Psych Quizzes

The area housed inside of the cortex and located at the very back of the brain is called the ________. It contains the midbrain, pons, and medulla.

Brainstem

________ was the first person to describe learning as acquired through classical conditioning while studying the digestive process of dogs.

Ivan Pavlov

Learning that is not directly observable is called

Latent learning

Sarah has just received her drivers' license and is now ready to drive to school. Although she's never driven to her school before, Sarah knows the way. The fact that Sarah can drive herself to school suggests that ________ has occurred.

Latent learning

Which of the following statements about learning is true?

Learning and habituation are related but different concepts.

One difficulty of survey research is that people may not answer questions with complete honesty, and thus may skew the results of the study. If people give different answers to a survey question that is asked on different occasions, this would be a particular problem for the critical thinking concept of ________

Replicability

Researchers exploring the concept of biological preparedness have not been able to consistently find that fear is acquired faster to a prepared stimulus than it is to an unprepared stimulus. This lack of research consistency is a problem for which of the six principles of scientific thinking?

Replicability

Which of the following is true concerning Tolman and Honzik's classic study of latent learning?

Rats were able to learn even when they were not receiving reinforcement.

_________ is consistency of measurement.

Reliability

The ________ effect refers to the sudden reemergence of a conditioned response following extinction when an animal is returned to the environment in which the conditioned response was first acquired.

Renewal

Dr. Francis is conducting a study in which she is examining the impact of a new math tutoring program on elementary school students' performance in a math class. She has hypothesized that the tutoring will significantly increase the performance of students who are enrolled in this program. She has to remember not to let her expectation of an outcome influence her interpretation of the final data. In other words, she needs to defend against the ________ effect

Rosenthal

Modern psychology is best considered to be a

Science

We experience the phenomenon of patternicity when we

See a pattern where none really exists

When psychologists want to find out about people's personality or attitudes, an effective research tool would be a(n):

Self-report measure

Ryan, a professional bass fisherman, is trying to determine which lure is most effective on Wakeby Lake: the plastic worm he normally uses or the new minnow-style lure he bought yesterday. Based on this scenario, what would constitute the control?

The plastic worm

The main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the nervous system is

Gamma-aminobutyric acid

What is the relationship between the p-value of a study and its statistical significance?

The lower the p-value, the greater the statistical significance.

The large difference in the percentages of women who admitted to extramarital affairs in the Hite Report versus a Harris organization pool was most likely due to:

The method of participant selection used in each study

Mark and Kathy take their 2-year-old son to the supermarket every Saturday. Each week, the same sequence of events unfolds: Their son screams, demanding that they buy him treats. Although they refuse to give in to his demands, he continues to scream. Finally, either Mark or Kathy gets in their son's face and yells at the top of their lungs "Shut up!" He stops screaming instantly. What operant conditioning concepts are illustrated in this story?

The parents are using punishment to suppress the screaming; their use of punishment is negatively reinforced by the cessation of screaming

Assuming that something is so simply because a teacher or religious authority said it is so, is an example of

Appeal to authority fallacy

A claim must be falsifiable in order to be useful. However, we also need this claim to

Be replicated by others

You are listening in on a discussion among a group of psychology majors. One major says that the field will move forward only if we use objective methods for understanding the principles that guide human actions. This statement is most consistent with

Behaviorism

If a person were to say that a scientific finding was replicated, he or she would be saying that the finding was

Capable of being consistently duplicated

Which part of the neuron is responsible for manufacturing proteins?

Cell body

Which of the following is most representative of research concerning learning styles?

Certain teaching approaches seem to work best irrespective of the learning style that an individual student has

An administrator believes that the placement of motivational posters on the walls in classrooms of academic buildings will lead to increased GPAs at his school. To test his theory, he randomly assigns certain classrooms within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to have the posters while others do not. None of the remaining four academic colleges have any posters placed in their classrooms. What is the independent variable in this study?

Classroom wall hangings

A classmate tells you the following, "It's not how a teacher answers your question that matters but how you interpret his or her attempt at answering your question that leaves you satisfied or unsatisfied with his or her answer." This statement fits most closely with ideas from the school of thought known as

Cognitivism

Sometimes a person's corpus callosum is split, which separates the two hemispheres completely. This is done to

Control epilepsy

If research finds that those who drive taxicabs have enlarged areas of their hippocampi, you may be tempted to believe that driving a cab and engaging in such visuospatial activities each day causes the hippocampus areas to grow. This may or may not be the case, and this riddle demonstrates the principle of

Correlation vs. causation

Professor Wagner is explaining to his subjects the purpose behind the experiment they just participated in, along with a general description of the results. He is engaging in what aspect of a research study?

Debriefing

Which of the following is a likely endocrine-based effect of damage to the hypothalamus?

Deregulation of hormones

Recently, ads have appeared on the radio for some natural herbs that will calm you, increase your sense of well-being, and make you happier in a month's time. You are sure this is a pseudoscientific claim because it is

Exaggerated

In Pavlov's "salivating dogs" studies, the UCS was

Food

What is one take home message from the discussion of autism and facilitated communication?

In almost all cases researched, the data failed to support the idea that facilitated communication was truly effective.

The variations that people show in their thinking, emotions, personalities, and behaviors are referred to as __________.

Individual differences

Mary conducts research examining the efficacy of treatment of elderly persons in nursing facilities in her home state. In order for her to use this research to influence larger political policies regarding the care of the elderly on a state and federal level, she will have to generalize her findings to the larger population of elderly nursing home residents. What sort of statistics should she use to accomplish this goal?

Inferential statistics

If Dr. Shioux wants to conduct research that will involve human participants at his university, he will have to submit a summary of the study to a(n) ________ before he can actually proceed. This will act as a form of protection for the participants he intends to enroll in his research.

Institutional review board (IRB)

Operant conditioning is also known as

Instrumental conditioning

Which of the following is the best statement of your authors' position regarding the use of intuition in decision-making situations?

Intuition is more likely than not to lead to disastrous mistakes

Kayla and Layla are twins who were separated at birth. A researcher interested in studying heredity tracks them down and speaks to their different families about the benefits that can be achieved by studying the two young girls. The girls and their different sets of parents agree to participate, and studies begin assessing various areas of the girls' lives. In order for this type of twin study to be most effective, what kind of twins should Kayla and Layla be?

Monozygotic

LaKeisha stepped on a piece of glass and quickly pulled her foot away from that sharp object. Which of the following are responsible for sending a message to the muscles in LaKeisha's foot, resulting in her pulling her foot away from the piece of glass?

Motor nerves

Nicky tends to bite his nails when he becomes nervous because it calms him down. Nicky's behavior is an example of

Negative reinforcement

The kind of learning that applies to voluntary behavior is called

Operant conditioning

A Phenotype is

Our set of observable traits

The term ________ refers to phenomena like ESP that fall outside the realm of traditional science

Paranormal

The term __________ refers to the tendency to perceive meaningful connections among unrelated phenomena.

Paternicity

As she walks out of the living room, Gloriann turns out the light. In this example, Gloriann's __________ nervous system is active.

Somatic

Which of the following extends from the brain stem down to the middle of the back, and is responsible for communicating information between the brain and the rest of the body?

Spinal Cord

Phineas Gage tragically had a tamping iron propelled through his head. Both left and right sides of the prefrontal cortex were severely damaged. As a result of the accident, Phineas Gage

Suffered a change in personality

Suppose Dr. Honeydew is proposing a theory of attraction that posits that "Opposites Attract." Most of the available evidence suggests that "Birds of a Feather Flock Together" (i.e., similarities attract) rather than opposites attract. For his theory to be accepted by the scientific community, Dr. Honeydew will need to

Supply extraordinary evidence to support his extraordinary claim

The flight-or-fight response is mobilized by the

Sympathetic nervous system

When Keller and Marian Breland, two psychologists who became animal trainers, decided to train raccoons to drop tokens into a piggy bank, they found that __________.

The raccoons displayed instinctive drift by rubbing the coins together, dropping them, and rubbing them together again

Suppose that a therapist notices several clients with anxiety disorders also demonstrate symptoms consistent with major depressive disorder. Why should she be cautious in making the assumption that experiencing an anxiety disorder causes one to experience major depressive disorder?

The relationship may really be the result of a third variable such as lack of personal control

Authorities have noted that there is an increased number of teen pregnancies among high schools that offer day care to their students. We can draw which of the following conclusions?

There is a positive correlation between teen pregnancies and day care in the high schools

Which of the following is one of the primary benefits of the case study method of conducting research?

They can be helpful in providing existence proofs

What is the main function of the reticular activating system?

To control levels of arousal

The concept of latent learning was developed by

Tolman

In which situation would presenting the mean as one's measure of central tendency be least accurate?

When the distribution is negatively skewed