Unit 0

Naturalistic observation

A small sample of living neural tissue is being studied under a powerful microscope. The researcher notices that some of the neural cells have connections to capillaries and seem to nourish and support the other neural cells. What type of research is being conducted?

hypothesis

A testable prediction that drives research is known as a(n)

It is unaffected by previous answers. It is as likely to be "c" as any other answer.

While taking a standardized test with randomly scrambled answers, you notice that your last four answers have been "c." Which of the following is true concerning the probability of the next answer being "c"?

ensure that every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected to participate in the research

The purpose of random assignment is to

Hindsight bias

After the student council election, a friend tells you he could have guessed who would be elected president. What psychological phenomenon might this illustrate?

The method used to learn the concepts.

In an experiment evaluating encoding strategies, a researcher taught participants 15 new psychological concepts. One group took notes to help learn the concepts while the other group was asked to create a mnemonic device for each concept. In this experiment, what is the independent variable?

Provide participants with enough information about a study to enable a rational decision about whether to participate

What must a researcher do to fulfill the ethical principle of informed consent?

People who spend more time exercising tend to weigh less

Which of the following is an example of negative correlation

Are people more likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next election?

Which of the following questions is best investigated by means of a survey?

Experiment

In a research study on the multi-store method of memory, one group of randomly assigned high school students were given 5 minutes to rehearse details about a stimulus after being exposed to it for 15 seconds. A second group were not given time to rehearse the details of the stimulus. Which of the following research designs best represents this study?

room temperature

In an experiment to test the effects of room temperature on test performance the independent variable is

Which of the following represents naturalistic observation?

1. Researchers go to the mall and distribute surveys about the stores in the mall. 2. Researchers observe students's eating patterns in the cafeteria 3. A principal looks at the relationship between the number of student absences and their grades. 4. Researchers bring participants into a laboratory to see how they respond to a puzzle with no solution. (2)

Debriefing

Which ethical principle requires that at the end of the study participants be told about the true purpose of the research?

Mean

Which measure of central tendency is most influenced by outliers (data that is extremely different from other data in the set)?

experiment

Which method should a psychology researcher use if she is interested in testing whether a specific reward in a classroom situation causes students to behave better?

Case study

An individual with an exceptional memory is identified. For any given date, she is capable of recalling major events, the weather, and what she did that day. What research method is being used if a psychologist conducts an in-depth investigation of this individual using questionnaires, brain scans, and memory tests?

68 percent

In a normal distribution, what percentage of the scores in the distribution falls within one standard deviation on either side of the mean?

Fully debrief the participants on the deception involved in the study.

Dr. Adeyemi obtains IRB approval for a study examining the effects of growth mindset versus fixed mindset on people's motivation for learning new information. They recruit 80 participants and receive informed consent from them. Participants then complete a questionnaire about learning strategies. Next, the participants are told that, based on their results, they are either able to readily learn new information or that they will struggle to learn new information. In reality, this questionnaire is meaningless, and participants are randomly told fake results. After hearing their results, the participants are then tested on their ability to learn complex new information. In terms of ethical procedures, after the data are collected, it will be important for Dr. Adeyemi to do which of the following?

Double-blind

Dr. Fredericks is interested in studying how quickly people forget what they learn in class. He teaches a class on biological psychology on a Monday. On Tuesday, he gives the class a quiz asking the students about details from the previous class. Which of the following procedures should Dr. Fredericks have followed to avoid the confounding variable of experimenter bias?

double-blind

In a drug study, neither the participants nor the person distributing the pills knows who is receiving the new drug and who is receiving the placebo. This type of research design is said to be a(n) _____ study.

overconfidence

The tendency to exaggerate the correctness or accuracy of our beliefs and predictions is called

The number of facts the participants remember during the test phase

A group of researchers are investigating how different studying strategies impact how much participants remember on a test. They recruit 50 participants and have half of the participants study by just reading a passage over and over for 10 minutes. The other half of the participants spend five minutes reading the passage one time and then answering a series of multiple-choice questions on the material for another five minutes. Finally, the participants write down as many facts from the reading passage as they can in three minutes. Which of the following is the dependent variable of the study?

The writer pulls the names of five students from a hat that contains all students' names. She interviews the five selected students.

A journalism student is writing an article about her school's new cell- phone policy, and she'd like to interview a random sample of students. Which of the following is the best example of a random sample?

The researcher should expect that the more data she collects, the more likely the results will regress to the mean.

A researcher is studying the accuracy of people's memories when they use mnemonic devices. After studying the first 10 people, the data showed that memories using mnemonic devices were more accurate than the average's person's memories. Which of the following explains why the researcher should not draw any conclusions about the accuracy of memories using mnemonic devices yet?

Naturalistic observation

A researcher looking for gender differences in 3-year-olds observes a preschool class and records how many minutes children of each gender play with dolls. She then compares the two sets of numbers. What type of descriptive research is she conducting?

the vocabulary quiz scores

A researcher wants to determine which studying technique would be more effective: massed practice or distributed practice. The researcher randomly assigns 30 students to two groups and gives them a list of vocabulary words to remember. One of the groups uses a massed practice technique. The other uses a distributed practice technique. The researcher gives the students a quiz four days later to see how well they remembered their list of words. He compared the scores for both groups. What is the dependent variable in this study?

The study raises ethical concerns because the amount of sleep deprivation could be harmful to participants in the study.

Dr. Ravi wants to conduct a study to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on problem-solving abilities. Her procedure involves randomly assigning participants to groups and depriving one group of sleep for a period of seven consecutive days. She then had each of them take a test that measures their ability to solve various problems. Which of the following is most problematic about Dr. Ravi's research design?

The color presented in the MRI images.

Researchers measured changes in neural firing in the frontal lobes for ten rats that were exposed to stimulants. The researchers used an MRI that indicates brain activity with colors. Normal brain activity is indicated by greens and yellows. High brain activity is indicated by reds and oranges. Low brain activity is indicated by grays and blues. All the rat's brains showed normal activity prior to being exposed to the stimulant.

Correlational Study

Researchers repeatedly presented a picture of a goat along with other animals and asked participants to rank how closely the picture of the goat matched their prototype of a "mammal." Participants used a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning "not at all like my prototype of a mammal" to 5 meaning "exactly like my prototype of a mammal." The graph depicts the rankings of each participant based on the number of exposures. What type of research has been conducted?

-0.85

Which of the following correlation coefficients represents the strongest relationship between two variables?

Participants in a drug study are given an inert pill instead of the drug and behave as though they were given the drug.

Which of the following describes the placebo effect?