Psychology 201-Final Exam

For a typical neuron, what is the threshold potential?

-55 mV

After suffering a devastating injury, Brandon had difficulty articulating words. The damage to an area of Brandon's brain inhibited speech production. This area is:

Broca's area

Jake told his friend Alison that he takes Xanax to treat an anxiety disorder, but doesn't understand how the drug works. If Alison took an introductory psychology course, she might be able to explain to Jake that Xanax works by enhancing the effects of:

GABA

Tamara was interested in studying people's attitudes toward immigration reform, so she surveyed a sample of friends from her college in Chicago. In her study, Tamara found that 63% of her friends favored immigration reform. She concluded that "The majority of people in the United States are in favor of immigration reform." Which statement expresses the problem with Tamara's conclusion?

Her sample is not representative of the United States population

_____ was an early approach to explaining the functions of the brain by trying to link the physical structure of the skull with a variety of characteristics.

Phrenology

What can be concluded about the ethics of the Little Albert study?

Presenting a baby with loud noises to induce fear is considered a problem according to today's ethical research guidelines

A pharmaceutical company wishes to test the effects of a new antidepressant using a double-blind study. Which alternative correctly describes the procedure the company would use?

The research assistants would not know which participants were receiving the new drug and which were receiving an inert pill. None of the patients would know which type of pill they were taking, either.

A brain surgeon is discussing research with a patient about to undergo a hemispherectomy. What would the surgeon tell a patient about their prognosis?

There is a 54-90% chance the patient will no longer suffer from seizures

__________ experiments showed that cats placed in a puzzle box took less time to trigger a latch and escape from the box as the number of learning trials increased.

Thorndike's

Samantha and Anaïs are identical twins who were separated at birth and raised in different cultures. Samantha was raised in the United States, and Anaïs was raised in France. Their rare circumstances made them good candidates for:

a case study

A scatterplot of a perfect negative correlation would show:

a diagonal line from the top left to the bottom right

Right before everyone arrived for her party. Aisha spilled one drop of perfume on the carpet. ABout half of the people there were able to smell it, which illustrates a(n):

absolute threshold

An advertisement for a new drug therapy is eye catching. The advertisement claims that the drug will counteract the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. The drug potentially works by acting as a(n):

acetylcholine agonist

Action potentials are:

all-or-none; they either happen or they don't.

While crossing a busy street, Aadhya was nearly hit by a bus. For a moment, she saw her life flash before her eyes, her heart raced, and her palms began to sweat. In dangerous situations like this, the _____ is activated and the nervous system orchestrates Aadhya's physiological and emotional reaction of fear.

amygdala

Mae tells her therapist that she has been prescribed Xanax for the past 5 years. Based on that information, what might the therapist suspect Mae is suffering from?

an anxiety disorder

Joel is giving a lecture slide presentation on rods and cones. First, he discusses how they are similar and then he begins to list their differences which include that rods:

are light sensitive and cones are detail sensitive

An example of using the survey method to conduct scientific research would be:

asking a group of students questions about their sexual attitudes and behaviors.

In an experiment, the process of random _____ ensures that each participant has an equal chance of being in either the control group or the experimental group.

assignment

Ivan Pavlov is associated with classical conditioning because he studied how organisms:

associate two different stimuli

After being shot in the head in Iraq, what type of glial cells began to restore the barrier between Brandon's brain and blood?

astrocytes

Katelyn has suffered a serious injury to the left hemisphere of her brain. It would be helpful for Katelyn's friends to know that there's a chance Katelyn will:

be unable to speak

If identical twins Sam and Anaïs were examined by a psychologist using the _____ perspective, then the focus would be on directly observable characteristics, such as their laugh, their body language, and their mannerisms

behavioral

Penny is a recovering drug addict. Her treatment program emphasizes an understanding of the reinforcers in the environment—the "people, places, and things"—that underlie her addiction. Her program reflects the _____ perspective of psychology

behavioral

The classic Bobo doll experiment by American psychologist Albert Bandura and his colleagues revealed that:

boys were more likely to mimic physical aggression, especially if they observed it modeled by men

Gavin, the yellow lab that Cesar Millan worked with, overcame his hypersensitivity to many sounds. Gavin had begun to associate harmless, everyday sounds with danger because of

classical conditioning

Hearing happens when fluid vibrates in the _________, bending the hair cells on the basilar membrane, which triggers the auditory nerve's action potentials

cochlea

Marina feels a rush of love and nostalgia in response to the scent of honeysuckle; the fragrance is similar to the perfume her mother wore when Marina was little. The perfume's fragrance is a(n) ________, and the scent of honeysuckle elicits a similar response through the process of stimulus ___________.

conditioned stimulus; generalization

Not only was Margaret Floy Washburn the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology, she also:

contributed to the field's knowledge of comparative animal behavior

Summer watches a bird right in front of her take off and start flying toward the distant hills. Her brain uses __________ to interpret how tense her eye muscles are when looking at the bird compared to when she's watching the distant hills. This is an example of a:

convergence; binocular one

Loudness (amplitude) is measured in

dB

You enter your shade-darkened den from the bright sunlight of the beach outside of your door. For a while, it is difficult to see. Soon, you undergo ______ and can see quite well.

dark adaptation

Ablation, a very early technique, studied the brain by:

destroying parts of a living animal brain to determine a loss of function

June's cat runs to the kitchen at the sound of the electric can opener but not when he hears a blender. June's cat is demonstrating stimulus:

discrimination

Aristotle believed that people know their reality through their perceptions and that they learn though their sensory experiences. Today this is known as:

empiricism

After a while Little Albert no longer startled at the sight of a white rat. In classical conditioning terms we say that _______ has occurred

extinction

Raphael conducted an experiment in which participants texted on their cell phones while driving a car through an obstacle course, or participants did not text while driving through the course. Raphael concluded from the results of the study that texting had a negative effect on participants' driving. Michael pointed out that participants' levels of driving experience could have interfered with the results, making driving experience a(n) _____ variable

extraneous

Characteristics of the environment or the participants that might interfere with an experiment's outcome are called:

extraneous variables

A pigeon in a Skinner box is trained to peck a bar for food. The pigeon is then placed on a partial reinforcement schedule, receiving food every 10 times it pecks. This is a _______ schedule of reinforcement

fixed-ratio

In which lobe is the motor cortex located?

frontal

Deepak has an automatic positive reaction to his grandma because she has given him presents many times in the past. He also reacts positively to anyone who looks similar to his grandma. This is an example of stimulus:

generalization

As an emergency room nurse, Elan knows that accidents where the _____ is damaged are often terminal, because it is the brain area responsible for life-sustaining processes.

hindbrain

Positive psychology has its roots in the _____ perspective

humanistic

Elsa is a community safety officer in her town. She plans to use negative reinforcement to get people to buckle their seat belts when driving a car by:

installing a device in cars that makes an annoying beeping sound if seat belts are unbuckled

If Juan were to correctly explain the difference between an independent variable and a dependent variable in a presentation to his class, he would say, "In an experiment, the independent variable is _____, and the dependent variable is _____."

manipulated; measured

In 1861, Wilhelm Wundt used an apparatus with a swinging pendulum that would hit a bell. Wundt would ask people to report the position of the pendulum when they heard the bell. He discovered that there was a slight delay between when people heard the bell and when they noted the position of the pendulum, indicating one of the first measures of:

mental processes

Kalifa just stubbed his toe on the leg of a table. The initial sharp, fast pain was carried to his brain by _________. The throbbing, slow pain that _____ carried to the brain began a few minutes later and lasted for several hours

myelinated large neurons; unmyelinated small neurons

In a Skinner box, a rat escapes painful electric shock by pressing a lever. The rat's bar-pressing behavior is conditioned through:

negative reinforcement

Tracy is a permissive parent and is often too busy to discipline her son. Instead, when her son whines, she gives him whatever he wants. At first, her son would whine for a few minutes. Now Tracy has to endure her son's incessant whining for hours before eventually giving in. Tracy's behavior is being maintained by _________ reinforcement, and her son's whining is being maintained by __________ reinforcement

negative; positive

Following surgery, Christina's brain reorganized itself and established new connections. Christina's brain demonstrated:

neuroplasticity

During the battle in Fallujah, Brandon was feeling extreme stress. It is safe to say that Brandon's body was flooded with:

norepinephrine

A lawyer is arguing that the sample of drivers stopped at a roadside checkpoint by police officers is _____, because the characteristics of the sample are different from those of the population it is intended to reflect.

not representative

Which of the following is a sense of smell

olfaction

Andre stares at a picture of the American flag for awhile and then looks at a white piece of paper. Why do the red stripes appear green when he looks at the blank page?

opponent-process cells activated by red light become fatigued.

Brain scans reveal that when visually impaired people learn Braille early in life, brain areas specialized for vision become active, suggesting that they become involved in processing touch sensations. Based on that information, these visual areas take on functions normally associated with the _____ lobe.

parietal

The somatosensory cortex is located in the _____ lobes

parietal

People often spend long hours driving for Uber because the Uber app reinforces occasionally and unpredictably, an indication of the:

partial reinforcement effect

Are you a secretive person? How high is your self-esteem? According to 19th-century _____, the answers to these questions lie on the surface of the skull.

phrenologists or biological psychologists

Dr. Moyer is studying the association between opportunities for workplace creativity and overall happiness. Dr. Moyer is a practitioner of _____ psychology.

positive

In _________, a person receives something unpleasant following a behavior

positive punishment

Antwon is an industrial/organizational psychologist who advises a petroleum company on selecting offshore oil rig workers who will most likely comply with safety regulations. Antwon is pursuing psychology's goal of:

prediction

reinforcers that satisfy a biological need, such as hunger and thirst, are called _________ reinforcers.

primary

When Tina looks at someone she finds physically attractive her

pupils dilate

Baharan wants to teach a pigeon to "play" a piano by using shaping. Her first step will be to:

reinforce the pigeons with food when they get close to a small keyboard

At a police checkpoint for drunk drivers, some cars are stopped at random; many others are not stopped. The cars that are stopped may be considered a _____ of all the cars that pass by the checkpoint

sample

Amy is conducting a survey of dating attitudes and behaviors among young adults as part of her master's thesis work. Amy distributes questionnaires to 200 randomly selected students enrolled in an introductory psychology class at her university. The 200 students are Amy's _____. The people to whom she assumes her results will generalize are the _____.

sample; population

As Chewy views a famous Impressionist painting, _____ neurons are receiving visual information about the art and carrying this information to her brain.

sensory

Lena tells her friend she is feeling a bit sad. Her friend might suggest getting some exercise since physical activity may boost _____ activity.

serotonin

A child who refuses to eat vegetables at a meal is first reinforced for touching vegetables with the fork, and finally is reinforced for putting the vegetables in their mouth with the fork. This is an application of

shaping

According to the World Happiness Report published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, one key factor that leads to variations in happiness in people of different countries of the world is:

social support

According to a meta-analysis on punishment and its outcomes by Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor

spanking was associated with numerous negative outcomes

Brandon was struck in the head by a bullet in Iraq. If the bullet had struck Brandon's _____ instead of his brain, the paralysis could have affected his entire body.

spinal cord

When Saralyn puts on her running shoes, her dog gets excited and waits by the door. When she puts on her work shoes, her dog stays calm and doesn't run to the door. This example illustrates:

stimulus discrimination

Dr. Leleux believes that psychologists should attempt to identify the fundamental elements of mental experience. Dr. Leleux associates himself with the school of:

structuralism

Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is known as:

sustainable

The junction between neurons where communication occurs is called the:

synapse

When Tonya hears a C sharp note she sees a burst of purple. She is experiencing:

synesthesia

One group of participants in an experiment texted on their cell phones while driving a car through an obstacle course, and another group did not text while driving through the course. Researchers recorded the number of objects each participant hit while driving through the course. What was the independent variable?

texting or not while driving

The minimum detectable value of a stimulus is called

the absolute threshold

Dr. Lopez, a health psychologist, helps patients determine whether they want to get a cochlear implant. One ethical issue she must consider is:

the implants may produce sounds that are Mickey-Mouse like or seem computerized

The thyroid gland regulates the rate of metabolism by secreting:

thyroxin

People see what they expect to see. Therefore, a perceptual set is an example of a ___________ influence on perception

top-down

________ is the process of converting sensory data into electrochemical neural signals

transduction

Compared to action potentials in unmyelinated neurons, action potentials in myelinated neurons:

travel much faster

Using a sample of young adolescents, Dr. Nguyen finds a correlation of +.55 between scores on a measure of neglectful or uninvolved parenting and scores on a measure of delinquent behavior. Based on this correlation alone, Dr. Nguyen can legitimately conclude that:

uninvolved parenting is related to a higher degree of delinquent behavior

Operant conditioning applies to _________ behavior and involves associations between __________.

voluntary; behavior and consequences