Unit 2 Test

Which of the following correctly describes the firing of neurons?

An all-or-none response

A double-blind control is essential for which of the following?

Assessment of a treatment designed to reduce schizophrenic symptoms

Which of the following will NOT increase behavioral and mental activity?

Barbiturates

Which of the following is a term for a variable that researchers do not control and that can affect the results of a study?

Confounding variable

In an experiment, which of the following variables refers to the outcome that is measured by the experimenter?

Dependent

Which of the following scenarios is regulated by federal law?

Dr. Mast, a psychologist, has a client, Tim, who threatens to seriously harm his brother, Carl. Tim has a history of serious violence and the means to carry out the threat; therefore, Dr. Mast must inform Carl.

There is a strong positive correlation between ice cream sales and instances of snakebites. Which of the following is the most likely explanation for this correlation?

Hot weather is related to both ice cream sales and snake activity.

Which of the following is true about the pons?

It is the region of the brain that is most closely associated with sleep and arousal.

Which of the following is true of the reticular activating system?

It regulates levels of arousal.

According to the ethical guidelines set by the American Psychological Association (APA), which of the following is true of psychological research in which animals are used as subjects?

It should conform to all APA ethical guidelines for animal research.

Which of the following areas of the body has the largest number of sensory neurons?

Lips

Which of the following is the correct sequence of the neural chain of events set in motion by an environmental stimulus?

Receptors, afferent neurons, interneurons, efferent neurons, effectors

For most people, which of the following is an activity based in the right hemisphere of the brain?

Simple spatial reasoning

Which of the following most accurately describes a dependent variable?

Some aspect of a participant's response that is measured in an experiment

Which part of the nervous system is most immediately activated by sudden fear?

Sympathetic

Professor Janeja is studying which brain regions are involved in learning to correctly navigate a maze task. She randomly assigns half of a group of mice to get a lesion in one area of the brain. The other half does not get a lesion. Based on the following graph, where in the brain is the most likely site of the lesion?

The hippocampus

Hunger and eating are primarily regulated by which of the following?

The hypothalamus

Which of the following biological systems is most likely responsible for an increase in heart rate while experiencing anxiety?

The sympathetic nervous system

Neurotransmitters are typically stored in which of the following parts of a neuron?

The terminal buttons

Which of the following best describes the response of members of the American Psychological Association to ethical issues in research?

They have developed codes of ethics for research with both human participants and animal subjects.

Marjorie's little brother tends to bother her when he is bored. Marjorie wants to figure out which toy will keep her brother occupied the longest so he will not bother her. She conducts a study where each day at 6P.M. for a week she gives her brother a different toy and on one of the days she gives him no toys to play with. She measures the amount of time he spends playing with each toy before he comes to bother her. Which of the following is the independent variable in this example?

Type of toy

When is it permissible for a psychologist to share a client's test scores with another person?

When the client provides written permission to share results

The part of the neuron that is responsible for receiving signals from other neurons is called

a dendrite

Jane Goodall lived among wild chimpanzees intermittently for decades, studying their social and family systems while keeping her interaction with the chimpanzees to a minimum. Her research method can most accurately be described as

naturalistic observation

Dopamine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine are all

neurotransmitters that excite or inhibit a neural signal across a synapse

Dr. Naum is studying the function of the medial temporal lobe of the brain by examining the case study of J.S., an individual who incurred damage in this area during a motor vehicle accident. Dr. Naum administers a battery of tasks multiple times over the course of several weeks to assess J.S.'s cognitive abilities. The graph below shows J.S.'s performance on three different tasks. The bar on the left shows his accuracy forming new memories in a lab context, the middle bar shows his accuracy on a driving course, and the bar on the right shows his accuracy on a third task. Based on the scores on the three tasks, Task 3 most likely involves

remembering events that occurred shortly before his accident

The process by which neurotransmitters are reabsorbed into the neuron after it fires is called

reuptake

The right occipital lobe receives visual information from the

right half of both retinas

The most distinctive characteristic of the experimental method is that it

seeks to establish cause-effect relationships

The next questions refer to the situation described below. In an experiment designed to determine whether watching violent scenes on television increases the frequency of aggressive behavior in children, one group of subjects saw a nonviolent cartoon and another group saw a violent cartoon. In the play period that followed the viewing of the cartoons, researchers observed the two groups of children together and counted instances of aggressive behavior. The control group in the experiment is the group that

watched the nonviolent cartoon

Damage to the cerebellum would most likely result in which of the following problems?

A loss of motor coordination

Brain damage that leaves a person capable of understanding speech but with an impaired ability to produce speech most likely indicates injury to which of the following?

Broca's area

What is the best way to ensure that results of a study are generalizable to a population?

By using a random selection of people in that population

Which of the following parts of the brain is most active in decision-making?

Cerebral cortex

Dr. Patel is conducting a study to test a hair-growth shampoo she is developing. She instructs fifty participants to use the hair-growth shampoo once daily for a month and another fifty to use a regular shampoo once a day for a month. Dr. Patel measures the participants' hair length at the beginning and the end of the thirty days. Which of the following is the dependent variable?

Change in hair length

Which of the following allows the examination of living brain tissue visually without performing surgery?

Computerized axial tomography

Which of the following systems produces, circulates, and regulates levels of hormones in the body?

Endocrine system

The next questions refer to the situation described below. In an experiment designed to determine whether watching violent scenes on television increases the frequency of aggressive behavior in children, one group of subjects saw a nonviolent cartoon and another group saw a violent cartoon. In the play period that followed the viewing of the cartoons, researchers observed the two groups of children together and counted instances of aggressive behavior. The dependent variable in the experiment is the

amount of aggressive behavior exhibited by the children

A research design involves two randomly assigned groups of participants. One group receives a one-time treatment, and the other does not. Later, the two groups are compared to see whether the treatment had an effect. Psychologists call this kind of research

an experiment

Dr. Larson was interested in whether classical music helps students perform better on a test. Dr. Larson randomly assigned half of the study's participants to a group that listened to classical music while taking a test. The other half of the participants did not listen to music while taking a test. The research design Dr. Larson used is

an experiment

To determine whether a cause-effect relationship exists between two variables, a researcher must use

an experimental approach

Activation of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system results in

an increase in respiratory rate

Item 6 The autonomic nervous system is most directly involved in

digesting food

Treating a patient for Parkinson's disease includes administering a chemical that will lead to increases in the patient's

dopamine

Drawing a random sample of people from a town for an interview study of social attitudes ensures that

each person in the town has the same probability of being chosen for the study

The role of the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system is to

establish homeostasis after a fight-or-flight response

In a research study, informed consent is a concern of

ethics

A researcher uses debriefing when he

explains the true purpose of a study immediately after the study is complete

Stimulation of portions of the left temporal lobe of the brain during surgery will cause the patient to

hear sounds

The most important reason to use operational definitions in psychological research is it

helps everyone involved with the research understand and collect data in the same manner.

The brain scans of people with amnesia are most likely to show damage to the

hippocampus

The part of the endocrine system that is responsible for overseeing and regulating the release of hormones across the entire body is the

hypothalamus

Brain lateralization refers to the

inclination for certain cognitive processes to be specialized to one hemisphere of the brain or the other

The primary effect of the myelin sheath is to

increase the velocity of conduction of the action potential along the axon

A survey shows that children who have encyclopedias in their homes earn better grades in school than children whose homes lack encyclopedias. The researcher concludes that having encyclopedias at home improves grades. This conclusion is erroneous primarily because the researcher has incorrectly

inferred causation from correlation

A study can be regarded as scientific only if

its conclusions can be verified or refuted by subsequent studies

For most people, speech functions are primarily localized in the

left cerebral hemisphere

People who have experienced severe damage to the frontal lobe of the brain seldom regain their ability to

make and carry out plans

The area of the brain stem that is important in controlling breathing is the

medulla

In order to yield information that is generalizable to the population from which it was drawn, a sample must be

representative of the population

Dr. Frishkoff is studying how participants' brain activity changes when they read sentences in which the last word is either expected ("The pizza was too hot to eat") or unexpected ("The pizza was too hot to cry"). While participants are reading, Dr. Frishkoff measures their brain activity. The results of her experiment are shown below. Dr. Frishkoff could accurately describe the results of her study by saying that participants

showed a negative-going peak in brain wave activity approximately 400 milliseconds after the unexpected word was presented that the participants did not show in response to the expected word

The sequence of shifts in the electrical charge of a neuron is called

the action potential

During neuronal firing, the part of the neuron that acts as an insulator and conductor to speed the electrical impulse as it travels down the axon is

the myelin sheath

Abnormalities in calcium regulation are most likely to arise from problems with

the parathyroid gland

The occipital lobes contain

the primary visual cortex

The time shortly after a neuron fires is referred to as

the refractory period

The generalizability of a study increases when

the sample is more representative of the population

Professor Ahad has forty-three students in section one of the psychology classes she teaches and fifty-two students in section two. Section one meets at eight a.m. and, section two meets at one p.m. Professor Ahad gives all of her students the same final exam, and those in section two score significantly higher than those in section one. Professor Ahad concludes that her section one students are academically inferior to students in section two. The biggest problem with Professor Ahad's conclusion is that

time of day is a confounding variable in this scenario.

Which of the following provides information regarding brain function by monitoring the brain at work through metabolism of glucose?

Positron emission tomography (PET)

In which of the following types of research are the same children tested periodically at different points in their development?

Longitudinal

Which of the following research methods is being used if the same subjects are tested at two, four, and six years of age?

Longitudinal

Which of the following is brain-imaging technique that produces the most detailed picture of brain structure?

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Which chemical is most closely associated with sleep?

Melatonin

The person most strongly associated with identifying deficits in the motor speech area and in the ability to produce speech is

Paul Broca

Which of the following occurs when a neuron is stimulated to its threshold?

The movements of sodium and potassium ions across the membrane creates an action potential.

An instructor conducted an experiment to determine the effects of two different methods of study on the amount students learned in introductory physics. The results showed that the average amount learned by the group using one method was greater than the average amount learned by the group using the other. However, the difference was not statistically significant. Which of the following is the most appropriate conclusion to be drawn?

There is a possibility that the difference between the two groups occurred by chance.