time and, 4 hours later, became extremely sick to her stomach. Now, the smell of oysters makes her stomach queasy. What is the unconditioned response?

stomach sickness

Wundt believed that scientific psychology should focus on analyzing the basic elements comprising consciousness, an approach his students later termed:

structuralism

Professor Woo noticed that the distribution of student scores on her last Biology test had an extremely small standard deviation. This indicates that the

students' scores tended to be very similar to one another

Shannon feels miserable in her marriage but refuses to consider getting a divorce; she feels that a divorce would completely waste all of the hard work she has put into making the marriage work for 20 years. Shannon's line of reasoning BEST illustrates the:

sunk-cost fallacy

Consistent with the facial feedback hypothesis, when people are asked to arch their brows, they find facts that they read in a textbook more:

surprising

Isaac wants to exploit findings consistent with the Schachter two factor theory to maximize his chances that sparks will fly on his first date with Rebecca. What might Isaac do?

take Rebecca on a roller coaster ride

The synapse is the junction between the:

terminal branches of one neuron and the dendrites of another

Noel wants to measure her cat Ernie's auditory threshold. She quietly whispers Ernie's name and slowly increases her volume until the cat turns and looks at her. Over the course of several days, she whispers 10 times at each volume. The volume at which Ernie responds 5 times is called:

the absolute threshold.

The "top-to-bottom" rule that describes the tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from head to the feet is called:

the cephalocaudal rule.

Dr. Roberts hypothesized that students in a classroom seating 30 would get higher course grades than students seated in an auditorium seating 300. In this example,

the independent variable is classroom size

Jean was at the mall with her family. She tried on a pair of shoes she really wanted. Her parents told her that they could not afford the shoes and walked out of the store. For a moment, Jean thought of running out of the store with the shoes on, but her parents had taught her at a very young age that stealing was wrong. A split second after thinking about stealing the shoes, Jean began to feel incredibly guilty about even having the thought. Which part of Jean's mind squelched her desire to steal the shoes?

the superego

Gavin is asked to remember a list of 20 words. Some of the words are written in blue ink, and some are written in red ink. A week later, he is asked to recall as many words as possible. Gavin will probably do better on the task if, during the encoding phase, he:think

thinks about the meaning of each word

In the hypothesis "Students who study a list of terms in the morning, just after waking up, will recall more terms than students who study the list just before falling asleep," what is the independent variable?

time of day of study

Sunil, who had a very low birth weight, shows problems with attention, perception, and learning deficits in school. Sunil was probably exposed to which teratogen?

tobacco smoke

A speck of dirt that gets into your eye will naturally cause a blinking reflex. The speck of dirt is a(n) _____ stimulus

unconditioned

Last week, Harry drank too much tequila, and doing so made him vomit. Now just the smell of tequila makes his stomach a bit queasy. Vomiting after drinking too much tequila is an example of a(n):

unconditioned response

Previous studies have demonstrated that scuba divers who memorized a list of words underwater subsequently remembered more of those words when tested:

underwater