AP Psychology Unit 1

Of the following, an evolutionary psychologist will most likely investigate the

reason why many people have an innate fear of the dark

Which of the following is the strongest correlation?

-.90

A group of ten students took a spelling test on Monday (Test 1), and then the same group of students took the same test again on Friday (Test 2). The scores on the two tests are given in the table. Which of the following is a correlation coefficient that was most likely obtained using the two sets of scores?

.88

On a test, the mean score for a class of 100 students is 80 and the standard deviation of the scores is 10. The professor who gave the test then realizes that she made a scoring error, which she corrects by adding 5 points to each student's score. The standard deviation of the students' new scores is

10

Dr. Barak's research focuses on how neurochemical makeup affects cognition, behavior, and emotion. Dr. Barak's approach is most likely

Biological

A person displays a set of rare behaviors that psychologists had not known about previously, because nobody had ever shown them before. The best strategy to investigate the nature of those behaviors is...

A case study

Dorothea Dix was known for

documenting the poor conditions of mental asylums, which eventually led to their reform

Research finds that, in general, the higher an incoming college student scores on a given test, the higher the student's college grade point average (GPA). Which of the following best describes this relationship?

A positive correlation

The next questions are based on the following. The figure shows a table with three columns and ten rows of data. Columns labeled "participant" "hours spend watch TV per day" "grade point average" What type of graph would a researcher use to represent these data?

A scatterplot

Which of the following characterizes a behavioral approach to psychology?

A study of how reinforcement affects learning

Which of the following studies is from an evolutionary perspective?

A study to see if women were more attracted to men who liked children than men who did not like children

A school's activities committee is planning for the upcoming school year. Which of the following research methods will best help measure student opinions on a variety of activities?

A survey

Researchers have found a negative correlation between income and dental problems. What conclusion can correctly be drawn from this statement?

As income increases, the likelihood of dental problems decreases.

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

Ivan Pavlov was most well known for which of the following?

Conditioning dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell

Researchers examined injury reports for 480 professional football games and determined there was an association between outdoor temperature and number of concussions reported. Which of the following best describes the type of research method used in this study?

Correlational

Introspection as practiced by early structuralists is best illustrated by which of the following behaviors?

Describing one's immediate sensations while looking at a rose

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.

Research has demonstrated that when participants in a study are shown a picture of a snake and a picture of a house, they are more likely to develop autonomic fear responses, such as increased sweating and heart rate, in response to the picture of the snake. It has also been found that fear responses to a picture of a house are quickly extinguished, whereas fear responses to a picture of a snake are maintained at a high level. These findings best support which of the following psychological perspectives?

Evolutionary

The claim that a whole is different from the sum of its parts is central to which of the following schools of thought?

Gestalt psychology

A researcher finds a .50 correlation between college grades and income at age 30. Which of the following interpretations of these data is correct?

Good grades in college and high incomes are related

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.

Elana recorded the height of all of her classmates and calculated the standard deviation. If everything else stayed the same, what change to the data would make the standard deviation increase?

If the tallest person were taller

Which of the following statements best describes the placebo effect?

It can be brought about by the individual's expectations.

In a normal distribution, which of the following statements is true about the area that falls between one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean?

It contains the middle 68% of the distribution.

Professor González is interested in evaluating the ability of a new method of note-taking to improve student grades. Group A is trained in the new method and group B uses the traditional outline method of taking notes. What is Professor González' independent variable?

Method of note taking

Margaret is beginning to plan a research project for her psychology class. She wants to examine whether there is a difference between boys and girls in terms of the frequency with which they throw away their trash in the school cafeteria after they have finished eating lunch. Which of the following methodologies would most accurately measure the behavior of interest in Margaret's study?

Naturalistic observation

Jeremy recorded his school's consumption of heating oil and the mean outside temperature each day for a month. His analysis showed that as the temperature decreased his school used more oil. Which of the following terms best characterizes the association between these two variables?

Negative correlation

A disadvantage of longitudinal studies is that...

Participants who drop oit during the course of the study may be different in important ways from ones who do not drop out

Of the following topics, which would a cognitive psychologist be most likely to study?

Problem-solving strategies in chess

Humanists would most likely criticize behaviorists on the grounds that behaviorism

Rejects free will and focuses solely on observable experiences

A psychologist gives the same test to a class of students at the beginning of the day and again at the end of the school day. The extent to which test scores are similar across the two administrations demonstrates which of the following test properties?

Reliability

All of the following are American Psychological Association ethical guidelines for researchers EXCEPT:

Research may not involve deception.

Students from a journalism class ask only their friends to participate in a school newspaper survey and neglect to ask the rest of the student body. The journalism students' data may not be generalizable due to

Sampling bias

Charlie believes anorexia nervosa is the direct result of the emphasis put on thinness in movies, television, and advertisements. Which of the following approaches is most consistent with Charlie's viewpoint?

Sociocultural

A psychological researcher designs a study to determine whether positive feedback affects self-esteem. The researcher requires each participant to toss twenty coins into a coffee can that is three feet away. Half of the participants are told that their performance is superior, and the other half are told that their performance is well below average. Although some of the participants want to quit tossing coins after a few attempts, they are told that once they begin the study they have to complete it. After the coin toss, participants take a test measuring self-esteem. Following the test, all participants are debriefed and told that information about their performance was false. Results of the study indicate that participants who are told their performance is well below average report lower levels of self-esteem than do those who are told their performance is superior. Which of the following elements constitutes the independent variable in the study?

The feedback about relative performance in coin tossing

Which of the following statements describes the mean, median, and mode of a test whose scores are normally distributed?

The mean, the median, and the mode will be the same value

A test with normally distributed results was returned to a class of 100 students. Later, the teacher realized an error was made and added 10 points to each student's score. Which of the following must have changed as a result of the increase in scores?

The mode

Operational definitions are used for which of the following reasons?

They enable researchers to replicate studies by precisely describing the variables and how they are used.

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

A psychological researcher designs a study to determine whether positive feedback affects self-esteem. The researcher requires each participant to toss twenty coins into a coffee can that is three feet away. Half of the participants are told that their performance is superior, and the other half are told that their performance is well below average. Although some of the participants want to quit tossing coins after a few attempts, they are told that once they begin the study they have to complete it. After the coin toss, participants take a test measuring self-esteem. Following the test, all participants are debriefed and told that information about their performance was false. Results of the study indicate that participants who are told their performance is well below average report lower levels of self-esteem than do those who are told their performance is superior. Which of the following violations of ethical guidelines occurs in the study?

Violation of the right to withdraw

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

A research team wanted to measure how attractive Chris thought Pat was. The researchers measured how long Chris spent looking at Pat as an indicator of how attractive Chris found Pat to be. This measurement constituted

an operational definition

According to Wilhelm Wundt, the focus of scientific psychology should be the study of

conscious experience

An industrial-organizational psychologist would be most likely to study the

effectiveness of management training

Of the following, a behavioral psychologist is most likely to study the

effects of token economies on establishing social skills among children with emotional disturbances

Which of the following research approaches would be best for testing the hypothesis that the presence of certain odors causes people to gamble more?

experimental

What field of psychology is most appropriate to analyze the efficiency of businesses in their hiring, basic training, and management leadership skills training?

industrial/organizational

Which of the following is a statistical approach concerned with forming conclusions about the effect of the independent variable on variations in the dependent variable?

inferential

In the early years of psychology, a research participant might have been asked to observe carefully and systematically his conscious experiences. What method would the participant be using?

introspection

Experimental research differs from correlational research in that experimental research

may reveal a causal relation

Dr. Grayson is interested in studying the relationship between weight loss and mood. To conduct the study, Dr. Grayson analyzes the results of several previous studies on weight loss and emotional state. Which research strategy is Dr. Grayson using?

meta-analysis

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

A research group conducted a study investigating the connection between self-reported number of hours slept in a given week and scores on a happiness measure. Based on the scatterplot above, the group can report that there is

positive correlation

Which of the following is required for a psychological experiment?

precise operational definitions

The belief that human behavior is the result of unconscious drives and conflicts represents which of the following theoretical perspectives?

psychoanalytic

The figure shows a table with three columns and ten rows of data. Columns labeled "participant" "hours spend watch TV per day" "grade point average" Which of the following statistics best approximates the relation between the variables?

r= -.90

Which of the following is used to reduce the effects of confounding variables in experiments?

random assignment

In developmental psychology, one advantage of cross-sectional over longitudinal studies is that cross-sectional research

requires comparatively little time

Research shows that women who are referred by a physician to participate in a study of eating disorders have more severe problems than women who volunteer on their own to participate in the study. If research on eating disorders regularly involves only women referred by physicians, the results of the studies might be limited because of the presence of

sampling bias

Standard deviation is a measure of how much

scores in a group differ from the mean of that group

A research psychologist generalizes from a particular sample to an entire population. This is an example of

statistical inference

An evolutionary psychologist would explainthat humans desire social interaction, social acceptance, and social affiliation due to a need for

survival

Cognitive psychologists are most likely to study

the acquisition of knowledge, planning, and problem solving

The results of a correlational study involving student volunteers in a psychology laboratory might not apply to the general population because

the sample is not randomly chosen and therefore may not be a representative sample