PSY 290 Final Exam

The phrase ____ is a frequency claim while ______ is an association claim

"Almost everyone loves Labradors" / "Dog ownership is linked to happiness"

Your friend Gaby loves reading articles about psychology studies in her monthly women's magazine. Which of the following would you tell her?

"Be careful about reading those articles because they may not present findings accurately"

Dr. Ewald is interested in determining how spice level and physical temperature interact when eating soup. He will connect a study where one group of participants eat both a spicy and non-spicy soup that has been cooled in the refrigerator. A second group of participants will eat the same spicy and non-spicy soup that was heated over a stove. Dr. Ewald will conduct a:

2 spice (non-spicy, spicy) x 2 temperature (cold, hot) mixed-groups design

Charlotte is studying subliminal messages and weight loss. She is curious whether people will lose more weight if they hear subliminal message that encourage weight loss in the music on their iPods compared to people who do not have subliminal messages in their music. She studies 40 people and finds the following results: A change to which of the following cells will result in a different interpretation of the results of subliminal messages?

A change in any cell will result in a different interpretation

Dr. Ewell, a development psychologist, is planning on conducting a study that involves watching children play together to determine how sharing behavior occurs in same-sex friend pairs compared to opposite-sex friend pairs. Which of the following is Dr. Ewell likely to give his research assistants to prevent observer bias?

A codebook

A psychiatrist is testing a drug that treats depression. He has give the drug to all his patients, and all of them have experienced a decrease in depressive symptoms. Although this is interesting, his experience is limited because he does not have

A comparison group that did not receive the drug

What is the problem with being swayed by a good story such as the TB program Scared Straight or the D.A.R.E. program?

A good story may not be supported by data

In quasi-experiment designs, the researcher does not have experimental control over the independent variable and does not randomly assign participants to conditions. This result in which of the following?

A larger threat to internal validity than a true experiment with random assignment.

When making the strong causal claim that smoking causes lung cancer in humans, researchers are relying on:

A strong pattern of empirical data and a plausible link between variables

This line graph shows:

A two-way interaction

Which of the following is NOT true of the correlation matrix?

Age is negatively correlated with all other variables

Dr. Gloss runs two experiments. In the first experiment, she finds that a t-test run on two groups of subjects produces a p value of .10. In her second experiment she uses the exact same methods from the first experiment on two different groups of subjects. She finds that the difference between group means and the variance of each group is exactly the same as the first experiment but she now has a p value of .01. What would you explain the difference in p values?

An increase in the number of subjects

In the four panel below, the curves indicated the sample variance and the black horizontal line indicates the distance between the group means. Panel ____ will produce the highest t value while ______ will produce the lowest t value.

B, D

Roger is interested in determining what menu designs increases his sales in his restaurant. For one night he gives a 100 customers a more classically designed menu and on the next night he gives a different group of 100 customers a menu with a more modern design. He then finds that his classically designed menu produced a larger amount of orders. What type of experiment design is Roger using

Between-subjects post-test design

Dr. Sparrow runs an experiment to compare how two learning strategies increase performance on a video game. He has two groups play the game for 10 minutes then has one group watch an expert play the game while the other group reads a box about the game. He then has them play the game for 10 more minutes. He expects that individuals who watch the expert play the game will outperform individuals who read a book about the game. What type of experiment design is Dr. Sparrow running?

Between-subjects pretest/post-test design

Julie is looking at the relationship between calorie consumption and exercise. She analyzes the data in two ways. The first way, she uses two groups of high calorie consumption and low calorie consumption. The second way, she uses the actual calorie intake of each subject. Julie is using calorie consumption as both a ____ and a ____ variable.

Categorical, dimensional

Shelly runs an experiment trying to determine if different types of music influence math performance. She plays classical, hard rock and jazz music while giving simple addition problems to a group of high school students. She found no difference in math performance between each music condition and concludes that music does not influence math performance. Why might she find no difference between groups?

Ceiling effects

John wants to determine if consuming caffeine increases cognitive task performance. He gives half of his participants a bottle of water and half of his participants a bottle of cola. He then them solve 25 math problems. He finds that people who drank caffeine solve more problems than those who drank water. His lab mate Gary decides to conduct the exact same study again to ensure that he can find the same difference between the groups a second time. However, this time he uses coffee instead of cola as a source of caffeine. This study is known as a

Conceptual replication

Happiness is an example of a(n) ____ variable while observing and counting how many times someone smiles is an example of a(n) _____ variable.

Conceptual, operational

Anton and his friends are discussing a study he read about in his developmental psychology class. In the study, the researcher made the claim that a majority of middle school students who are bullied have low self-esteem. Clarissa questions the study, saying, "I am not sure that I am convinced—I am not sure you can really measure being bullied." Quinn also questions the study, saying, "Which middle school students did they study? I am curious if they included both private and public school students." Clarissa's concern regards ____ while Quinn's concern regards _____

Construct validity, external validity

Systematic variability related to the independent variable can be accounted for by _____ while systematic variability in your participant sample can be accounted for by ______

Control variables, random assignment

Dr. Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling. Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble. Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling. The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr. Sheffield has now decided that he wants to test his measure on some university students (who some estimates say have a 6% prevalence rate of compulsive gambling.) He has a group of 100 university students complete his measure. He also has them complete two other measures (one that measures addictive behavior in general and one that measures general attitudes toward gambling). He finds that his new measure is positively associated with each of these other measures. This procedure has provided evidence for the of Dr. Sheffield's measure.

Convergent validity

Dr. Farah is an education psychologist who is interested in studying the potential causal relationship between doing homework and academic achievement. in January, Dr. Farah has her students report their fall GPA and estimate how many hours they spent doing homework during a typical week in the fall semester. In May, Dr. Farah measure the same variables again (estimated # of hours a night doing home during a typical week in the spring and their spring GPA). She fins the following correlations. A cross-sectional correlation is represented by _____, an auto-correlation is represented by ______, and a cross-lag correlation is represented by ______.

Correlation 1, Correlation 5, Correlation 3

Your friend Dominic is complaining about having the Police Academy Exam (PAE), a test the is required to enter the police force. He complains, "Tests like the PEA don't really measure how well people actually do on the streets being a policeman, how could they?" Dominic is questioning the ____ of the test.

Criterion validity

Sarah is conducting a longitudinal surgery study across a period of 3 months to see if she can determine if exercising causes an increase in happiness. What type of correlation should Sarah be interested in?

Cross-lag correlations

Larry has created a questionnaire that he believes measures levels of happiness. He gives the happiness questionnaire to his participants. In order to demonstrate ____ validity, his questionnaire would have to be _____ correlated with the depression questionnaire.

Discriminant, negatively

Dr. Ramon makes the following claim: "Being in the television watching group lead to shorter conversation time with a spouse later that night compared to people who were in the reading group." Dr. La Salle makes the claim: "research shows that making more money is related with spending less time talking with your spouse." Which of the following statements is true of Dr. Ramon's and Dr. LaSalle's claims?

Dr. Ramon is making a causal claim while Dr. LaSalle is making an association claim

Jake is conducting an analysis consisting of 45 correlations between all possible pairs of nine dependent variables measuring various personality traits. He sets his level of significance at p < .001. Why did he set his p value well below .05 which is the typical level of significance?

Each additional test increases the chance of a false positive

University committees such as the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the American Psychological Association (APA) have rules in place to conduct oversight of ____

Ethics, integrity, responsibility

In typical psychology studies comparing how different samples of people behave, we are interested in how ____ behave(s). In single-n studies, we are interested in how ____ behave(s).

Groups, a single person

In the study depicted in the figure above, how could a researcher transform the study into a within-groups design?

Having participants play both the competitive game and the noncompetitive game

Dr. Tuttle wants to examine if joining a sorority of frat increases self-esteem in college students. He recruits a group of 75 freshman. One year later, he assesses their self-esteem with a self-report measure. If Dr. Tuttle is interested in a casual relationship between joining a frat/strat and the influence on self-esteem, what would be a concern in his experiment design. What is the biggest drawback of Dr. Tuttle's experimental design

He could not randomly assign participants to join a sorority or fraternity

Nate runs a study where he gives a single group of 50 participants a new vitamin drink daily for two weeks. He finds that after 2 week the participants report significantly increased levels of energy and alertness. He concludes that the vitamin drink significantly increases energy levels and alertness. What is wrong with his experimental design?

He needs a control group

Dr. Kushner is planning on conducting a study next semester. He is curious as to whether sleep deprivation is associated with poorer cognitive performance. For example, if you sleep poorly the night before a big exam, will you do worse? Dr. Kushner is especially curious about selective sleep deprivation, where people are kept from entering REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to monitor brain waves, he plans to let participants sleep until they enter REM sleep and then wake them. After the participants are awake for one minute, Dr. Kushner plans to let them return to sleep. As they enter REM sleep again, he will wake them again and follow the same procedure. He plans to do this through the entire eight-hour sleep session. The following morning, participants will be asked to take a sample SAT test. Which of the following is true regarding obtaining informed consent in Dr. Kushner's study?

He needs to obtain informed consent because there is a likelihood of risk in his study

Dr. Norris is looking at the relationship between age (IV) and performance (DV) on a reaction time task and produces the scatterplot below. However, he finds that there is no significant relationship between age and task performance (p =.37) when he runs a Pearson correlation on the results. Why is that?

He used a linear correlation analysis

Elliott is double majoring in English and psychology. He plans on being a high school English teacher and is only majoring in psychology because he finds the classes interesting. Which of the following is an important reason for him to be a good customer of research?

He will probably want to read research related to enhancing his teaching

Robert finds that age is related to spirit times in a 50-yard dash. For a third variable such as heart disease to be plausible as the explanation in this association, which of the following must also be true?

Heart disease must be related to both age and sprint times.

Which of the following determines the construct validity of a survey question?

How well is it worded

Which of the following is true of the relationship between hypotheses and theories?

Hypotheses are used to determine if a theory is accurate

Dr. John's experiment relies on research assistants identifying the number of smiles each subject makes in response to various types of live animals. Dr. Reed's study relies on measuring a precise amount of protein within the rat brain in several rats. Dr. John would be interested in _____ reliability while Dr. Reed would be interested in _____ reliability

Inter-rater, test-restest

Why do polls and surveys often acquire sample sizes of 1000-2000 people

It helps with statistical validity

Sandra is conducting a study characterizing aspects of happiness and self-esteem. She decides to use open-ended questions in order to acquire detailed information about each construct. If Sandra wanted to identify the strength of an association between levels of happiness and self-esteem using a dimensional approach, what question format should she use?

Likert scale

What is the difference between a main effect and an interaction?

Main effects examine one independent variable at a time; interaction effects examine how multiple independent variables interact.

What does an experimenter need to do to investigate a causal claim

Manipulate a variable

Kelly runs an experiment assessing the self-confidence of a single group of adolescents from ages 12-17. She uses the same assessment for all subjects and finds that self-confidence increases with the number of years they attend high school. She determines that attending high school increases self-confidence. What type of threat to internal validity would be the best alternative explanation for her findings?

Maturation

Linda is interesten in examining the relationship between daily stress and cardiovascular health for her senior psychology research project. She decides to conduct a meta-analysis rather than a review paper. What will Linda NOT do when conducting her meta-analysis?

Measure daily stress and cardiovascular health in several new samples of participants

Dr. Ford is an education psychologist interested in how elementary students improve in a new training program he has developed to help increase reading comprehension. He is looking to recruit 1000 students across Florida elementary schools to get a representative sample of young children in Florida. What type of sample should Dr. Ford acquire?

Multistage sample

Dr. Tuttle wants to examine if joining a sorority of frat increases self-esteem in college students. He recruits a group of 75 freshman. One year later, he assesses their self-esteem with a self-report measure. If Dr. Tuttle is interested in a causal relationship between joining a sorority or frat and the influence on self-esteem, what would be a concern in his experiment design. Dr. Tuttle's experimental design is known a(n):

Nonequivalent control group design

Randall is trying to determine if adding chocolate on top of his pastries increases his sales. On Saturday, he only sells pastries without chocolate while on Sunday, he only sells pastries topped with chocolate. He finds that he sells much more pastries on Sunday when they are topped with chocolate. What type of experimental design is Randall using?

Nonequivalent control group design

Dr. Crow is a clinical psychologist who is curious about how people deal with natural disasters. His previous research suggests that there is a relationship between how much people feel their emotional well-being was affected by the natural disaster and their likelihood of developing PTSD symptoms. However, he is curious as to whether the effect of emotional well-being occurs because people receive different levels of social support. He conducts a study in which he asks 174 men and women affected by Hurricane Sandy to report on how their well-being was affected by the hurricane, the social support felt after the storm, and the number of PTSD symptoms. Dr. Crow finds support for his proposed relationship. However, in examining his data more closely, he finds that relationship between emotional well-being and PTSD symptoms is not significant for men while being significantly negative for women. Dr. Crow's finding that the relationship between emotional well-being and PTSD symptoms depends on participant sex suggests which of the following?

Participant sex is a moderating variable

Testing threats involve ________ whereas instrumentation threats involve ________.

Participants, measurements

Which of the following statements is true of assigning participants randomly to groups in an experiment and acquiring a random sample of participants in a survey study?

Random assignment is necessary for avoiding third variable confounds, whereas acquiring a random sample is necessary for generalizing the results of the study.

Identify the type of association for this hypothetical scatterplot (y-axis is average reaction time (lower is better) while the x-axis is age in years)

Reaction time performance increases consistently across most of the lifespan then decreases sharply at the end of the lifespan

Sandra measures the level of happiness across two groups of subjects two weeks apart. One group receives a behavioral intervention aimed at improving happiness while the other group does not. She uses the same happiness assessment at both time points. She finds that the experimental group had normal levels of happiness before the intervention that moderately increased after the intervention. In the control group that did not receive the intervention, she finds unusually high levels of happiness that went down to normal two week later. What might explain her results for the control group?

Regression to the mean

One saying in psychology is, "the best statistic is ____"

Replication

Larry wants to determine if he can increase the number of laps that his grandfather walks around a park by offering praise and support through complimenting him on his exercise routine. For one week, Larry walks with his grandfather around the park. The first day, he does not compliment him, the next he does, and continues switching back and forth the entire week. He finds on days he praises his grandfather, his grandfather walks more laps around the park than on days he does not praise him. What type of experiment is Larry conducting?

Reversal design

Allen is conducting a survey examining people's opinions toward his restaurant. He looks at the response from three random people who all put a straight line down each column as answer saying everything was "poor", "good". or "very good". This showed that customers were not really rating each individual question. How could Allen change his surgery to get more detailed information about each category?

Reverse the rating scale for each question (ex: bad to good, then from good to bad)

Generally, we are more concerned about how to _____ subjects in frequency claims and how to control for _____ in causal claims

Sample, confounds

When conducting an experiment and doing statistical tests, most researchers acquire a ______ from a ______

Sample, population

Political polls on political websites often attract a unique group of participants. What is wrong with such a pool?

Self-selection

Why is it important for scientists to publish their results and make them available to the public?

So other scientists can replicate their results

Tad has a belief that owning a home makes you feel better and less depressed. He only considers evidence that supports his hypothesis from studies that confirm a negative correlation between those who own homes and the severity of their depression. What would Tad also be looking for?

Studies that show a positive relationship between owning a home and depression

Jane sees a study showing that on average, people who like nightclubs are more extroverted than people who enjoy libraries. She states that the study cannot be true because she is introverted and likes to go dancing. What is wrong with Jane's reasoning?

Studies usually describe average behavior and not every single case

Experimental confounds influencing group means are a source of ______ while individual differences influencing test performance are a source of _____

Systematic variance, unsystematic variance

The graph for 10 year olds show (first graph)

That more attributes were listed for the Dog and Cat condition for cutting picture while more attributes were listed for the Dog Only condition for drawing pictures

What is a fact from this graph?

That the Dog and Cat condition had more attributes listed compared to the Dog Only condition

Imagine that you are reading a journal article and you see the following sentence: "The study used a 2x2x4 design." Based on this sentence alone, you would know which of the following pieces of information?

The number of main effects that need to be examined

You run a regression model examining the association between productivity and hours worked with the result: Next, you run a regression model examining the relationship between productivity, hours worked, and job difficulty with the results: Which statement is true?

The relationship between hours worked and productivity depends on job difficulty

Two researchers tell you they study the same thing. However, when you look at their research papers, they do not use similar mythologies or measurements. How is this possible?

The researchers have the same conceptual definitions

Two researchers tell you they study the same thing. However, when you look at their research paper, they do not use similar methodologies or measurements. How is this possible?

The researches have the same conceptual design

Which of the following is not applicable to single-N studies in cases such as brain damage or lesions?

The use of t-tests comparing groups

Deci and Ryan proposed that 3 fundamental needs are required for human growth and fulfillment: relatedness, autonomy, and competence. Susan thinks that if students have certain needs met in psychology class, such as relatedness or autonomy, they will feel happier and more satisfied with the class then if they do not. Deci and Ryan are describing a ____ while Susan is describing a _____

Theory, hypothesis

Dr. Kinner -- Pain Relief Expectation and Duration Graph Which of the following is NOT true?

There is a main effect of pain relief such that the Expecting condition led to more correct answers than the Non-Expecting condition

Make a statement from this graph

There is a two-way interaction for 10-year-olds but not for 20-year-olds

Dr Kinner -- Pain Relief Expectation and Duration Graph Which of the following is NOT true?

There is a two-way interaction such that there is a difference in the 2 vs 4 minuet manipulation for the "expecting" condition but not difference in the "not expecting" condition

Why is it important to adopt the mindset of a scientific reasoner?

To avoid falling to the pitfalls of personal biases

Testing the effect of tv advertising on introductory psychology students in the artificial setting of the college laboratory is an example of

Translational research

Which of the following is NOT a reason that a study might yield a null result?

Use of a within-subjects design

We should understand research methods for all of the following reasons except:

to avoid critical thinking