Intro to Psych Final

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.".

Which is an example of a "positive punishment"?

A student is caught texting in class and the professor reprimands him in front of his classmates

What is the primary difference between a hypothesis and a theory?

A theory is a collection of data-based hypotheses

Which of these correlations has the least predictive value?

+0.10.

The person who first demonstrated how adaptations could be passed from one generation to the next

Gregor Mendel

An absolute threshold is

Lowest intensity of a stimulus that a person can detect half the time

Which statement reflects a reasonable attitude for a good student of psychology to have toward any claim about human behavior?

Skepticism is advisable until an idea is proven right

Psychologists use the term sensory modality to refer to a

Specific sense, such as vision or olfaction

Each of our _______ consists of tightly coiled DNA.

chromosomes

Twins who share a certain physical or behavioral trait are _______ for that trait.

concordant

The key purpose of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) is to

determine whether a proposed study is ethical

In the final stages of synaptogenesis, neurons

grow dendrites and axons

Natural selection has favored species that reproduce sexually because sexual reproduction:

leads to genetic diversity, which is adaptive

All of the following are female secondary sex characteristics except

ovaries

A depressed teenager treated with medication begins feeling better immediately, even though the medication typically takes weeks to work. This is an example of a _______ effect.

placebo

"Green is the prettiest color" is a _______ hypothesis because it is _______.

poor; not testable.

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

stranger anxiety

To identify the most popular exhibits at a science museum, visitors were asked every day for six weeks 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

The idea that children are born with no knowledge or "content" whatsoever and are "filled" by life experiences is called

tabula rasa

Any substance that can potentially harm the fetus during birth is called a

teratogen

Alzheimer's disease is dementia that is caused by

the build-up of amyloid in and outside of acetylcholine neurons

Heritability estimates tell us

the degree to which variations in a population can be attributed to genetics

Psychology is best defined as the study of

the mind and behavior

The primary function of the three ossicles of the middle ear is to:

transmit vibrations to the inner ear

The median is a better measure of central tendency than the mean for which of the following distributions?

10, 12, 13, 14, 106

In an analysis testing differences between an experimental and a control group on the dependent variable, a p-value of 0.07 means there is a

7 percent chance that differences between the two samples are due to chance alone

The optic disc is the part of the retina

that has no photoreceptors

Schizophrenia most often presents itself at what stage?

Early adulthood, when people begin to face the world on their own

Which of the following perspectives argues that human behavior develops in certain ways because it serves a useful purpose?

Functionalism

A quarter in your hand casts a different image on your retina than a quarter taped to the wall across the room, yet you know that the quarters have exactly the same dimensions. This phenomenon would be best explained by a

Gestalt psychologist

Which of the following is a myth of psychology?

Heritable traits, such as IQ, cannot be altered by experience..

How is natural selection related to psychology?

Humans behave as they do in part because that behavior promotes survival

When the U.S. Supreme Court was deliberating on whether to require schools to integrate black children and white children, their decision to strike down laws permitting segregated schools was greatly influenced by the "Doll Test," conducted by

Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark

Which of the following approaches to psychology did Edward Titchener advocate in the late 1800s?

Structuralism

A child finds a five-dollar bill beside her teacher's desk. Which scenario describes the application of preconventional moral reasoning?

The child is afraid she'll get in trouble if she takes the money, so she gives it to her teacher

Which single gene effect do men display more often than women?

The inability to distinguish red from green.

Which developmental milestone characterizes menarche?

The onset of menstruation

The year 1879 might be thought of as the beginning of psychology as a science because that is the year

Wilhelm Wundt developed and opened the first psychology laboratory

A professor wanted to learn more about the body image concerns of young teenage girls. She randomly selected 200 girls from local middle schools to complete her questionnaire. These girls were

a representative sample

When a child learns new information about the world that fits with her schema, it is called _______. When a child learns new information that requires her to change her schema, it is called _______.

assimilation; accommodation.

Piaget's theory of development has been referred to as _______ because in his view, children adapt to the world by actively building and organizing their experiences.

constructivism

Before the mechanisms behind PKU were known to science, infants that inherited the genes for the disorder almost always

developed mental impairments

Twins who do not share 100 percent of their genes are called

dizygotic

Even though your body changes and you develop new physical and behavioral characteristics, your _______ never changes.

genotype

Dizygotic twins

grow from separate zygotes

The receptor cells that are specialized to detect vibrations along the cochlear membrane are called

hair cells

In experimental research, which of the following variables is controlled by the researcher?

independent

A researcher presents his participant with a series of flashing lights at varying intervals. After each presentation of a light, he asks the participant to fully describe her internal experiences, a method known as

introspection

The flexible, transparent structure in the eye that helps focus on an image on the back of the eye's interior is

lens

Neural development begins with rapid division of nerve cells in a process called

neurogenesis

The study of the nervous system is called

neuroscience

Learned behavior is less prone to extinction if it is conditioned by _______ reinforcement

partial

A _______ is the region of space where stimuli affect the activity of a cell in a sensory system

receptive field

A researcher testing a new medication for attention deficit disorder randomly assigns half of the participants to get the actual medication and half to get a sugar pill. Neither the researcher nor the participants know who is getting what. This study design will

reduce unconscious bias

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 self-report measure of the personality trait of agreeableness produces very similar scores each time the same person completes it. It is also strongly correlated with whether family members describe a person as friendly and cooperative. This measure appears to be

reliable and valid

Most _____ tastes, like that of vinegar, are chemically acidic

sour

Gerard's mother has noticed that he becomes very upset when she leaves for work in the morning. When she gets home, he is resistant to her attempts to bond with him. Gerard is displaying

ambivalent attachment

An unethical experimenter wants to test the relationship between discomfort and aggression. On a hot day, she turns off the air conditioning in one dorm and leaves it on in another, then has her research assistants count occurrences of verbal aggression in common areas of the buildings. Students in the air-conditioned dorm would be the _______, and students in the overheated dorm would be the _______.

control group; experimental group

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

Preoperational children are often described as _______ because they do not understand that different people can have different points of view.

egocentric

Which approach would be most appropriate for testing the hypothesis that taking practice tests improves learning more than studying alone does?

experimental research

The fusion of your father's sperm and your mother's egg is referred to as

fertilization

You work three hours a day, M-F, and receive a paycheck every Friday afternoon. You are being paid on a _____ reinforcement schedule

fixed interval

You feel sick after eating leftovers you found in the back of the refrigerator. Occam's razor would favor the hypothesis that you have

food poisoning

Lila is 18 months old and is no longer surprised when her mother hides her ball, only to reveal it again in a different position in front of her. What cognitive milestone is Lila displaying?

object permanence

Darwin's crucial insight into the idea of evolution by natural selection occurred while he was

reading a book by Malthus entitled population

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

Two reflexes that help an infant receive nourishment are the _______ reflex, or the turning of the head in response to a brush of the cheek, and the _______ reflex, primarily for intake of breast milk.

rooting; sucking.

This morning, a very loud clap of thunder right outside your window startled you. For the rest of the day, any kind of loud sound caused you to jump. This is an example of

sensitization

Your cat comes running as soon as she hears you open food. In this example, the ______ is the conditioned stimulus

sound of the can being opened

Ever since Ryan was bitten by a gray cat, he cries when he sees one. One day, he sees a gray squirrel scamper across his front yard and he begins crying. Ryan's behavior illustrates

stimulus generalization

A reinforcer is a consequence that _______ a behavior

strengthens

According to the social brain hypothesis, each of us can deal effectively with social interactions with roughly 150 people. This implies that

we are capable of maintaining social networks of up to 150 people throughout our lives

According to Erikson's theory of psychosocial development, which question best corresponds with an adolescent's search for identity?

How can I fit in socially with the people around me?

What is the most likely outcome of the alteration of a randomly selected SINGLE nucleotide in the genome?

No noticeable behavioral or physiological difference

A research team was investigating the impact of stereotypes on performance. In one group, women read a magazine article about why the structure of men's brains makes them better at math. In the second group, women read a magazine article saying there are no biological differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women. All women in the study then took a challenging math test. Researchers scored the number of items women answered correctly. In this study, which of the following was the dependent variable?

Women's scores on the math test