Exam 1 Review Questions

Behaviorism developed as a reaction to which of the following?

A frustration with the inability to measure unconscious mental processes

What is the independent variable for this OkCupid study?

The compatibility percentage displayed to the users (manipulated artificially by OkCupid)

dual coding

Two different sensory "traces" are available to remember something (ex. drawings and text on same page)

Structuralism

an early school of psychology that used introspection to explore the elemental structure of the human mind

Metacognition

awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes.

Freud

id, ego, superego

retrieval practice

learn by testing oneself

Cognitivism

the belief that much of human behavior can be understood in terms of how people think

internal validity

the degree to which changes in the dependent variable are due to the manipulation of the independent variable

third variable problem

A problem that occurs when the researcher cannot directly manipulate variables; as a result, the researcher cannot be confident that another, unmeasured variable is not the actual cause of differences in the variables of interest.

Functionalism

A school of psychology that focused on how our mental and behavioral processes function - how they enable us to adapt, survive, and flourish.

After watching a number of advertisements about people winning the lottery, people tend to think that their chances of winning are much higher than they actually are. What bias does this situation best represent?

Availability heuristic

In a research study, participants were shown clips of "The Colbert Report", which was a political satire show. Participants who had liberal beliefs reported believing that Colbert was liberal and interpreted Colbert as making fun of conservatives. On the other hand, participants who had conservative beliefs reported believing that Colbert was conservative and interpreted Colbert as making fun of liberals. What bias best helps us understand this situation?

Confirmation bias

In research on concussions, it's common for researchers to obtain autopsied brains of former former NFL players who chose to donate their brains to science upon their death. If the population of interest is all NFL football players, what type of sampling is represented here?

Convenience

In research on concussions, researchers hope to understand whether the level of exposure to concussions is related to tau protein in the brain. Researchers measured and compared the levels of tau protein in the brains of NFL players, who suffer from a great deal of concussions, to healthy men, who do not experience concussions. What kind of study design does this scenario best represent?

Correlational

According to studies on procrastination, an estimated 20 percent of adults and above 50 percent of students regularly procrastinate. This statement best represents which goal of science?

Description

A team of researchers attempted to measure whether people can distinguish between real or fake news in a sample of students. Using a lottery system, the researchers sampled 7,804 students from across the U.S. in colleges. They found that 82% of students couldn't distinguish between an ad labeled "sponsored content" and a real news story on a website. What kind of study design does this research finding best represent?

Descriptive

A study found a correlation between extroversion and face recognition skills. The author then proposes that it may be that being extroverted leads to extremely good facial recognition ability, or perhaps that the extremely good facial recognition ability leads to being extroverted. Which research methods concept does this scenario best refer to?

Directionality problem

Researchers conducted a study on college students participating in a debate tournament. In the study, the researchers asked the college students to guess the score that the judges gave them for their performance (i.e., perceived ability). The researchers later obtained the actual scores each student received from the judges. The researchers wanted to know how the students' perceptions were associated with their actual performances. In this study about debate skills, what bias are the researchers trying to learn about?

Dunning-Kruger effect

Some neuroscientists believe that understanding the functioning of the brain is comparable to the idea of turning on a car and watching how the parts and systems interact and adapt to each other. This perspective is best aligned with which school of thought?

Functionalism

A coach for a soccer team wants the players to evaluate the quality of each player's kicks toward the goal. Instead of doing the evaluations in real-time after the player has already kicked, she videotapes them all separately. The coach plays the video and has the players evaluate the process of the kick as it's happening and then pauses the video before the ball reaches the goal and before the players know whether the kick was successful or not. The coach is trying to prevent which bias?

Hindsight bias

When companies do experiments on those that use their services, there are concerns about whether people truly understand that their information is being collected for research. Concerns include that the participants do not know about the risks before getting involved and do not have the opportunity to say no. Which concept from research ethics does this situation best relate to?

Informed Consent

Many research articles report that the less time that people spend exercising, the more anxiety they report feeling. Which of the following scatterplots would best represent this study's finding?

Inversely relates, downwards scatterplot

A researcher is studying students in two math classrooms using different teaching strategies. Two math teachers having been teaching their students about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division for the past year. Ms. Agarwal gives students their math worksheets organized by the type of math skills students need to practice (1 page on addition, 1 page on subtraction, etc.). On the other hand, Mx. Banerjee organizes math worksheets so that the different skills are mixed across the entire worksheet. At the end of the school year, all students are given an unannounced test.

Ms. Banerjree

What is the dependent variable for this OKCupid experiment?

Odds of a having meaningful online conversation

An organization released a report in 2007 that stated that the increase in violent crime and robberies and the increase in the sale of iPods is more than a coincidence. The report noted that violent crime fell every year from 1993 to 2004, before rising in 2005 and 2006, just as iPod sales increased dramatically, suggesting that iPods were to blame for the increase in crime. What bias best helps us understand this situation?

Post-hoc fallacy

Researchers collected data regarding the amount of time for recess during school and their students' academic performance from a large number of different countries. They found that countries where they have more recess time tend to have higher student academic performance than countries where recess time is less. This study result best represents which goal of science?

Prediction

Which effective learning strategy is best represented in this study?

Retrieval practice

Imagine that we're doing research on alcohol use. Which level of analysis is correctly matched with an example?

Social level: A history of family members tolerating alcohol use is associated with increased use of alcohol during adolescence.

Which effective learning strategy is best represented in this study of students learning French?

Spaced practice

In the foundations of psychology, the Gestalt school of thought can be viewed as a reaction against which school of thought?

Structuralism

Interleaving

Switch between ideas while you study

In a research study, students learned French vocabulary using three classroom activities that involved retrieving and using their knowledge of French. Half of the students did the exercises back-to-back on the same day and the other half of the students did each exercise once per day over three days. Each exercise took 10 minutes so students either completed 30 minutes of exercises in one class, or 10 minutes of exercises per day over three classes. After one week, all of the students were given an unexpected test. Based on what you learned about effective learning strategies, which group of students performed better on this unexpected test?

The group who did each exercise once per day over three days

Researchers presented one group of high school students material about the different types of clouds in class one time and then had three closed-book quizzes (meaning that they couldn't use any resources to do the quiz). A second group of high school students were presented the same material in class one time and then were asked to re-read the material three times. After a year, all students were tested on this material about the different types of clouds.

The group who did three closed-book quizzes

Cognitivism developed, in part, as a reaction to which of the following?

The rising use of computers and development of artificial intelligence.

What is one proposed reason for why these college students would have this large gap between their perceived score and the actual score from the judges?

They do not engage in metacognition.

Based on what you have learned about biases, which college students were the most likely to overestimate their ability to debate?

Those who performed the worst according to the judges' score

Gestalt Psychology

a psychological approach that emphasizes that we often perceive the whole rather than the sum of the parts

Recent research on debate skills has explored the relationship between the activity level of certain areas of the brain and performance on memory and attention performance during debates. This kind of research is crossing the ______ and _____ levels of analysis.

biological; individual

A researcher read a research report that caregivers spend on average 13 days per month running errands for the person and 6 days per month helping the person eat, dress, bathe, or do other personal care. Because the report did not show the survey questions, the researcher was unsure how well the questions measured these variables. This researcher is wondering about which type of validity?

construct validity

If someone wonders whether exchanging four or more messages truly represents having a meaningful conversation, she is wondering about the __________ of how this variable has been operationally defined.

construct validity

Aarti is learning about the neuron, a brain cell, in a psychology course. To study the parts and functions of the neuron, she combined her reading notes, class notes, and the textbook materials to draw the following:

dual coding

external validity

extent to which we can generalize findings to real-world settings

If researchers are interested in the population of American adults and they obtain a nationally representative sample, the researchers have a study with findings that have:

high external validity

A researcher is studying students in two math classrooms using different teaching strategies. Two math teachers having been teaching their students about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division for the past year. Ms. Agarwal gives students their math worksheets organized by the type of math skills students need to practice (1 page on addition, 1 page on subtraction, etc.). On the other hand, Mx. Banerjee organizes math worksheets so that the different skills are mixed across the entire worksheet. At the end of the school year, all students are given an unannounced test.

interleaving

Consider the characteristics of a true experimental study such as random assignment of participants into conditions and keeping the elements of the study as consistent as possible. These characteristics increase the ______ validity of the study findings.

internal

A football coach has the same trainer watch tapes of the players. The trainer is supposed to score the players on the level of cognitive impairment after concussions. Even when watching the same tapes, the trainer's scores of the player differ from week to week. This situation best represents a problem with:

reliability

Dr. Patel wants her students to learn and remember the material from her introductory course. At the start of each class meeting, she reviews material from the last class and from weeks ago. Her class activities and homework assignments include questions that have students working on new problems as well as problems using material from previous weeks ago. Students can use their notes and books to complete class activities and homework assignments. This description of Dr. Patel's class design is best understood as promoting which effective learning strategy for her students?

spaced practice

construct validity

the extent to which variables measure what they are supposed to measure

elaboration

the formation of a number of different connections around a stimulus at any given level of memory encoding

growth mindset

the idea that our abilities are malleable qualities that we can cultivate and grow

fixed mindset

the idea that we have a set amount of an ability that cannot change

Behaviorism

the science of behavior that focuses on observable behavior only

concrete examples

the use of real or tangible concepts used in a sentence to clarify understanding