Psychology Online Quiz Questions Exam 1

B.F. Skinner

Behaviorism

Lucy wants to study changes in cognitive skills, moral reasoning, and social behavior across the lifespan. Lucy should specialize in ________ psychology.

Developmental

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

Experimental

William James

Functionalism

Abraham Maslow

Humanistic Psychology

Edmund wants to identify relatively consistent patterns of thought and behavior, measure these traits, and determine how these traits interact in a particular context to determine how a person will behave in any given situation. Edmund wants to conduct research in the area of ________.

Personality Psychology

Sigmund Freud

Psychoanalytic Theory

Susan wants to study prejudice, attraction, how we explain our own behavior versus how we explain the behavior of others, and how we resolve interpersonal conflicts. Susan should conduct research in the area of ________.

Social Psychology

Wilhelm Wundt

Structuralism

Excitatory signals to a neuron must exceed inhibitory signals by a minimum intensity in order to trigger

an action potential

Increasing excitatory signals above the threshold for neural activation will not affect the intensity of an action potential. This indicates that a neuron's reaction is

an all-or-none response

Many studies that cannot ethically be conducted as experiments with typical human participants ________.

are possible to test with animal studies

Messages are transmitted from your spinal cord to your heart muscles by the

autonomic nervous system

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

In a tragic diving accident, Andrew damaged his spinal cord. As a result, his legs were paralyzed. Andrew's injury was located in his

central nervous system

The tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random sequences of outcomes often leads us to underestimate the extent to which outcomes result from

chance

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(n) ________ is a variable that affects both variables of interest and may falsely give the impression of a cause-and-effect relationship.

confounding variable

An upper-level psychology class is conducting an experiment on racial prejudice that involves having participants rate the likeability of faces in a set of photos. However, they tell participants that the study is about the effects of aging on likeability. When participants are finished, they are thanked for their time and leave the experiment. In this example, the class forgot to ________ in order to resolve the ________ in the study.

debrief participants; deception

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

Ethics need to be considered when ________ scientific research.

designing, conducting, and reviewing

Schizophrenia is most closely linked with an oversupply of the neurotransmitter

dopamine

Which of the following is not part of obtaining informed consent?

explaining the hypothesis to the participants

Whereas the importance of random sampling is for _____ , the importance of random assignment is for _____

generalizability, generalizability

After the horror of a terrorist attack, many people complain that they could have predicted this would happen and the CIA and FBI should obviously have foreseen the likelihood of this event. This perception most clearly illustrates

hindsight bias

The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems work together to keep you in a steady internal state called

homeostasis

Oona wants to conduct research on personnel management, workplace environment, and what type of environment results in high levels of employee productivity and efficiency. Oona should conduct research in the area of ________ psychology.

industrial-organizational

Information travels through axons that are bundled into the cables we call

nerves

A negative correlation means ________.

one variable decreases as the other increases

Rodesia insists that Dr. Phillips' theory of aggression be checked against observable evidence. She is demonstrating the scientific attitude of

skepticism

Sensory and motor neurons of the ________ nervous system are associated with activities traditionally thought of as conscious or voluntary.

somatic

The ________ nervous system is responsible for responses such as pupil dilation, increased heart rate, and increased respiration.

sympathetic

A hypothesis is a(n)

testable prediction that gives direction to research.

Testing hypotheses and refining theories in light of those tests is central to

the scientific method.

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

there is a relationship between smoking and lung cancer

Research on brainstorming revealed that one reason people created more and better ideas when working alone was that

they didn't work as hard in the group setting

Cognitive psychology focuses on studying ________.

thoughts and their relationship to our expeirences and our actions

A(n) ________ is a description of how the researchers will measure the variables of interest.

operational definition

________ are the most commonly used species for animal research.

rodents

You feel the pain of a sprained ankle when ________ relay(s) messages from your ankle to your central nervous system.

sensory neurons