Intro to Psychology Chapters 1-5

Which scenario best illustrates infantile amnesia?

A 40-year-old man cannot recall any details of his second birthday party

Of the following people, whose brain would be most plastic?

A 5-year-old child

Which of the following demonstrates the concept of habituation?

A baby glances at a familiar stuffed animal, then stares at a new one

Evan has developed articulate verbal skills, often rattling off the details of the workings of his various toys. However, Evan finds it very difficult to understand what other people think and feel. As a result, he has trouble forming relationships with other children at school. Evan likely has

Asperger's syndrome.

Which function is most directly controlled by the brainstem?

Breathing

Which statement is not consistent with research on cognitive processing and aging?

Crystallized intelligence continues to grow through the aging process.

The molecule present in the chromosomes that "codes" hereditary information is called

DNA.

Which statement provides the most accurate description of Alzheimer's disease?

Dementia caused by the build-up of amyloid inside and outside of acetylcholine neurons

_______ psychologists study how the mind and behavior progress as people age.

Developmental

Which of the following conditions affects the appearance of the child's face and causes significant damage to the developing brain?

Fetal alcohol syndrome

_______ intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly and solve novel problems, and _______ intelligence is the accumulation of facts, experience, and historical references

Fluid; crystallized

Which correctly names the lobes labeled 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively?

Frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, temporal lobe

Which factor is most closely associated with the eventual onset of schizophrenia?

Growing up in a big city

In the homunculus that corresponds to the mapping of the somatosensory cortex, which body part occupies the largest area?

Hand

Which of the following samples would produce a nearly normal distribution?

Heights of all adult men in America

Which statement about information transmission between neurons is correct?

Information between two neurons passes in only one direction at the synapse.

Which type of neuron is most common in the brain?

Interneuron

What can be concluded from the psychological study of attachment?

It is an emotional bond and is necessary for children and parents to remain engaged.

Which scenario describes a child who has mastered the concept of conservation of mass?

Jane knows that she has the same amount of clay in her round ball as Rico has in his flat disk

Which is most consistent with the textbook's characterization of how nurture influences behavior?

Learning experiences and social interactions affect how we use the genes that we inherited

If a doctor stimulated your occipital lobe, which would you be most likely to experience?

Lights and colors

A scientist is interested in understanding how the size of the prefrontal cortex changes between the ages of 9 and 13. Which of the following brain imaging techniques would she be most likely to use?

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

_______ twins share 100 percent of their DNA

Monozygotic

How do gene mutations contribute to evolution?

Natural selection favors beneficial mutations, so they survive and are passed on to future generations

Juan is thirteen months old and is no longer surprised when his mother hides his toy train, only to reveal it again in a different position in front of him. What cognitive milestone is Juan displaying?

Object permanence

Scientific investigation of Clever Hans revealed that

Occam's razor is far from infallible.

What does it mean to say that schizophrenia is heritable?

People with close blood relatives with schizophrenia are more likely to develop symptoms than the general population

The foundations of psychology are most closely related to which of the following disciplines?

Philosophy

Which strategy has been most effective in reducing the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)?

Placing babies on their backs when sleeping

. The study of how physical events, such as lights and sounds, affect our senses is called

Psychophysics

A meta-analysis of published and unpublished tests of SSRI medications revealed that

SSRIs beat placebos only for severe levels of depression

Children's theory of mind can be assessed with the

Sally and Anne test.

Which is the most likely reason that Hester was the first of the Genain quadruplets to develop schizophrenic symptoms?

She had the lowest birth weight of the quadruplets.

Which statement best captures the concept of a sensitive period?

Some abilities, such as 3-D vision, will not develop if a child does not have proper sensory input early in life.

Which reflex helps the infant feed on breast milk?

Sucking

During which stage of neural development do the neurons begin to branch out to form connections with one another?

Synaptogenesis

Which of the following is true about the strength of a correlation?

The closer a correlation is to 0.00, the weaker the relationship.

Which developmental milestone characterizes menarche?

The onset of menstruation

When one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other develops it only about half of the time. What is the most likely explanation for this?

There is an environmental component involved in developing schizophrenia.

A scientist is testing the hypothesis that inhibiting neural activity in the prefrontal cortex could help relieve depression. Which technique would be most useful for testing this hypothesis?

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

_______ temporarily disrupts brain activity

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

Why did women make few contributions to psychology in the first part of the 20th century?

Widespread sexism limited women's participation in science.

Which of the following would be evidence against the social brain hypothesis?

Your sister is clearly able to engage in meaningful social interactions with all of her 500 friends on Tumblr

Any substance that disrupts the flow of nutrients to the brain, or in any way harms the fetus, is called

a teratogen.

A hypothesis is

a testable prediction about the relationship between variables

Myelinated axons are useful because they

allow action potentials to travel more quickly

Adolescents are in the fifth stage of psychosocial development, and according to Erikson, are most concerned with developing

an identity.

On a hike, you find branches arranged to form a three-foot-tall pyramid, surrounded by a circle of pebbles. Occam's razor would support the hypothesis that _______ created this pyramid.

another hiker

Gestalt psychologists such as Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler

argue that the overall experience of human perception is greater than the sum of its parts.

According to Piaget's theory, the two processes that drive children's mental development are called

assimilation and accommodation.

Axons differ from dendrites in that

axons transmit information and dendrites receive information.

In order to fit a growing number of synapses into the skull, a human brain

becomes increasingly wrinkled.

Though generally satisfied with life, older people do experience a sense of loss and longing after the death of a friend or loved one. This is called

bereavement

In cases where only one of two identical twins develops schizophrenia, all of the following factors may be responsible except

birth order.

The hallmarks of psychology as a science are

careful experimentation and the application of critical thinking.

To better understand aggressive behavior toward strangers, a psychologist gathers all available information about a man who threatened random people in a mall with an automatic weapon. This is an example of

case study research

The term "plasticity" is used to describe the human brain as

changeable.

Each of our _______ consists of tightly coiled DNA.

chromosomes

The rod-shaped cellular structures that contain human DNA are called

chromosomes.

Jessica has mastered addition and subtraction with two- and three-digit numbers. She still struggles to understand more general mathematical rules, such as the fact that multiplying a number by -1 will always yield a negative number. She is likely in the _______ stage of cognitive development.

concrete operational

A recent study found that married people are less likely to have personality disorders than unmarried people. The news reporter covering the study advised people to get married to improve their personalities. You know this recommendation is not warranted because

correlational research is invalid

The numerals 1, 2, 3, and 4 refer to _______, respectively

dendrites, cell body, axon, and axon terminals

In an experiment, the variable that is expected to differ across the experimental and control groups is the _______ variable.

dependent

In a developing placenta, the inner cell mass is the part of the embryo that

develops into the body.

During neural development, the nervous system generates more cells than it ultimately needs. Over half of the extra cells

die though a natural process before birth

In the experiment with dull and bright rats, Cooper and Zubek demonstrated a gene-environment interaction by showing that when navigating the maze

dull rats raised in enriched environments eventually performed as well as bright rats.

The scientific study of factors that affect gene expression is called

epigenetics.

A behaviorist would be least concerned with

events that occurred in the past.

Research that involves intentional manipulation of variables is called _______ research.

experimental

Parents who agree with John Locke's notion of tabula rasa would most likely

expose their children to a rich variety of sensory experiences

Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark found that doll tests

exposed internalized racism in African-American children, particularly among children attending segregated schools

Your first cell began making proteins when your father's sperm fused with your mother's egg in the process of

fertilization.

Many people over age forty develop presbyopia, a condition in which it becomes difficult to

focus on nearby objects.

Cognitive psychology

focuses on how people think, remember, store, and use information

Though our brains are almost fully developed by the time we reach adolescence, enormous changes continue in the brain region called the _______ lobe.

frontal

Compared to computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans

generally provide more detailed structural information.

Your baby cousin gazes at a new ball for several seconds, then turns her attention to other objects in the room. She is demonstrating

habituation.

Psychologists now believe that subliminal advertising

has a weak effect on consumers, if any at all.

According to René Descartes, the very fact that he is thinking proves that

he exists.

The development of secondary sex characteristics, such as breast development in girls, is driven by

hormones

The key difference between twin studies and adoption studies is that in adoption studies

identical twins are separated at birth and raised apart.

Baby chicks born on a farm will often follow the human that they first see when they hatch. This is a result of _______, the innate process of learning to recognizing a parent.

imprinting

If human beings demonstrated _______, a newborn baby would think that the attending physician in the delivery room was her mother or father

imprinting

Many research findings indicate that disease, malnutrition, and neglect _______ the probability that a person will develop schizophrenia

increase

Strong inference

involves designing research with the potential to disprove a hypothesis

The expression of genes

is constantly changing in response to the environment.

A heritable trait is one that

is influenced by genes inherited from one's parents

Refer to the set of numbers below. 2, 8, 3, 4, 8, 10, 0 In the set of numbers, the median is _______ than the mean and _______than the mode.

less;less

Colorblindness is more common in males than in females because

males receive only one allele (on the X chromosome) for that gene for color vision.

Infants progressively show more complex motor behaviors, which is primarily the result of

maturation of the brain

A correlation of -0.80 between meditation and anxiety symptoms would indicate

meditation predicts lower levels of anxiety

The hippocampus plays the most significant role in

memory.

Before scientists fully understood the cause of PKU, infants with the disorder often developed

mental impairment.

Mutations arise from

mistakes in copying DNA from a parent when eggs or sperm are made.

Identical twins are called _______, while non-identical twins are called _______.

monozygotic; dizygotic

The difference between a zygote and an embryo is that the embryo is

more complex.

The three main functional types of neurons are

motor, sensory, and interneurons.

A researcher hoping to identify autism's early warning signs collects home videos of autistic teens. She uses these videos of their formative years to identify atypical movements as they learned to crawl and walk. This is an example of

naturalistic observation.

Both the spinal cord and the brain develop from the fetal structure called the

neural tube.

The brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease are typically littered with clumps of dead and dying neurons, called

neuritic plaques.

The first stage of neural development is _______, the continuous division of cells at a rate of up to 250,000 a minute

neurogenesis

Otto Loewi electrically stimulated a nerve in a frog heart. He then applied fluid surrounding that heart to a second heart. In this experiment, he found evidence that

neurons communicate chemically.

A _______ is most likely to study the brain activities that underlie human behavior

neuroscientist

A person who has PKU should avoid all food containing

phenylalanine

Modern brain research has refuted Descartes's concept of the human mind by

providing evidence that damage to specific parts of the brain causes very specific losses of behaviors.

The landmark in development when an individual becomes capable of reproduction is called

puberty

Treatment-outcome researchers attempt to prevent initial differences between treatment and control groups by using

randomization

Kohlberg constructed his theory of moral reasoning by asking people to decide how a fictional character, Heinz, should respond to a moral dilemma. Kohlberg was most interested in the

reasoning by which people reached their decisions

A warm and nurturing home environment could affect the future of a baby with a family history of schizophrenia by

reducing or eliminating controllable sources of stress.

In Plato's cave allegory, a prisoner was temporarily unchained and allowed to see the fire at the mouth of the cave. When he returned to the chains, the other prisoners

refused to believe him

A measure of conscientiousness produces very similar scores each time a person repeats the exercise, but it doesn't predict whether a person is reliable in everyday life. This measure appears to be

reliable and valid.

All of the following activities have been shown to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease except

resting the brain by avoiding complex cognitive tasks.

At six months old a child is likely to be

rolling over

When a touch to the cheek elicits a turn of an infant's head, the infant is displaying a simple reflex called

rooting.

Gina is very attached to her father, who is her primary caregiver. She is usually upset when he leaves her with her grandmother to go to work, but Gina is always happy when he returns in the evening. Gina is displaying

secure attachment.

When you scrape your knee, pain is relayed from your knee to your central nervous system by

sensory neurons

If you and your sibling share a trait, then by definition you

share a particular genotype.

Mary Ainsworth found that infants vary in their attachment styles by using an experimental procedure called the

strange situation task.

. At about eight months of age, as a part of normal attachment development, infants begin to show

stranger anxiety.

A person's emotional makeup is called

temperament

Menopause is characterized by

the end of monthly menstrual cycles.

The discipline of psychology can most accurately be defined as the study of

the mind and behavior

Synapses are

tiny gaps between cells that are important for neural communication

PET scans

track radioactive markers in the blood.

Researchers can tell if an infant prefers a visual stimulus, such as a face, to another stimulus by

tracking how long an infant looks at each stimulus.

The corpus callosum is directly responsible for

transferring information between the left and right hemispheres.

Although very few people would admit to a belief that men make better hires than women, several experiments show that men are more likely to be hired than women with identical résumés. This is an example of

unconscious bias.

A fertilized human egg cell is called a

zygote.

Which of the following constitutes a gene?

A length of DNA

Deception in psychological research

is occasionally allowed but must be followed by a thorough debriefing.

Complex behavior is controlled by

neural networks

Scientific investigation has revealed that the "Mozart Effect" (the notion that children become smarter from listening to the music of Mozart) is

not substantiated through research

The part of the cell that contains chromosomes is called the

nucleus.

When psychologists use the term "nature" to refer to causes of behaviors, they mean

our genes and strictly biological influences

White matter refers to

parts of the brain filled with myelinated axons.

Regardless of what your current _______ displays, your _______ never changes.

phenotype; genotype

"The death penalty is immoral" is a _______ hypothesis because it _______.

poor; is not testable

Following a head injury, Maria experienced a dramatic personality change. She now gambles heavily, swears and yells at work, and has difficulty planning ahead. She most likely experienced damage to her

prefrontal cortex

The key purpose of myelin is to

provide electrical insulation.

Ethical principles require researchers to

provide information about potential risks to participants before they begin a study

In a behaviorist approach to treatment for a patient with a fear of rats, the patient is

repeatedly exposed to stimuli that are gradually more and more like rats

The Tuskegee syphilis study is famous because

researchers failed to inform participants that they had a treatable disease

To allow communication, neurons

send chemical messages across small gaps between neurons.

Dopamine is most directly involved in

signaling pleasure.

Damage to the left cerebral hemisphere would most likely affect a man's ability to

speak and understand language.

As the number of pirates in the world has decreased, the mean global temperature has increased. This is an example of a

spurious correlation

A manager at a science museum wants to identify the most popular exhibits, so once every hour for six weeks she has volunteers count the number of people standing in front of each exhibit. This is an example of

survey research

Which of the following research methods would be most appropriate for investigating the relationship between political orientation and belief in climate change?

survey research

To identify the most popular exhibits at a science museum, every day for six weeks all visitors were asked to rate how much they enjoyed each exhibit. The data were analyzed to look for age and sex differences in exhibit preferences. This was an example of

survey research.

Your text describes a study in which professors receive e-mails, supposedly from students, asking for mentoring. All details about the e-mails are identical except whether they appear to come from males or females and from whites or nonwhites. This is _______ research, and found _______.

correlational; bias against women and minorities

Psychological research has proven that many long-held, popular beliefs about psychology are untrue. Psychology as a science has been able to accomplish this by emphasizing

critical thinking

Your uncle tells you about an interesting magazine article explaining that humans use only 10 percent of their brains. As a student of psychology, your response should be:

"Well, research actually shows that almost all of the brain is continually active."

As you and your roommate watch a news report about a big fight that broke out at a local club, he turns to you and says, "I'm not surprised. It's a full moon, after all. People always go crazy around the full moon." As a student of psychology, your response should be:

"When you look at police records, the actual data do not really support that idea."

Which of the following best represents the case study method?

A book that documents the development of a person who was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness at a young age

A research team is investigating the impact of stereotypes on performance. In one group, women read an article about why the structure of men's brains makes them better at math. In the second group, women read an article saying there are no biological differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women. Then all women in the study take a challenging math test. Researchers time the test and score the number of items women answered correctly. In this study, which of the following is the independent variable?

Women's scores on the math test

The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee is responsible for all of the following except

collecting blood and tissue samples from research animals.

You are trying to overcome your fear of snakes. Inspired by the work of Mary Cover Jones, your therapist first shows you some pictures of snakes. Then she tells you that there is a small snake in a cage in the next room. She asks you to observe the live snake from a distance, and continues this process until your fear is conquered. Your therapist is using the technique called

desensitization.

For a behaviorist, the goal of psychology is to

determine how various experiences result in different behaviors

In a depression-treatment study, neither the participants nor the researcher know who is taking medication and who is taking a sugar pill. This is an example of a

double-blind trial.

The technique that detects voltage changes in the brain is

electroencephalography (EEG).

The limbic system is most involved in

emotion.

The thyroid and the pituitary gland are part of the

endocrine system.

Debi just ran a marathon in less than four hours and felt no pain during the run. Her lack of pain was most likely due to

endorphins.

The belief that genes determine everything about us, including our behavior, is referred to as

genetic determinism.

The endocrine system controls

hormone production and release.

Students _______ would be the most representative sample for a study of competitiveness in high school.

in a required health class