Psych Exam 2 Practice

What are two basic functions of working memory?

(1) Active processing of incoming visual-spatial and auditory information (2) focusing our spotlight of attention

What are three ways we forget, and how does each of these happen?

(1) Encoding failure - unattended information never entered our memory system. (2) Storage Decay - information fades from our memory (3) Retrieval Failure - we cannot access stored information accurately, sometimes due to interference or motivated forgetting

Performance peaks at lower levels of arousal for difficult tasks, and at higher levels of for easy or well-earned tasks. (1) How might this phenomenon affect runners? (2) How might this phenomenon affect anxious test-takers facing a difficult exam? (3) How might the performance of anxious students be affected by relaxation training?

(1) Runners tend to excel when aroused by competition. (2) High anxiety in test-takes may disrupt their performance. (3)Teaching anxious students how to relax before an exam can enable them to perform better.

What two new concepts update the classic Atkinson-Shiffrin three stage information processing model?

(1) We form some memories through automatic processing, without our awareness. The model only focused on conscious memories. (2) The newer concept of a working memory emphasizes the active processing that we now know takes place in the short-term memory stage.

More intelligent children and adults tend to live healthier and longer lives. Which of the following is a possible reason for this phenomenon?

- Intelligence facilitates more education, better jobs, and a healthier environment - Intelligence encourages healthy-living: less smoking, better diet, more exercise - A "well-wired-body" as evidenced by fast reaction speeds, perhaps fosters both intelligence and longevity. NOT because - intelligent people have slower reaction times, making it less likely that they will put themselves at risk.

Psychologists involved in the study of memories of abuse tend to agree with which of the following statements?

- Memories of events that happened before age 3 are not reliable - Memories can be emotionally upsetting - Sexual abuse happens DISAGREE with - we tend to repress extremely upsetting memories

Which of the following are part of the evidence presented to support the view that humans are strongly motivated by a need to belong?

- students who rated themselves as "very happy" also tended to have satisfying close relationships - social exclusion - such as exile or solitary confinement - is considered a severe form of punishment - children who are extremely neglected become withdrawn, frightened, and speechless NOT evidence that - as adults, adopted children tend to resemble their biological parents and to yearn for an affiliation with them

The IQ of a 6-year-old with a measured mental age of 9 would be

150 9/6 x 100 = 150

Which of the following is a genetically predisposed response to food?

A preference for sweet and salty foods

What are the three criteria that a psychological test must meet in order to be widely accepted? Explain.

A psychological test must be standardized (presented on a similar group of people), reliable (yielding consistent results), and valid (measuring what it is supposed to measure).

An example of an external stimulus that might influence sexual behavior is

A sexually explicit film

What is the difference between a test that is biased culturally and a test that is biased in terms of its validity?

A test may be culturally biased if higher scores are achieved by those with certain cultural experiences. That same test may not be biased in terms of validity if it predicts what it is supposed to predict. For example, the SAT may be culturally biased in favor of those with experience in the U.S. school system, but it does still accurately predict U.S. college success.

After hours of driving alone in an unfamiliar city, you finally see a diner. Although it looks deserted and a little creepy, you stop because you are really hungry. How would Maslow's hierarchy of needs explain your behavior?

According to Maslow, our drive to meet the physiological needs of hunger and thirst take priority over safety needs, promoting us to take risks at times in order to eat.

Which three of the following five factors contribute to unplanned teen pregnancies?

Alcohol Use, Unprotected Sex, Mass Media Models

Which strategies are better for long-term retention: cramming and rereading material, or spreading out learning over time and repeatedly testing yourself?

Although cramming may lead to short-term gains in knowledge, distributed practice and repeated self-testing will result in the greatest long-term retention.

An employer with a pool of applicants for a single available position is interested in testing each applicant's potential. To help her decide whom she should hire, she should use an ______ test. That same employer wishing to test the effectiveness of a new, on-the-job training program would be wise to use an ______ test.

Aptitude; Achievement

____ theory attempts to explain behaviors that do NOT reduce physiological needs.

Arousal

What is the different between automatic and effortful processing, and what are some examples of each?

Automatic processing occurs unconsciously (automatically) for such things as the sequence and frequency of a day's events, and reading and comprehending words in our own language. Effortful processing requires attention and awareness and happens, for example, when we work hard to learn new material in class, or new lines for a play

The rate at which your body expends energy while at rest is referred to as the _____ ____ rate.

Basal Metabolic

What did Binet hope to achieve by establishing a child's mental age?

Binet hoped that the child's mental age (the age that typically corresponds to the child's level of performance), would help identify appropriate school placements of children.

The concept of working memory

Clarifies the idea of short-term memory by focusing on the active processing that occurs in this stage

When a situation triggers the feeling that "i've been here before," you are experiencing

Deja Vu

Correlation coefficients were used in this section. Here's a quick review: Correlations do not indicate cause-effect, but they do tell us whether two things are associated in some way. A correlation of -1.0 represents perfect _____ (agreement/disagreement) between two sets of scores: As one score goes up, the other score goes _____ (up/down). A correlation of _____ represents no association. The highest correlation 1.0 represents perfect _____ (agreement/disagreement): As the first score goes up, the other scores goes ____ (up/down).

Disagreement; down. Zero Agreement; up.

The use of condoms during sex ____ (does/doesn't) reduce the risk of getting HIV and ____ (does/doesn't) fully protect against skin to skin STI's.

Does; Doesn't

Eliza's family loves to tell the story of how she "stole the show" as a 2 year old, dancing at her aunts wedding reception. Even though she was so young, Eliza can recall the event clearly. How is this possible?

Eliza's immature hippocampus and lack of verbal skills would have prevented her from encoding an explicit memory of the wedding reception at the age of two. It's more likely that Eliza learned information (from hearing the story repeatedly) that she eventually constructed into a memory that feels very real.

From a biological perspective, AIDS is passed more frequently from women to men than from men to women. True or False.

False. AIDS is transmitted more easily and more often from men to women.

The existence of savant syndrome seems to support

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Charles Spearman suggested we have one ____ _____ underlying success across a variety of intellectual abilities.

General Intelligence

Today's evolutionary psychology shares an idea that was an underlying assumption of instinct theory. That idea is that

Genes predispose species-typical behavior

The blood sugar ____ provides the body with energy. When it is ______ (low/high), we feel hungry.

Glucose; low.

Why are habits such as having something sweet with that cup of coffee, so hard to break?

Habits form when we repeat behaviors in a given context and, as a result, learn associations - often without our awareness. For example, we may have eaten a sweet pastry with a cup of coffee often enough to associate the flavor of the coffee with the treat, so that the cup of coffee alone just doesn't seem right anymore

If environments become more equal, the heritability of intelligence would

Heritability - variation explained by genetic influences - will increase as environmental variation decreases

According to the concept of set point, our body maintains itself at a particular weight level. This "weight thermostat" is an example of ______.

Homeostasis

Why do psychologists NOT diagnose an intellectual disability based solely on the person's intelligence test score?

IQ score is only one measure of a person's ability to function. Other important factors to consider in an overall assessment include conceptual skills, social skills, and practical skills.

Amnesia following hippocampus damage typically leaves people unable to learn new facts or recall recent events. However, they may be able to learn new skills, such as riding a bicycle, which is an _____ (explicit/implicit) memory.

Implicit

Jan walks into a friends kitchen, smells bread baking, and begins to feel very hungry. The smell of baking bread is a(n) ______ (incentive/drive).

Incentive

Why can two people of the same height, age, and activity level maintain the same weight, even if one of them eats much less than the other one does?

Individuals have very different set points and genetically influenced metabolism levels, causing them to burn calories differently.

What factors influence our sexual motivation and behavior?

Influences include biological factors such as sexual maturity and sex hormones, psychological factors such as environmental stimuli and fantasies, and social-cultural factors such as the values and expectations absorbed from family and the surrounding culture.

How do instinct theory, drive-reduction theory, and arousal theory contribute to our understanding of motivated behavior?

Instincts and evolutionary psychology help explain the genetic basis for our unlearned, species-typical behaviors. From drive-reduction theory, we know that our physiological needs (such as hunger) create an aroused state that drives us to reduce the need (for example, by eating). Arousal theory suggests that we need to maintain an optimal level of arousal, which helps explain our motivation toward behaviors that meet no physiological need.

Imagine being a jury member in a trial for a parent accused of sexual abuse on a recovered memory. What insights from memory research should you offer the jury?

It will be important to remember the key points agreed upon by most researchers and professional associations: sexual abuse, injustice, forgetting, and memory construction all happen; recovered memories are common; memories from before age 3 are unreliable; memories claimed to be recovered through hypnosis or drug influences are especially unreliable; and memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting.

If you want to be sure to remember what you're learning for an upcoming test, would it be better to use recall or recognition to test your memory? Why?

It would be better to test your memory with recall. Recalling information is harder than recognizing it. So if you can recall it, that means your retention of the material is better than if you could only recognize it. Your chances of test success are therefore greater.

The neural basis for learning and memory, found at the synapses in the brain's memory-circuit connections, results from brief, rapid stimulation. It is called

Long-term potentiation

Hunger occurs in response to ____ (low/high) blood glucose and _____ (low/high) levels of ghrelin.

Low; High

If you try to make the material you are learning personally meaningful, are you processing at a shallow or a deep level? Which level leads to greater retention?

Making material personally meaningful involves processing at a deep level, because you are processing semantically - based on the meaning of the words. Deep processing leads to greater retention.

Journalist Dorothy Dix once remarked, "Nobody wants to kiss when they are hungry." How does Maslow's hierarchy of needs support her statement?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs supports this statement because it addresses the primacy of some motives over others. Once our basic physiological needs are met, safety concerns are addressed next, followed by belongingness and loved needs (such as the desire to kiss).

Memory aids that use visual imagery (such as peg words) or other organizational devices (such as acronyms) are called ______.

Mnemonic Devices

With a challenging task, such as taking a difficult exam, performance is likely to peak when arousal is

Moderate

What are some ways to manage our social networking time successfully?

Monitor the time spent online, as well as our feelings about that time. Hide distracting online friends. Turn off or put away distracting devices. Consider social networking fast, and get outside and away from technology regularly.

Your friend has experienced brain damage in an accident. He can remember how to tie his shoes but has a hard time remembering anything told to him during a conversation. What's going on here?

Our explicit conscious memories of facts and episodes differ from our implicit memories of skills (such as shoe tying) and classically conditioned responses. Our implicit memories are processed by more ancient brain areas, which apparently escaped damage during the accident.

How does the existence of savant syndrome support Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences?

People with savant syndrome have limited mental ability overall but possess one or more exceptional skills, which, according to Howard Gardner, suggests that our abilities come in separate packages rather than being fully expressed by one general intelligence that encompasses all of our talents.

What is priming?

Priming is the activation (often without our awareness) of associations. Seeing a gun, for example, might temporarily predispose someone to interpret an ambiguous face as threatening or to recall a boss as nasty

What - given the commonality of source amnesia - might life be like if we remembered all our waking experiences and all our dreams?

Real experiences would be confused with those we dreamed. When meeting someone, we might therefore be unsure whether we were reacting to something they previously did or to something we dreamed they did.

Multiple choice questions test our ____. Fill in the blank questions test our _____.

Recognition; Recall

What are recommended memory strategies?

Rehearse repeatedly to boost long-term recall. Schedule spaced (not crammed) study times. Spend more time rehearsing or actively thinking about the material. Make the material personally meaningful, with well-organized and vivid associations. Refresh your memory by returning to contexts and moods to activate retrieval cues. Use mnemonic devices. Minimize interference. Plan for a complete night's sleep. Test yourself repeatedly - retrieval practice is a proven retention strategy.

The Stanford-Binet, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Wechsler Intelligence Scare for Children yield consistent results, for example on retesting. In other words, these tests have high:

Reliability

Freud proposed that painful or unacceptable memories are blocked from consciousness through a mechanism called

Repression

Researcher A is well-funded to learn about how intelligence changes over the life span. Researcher B wants to study the intelligence of people who are now at various life stages. Which researcher should use the cross-sectional method, and which the longitudinal method?

Researcher A should develop a longitudinal study to examine how intelligence changes in the same people over the life span. Researcher B should develop a cross-sectional study to examine the intelligence of people now at various life stages.

Which factors have researchers thus far found to be unrelated to the development of our sexual orientation?

Researchers have found no evidence that any environmental factor (parental relationships, childhood experiences, peer relationships, or dating experiences) influences the development of our sexual orientation.

Specific odors, visual images, emotions or other associations that help us access a memory are examples of ____ _____.

Retrieval cues

The hour before sleep is a good time to memorize information, because going to sleep after learning new material minimizes _____ interference.

Retroactive

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, our most basic needs are physiological, including the need for food and water; just above these are _____ needs.

Safety

Sanjay recently adopted the typical college diet high in fat and sugar. He knows he may gain weight, but he figures it's no big deal because he can lose the extra ponds in the future. How would you evaluate Sanjay's plan?

Sanjay's plan is problematic. After he gains weight, the extra fat will require less energy to maintain than it did to gain in the first place. Sanjay may have a hard time getting rid of it later, when his metabolism slows down in an effort to retain his body weight.

What have researchers found an even better predictor of school performance than intelligence test scores?

Self-discipline

At which of Atkinson-Shiffrin's three stages would iconic and echoic memory occur?

Sensory memory

When we are tested immediately after viewing a list of words, we tend to recall the first and last items best, which is known as the ____ ____ effect.

Serial Position

The inability to complete the sexual response cycle may be considered a ____ ____. Exhibitionism would be considered a ______.

Sexual Dysfunction; Paraphilia

What is the difference between sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias?

Sexual dysfunctions are problems that men and women may have related to sexual arousal and sexual function. Paraphilias are conditions, which may be classified as psychological disorders, in which sexual arousal is associated with nonhuman objects, the suffering of self or others, and/ or non consenting persons.

A striking effect of hormonal changes on human sexual behavior is the

Sharp rise in sexual interest at puberty

Which three of the following five factors have researches found to have an effect on sexual orientation?

Size of certain cell clusters in the hypothalamus, Prenatal hormone exposure, and for men, having multiple older biological brothers

We may recognize a face at a social gathering but be unable to remember how we know that person. This is an example of

Source amnesia

What psychological principle helps explain why women tend to perform more poorly when they believe their online chess opponent is male?

Stereotype threat

___ ____ can lead to poor performance on tests by undermining test-takers' belief that they can do well on the test.

Stereotype threat

Social networking tends to ______ (strengthen/weaken) your relationships with people you already know, ______ (increase/ decrease) your self-disclosure, and ____ (reveal/hide) your true personality.

Strengthen; increase; reveal.

The hippocampus seems to function as a

Temporary processing site for explicit memories

The primary male sex hormone is ___. The primary female sex hormones are the ____.

Testosterone; Estrogens

Which brain area responds to stress hormones by helping to create stronger memories?

The amygdala

Which parts of the brain are important for implicit memory processing, and which parts play a key role in explicit memory processing?

The cerebellum and basal ganglia are important for implicit memory processing and the frontal lobes and hippocampus are key to explicit memory formation.

In prosperous country X, everyone eats all they want. In country Y, the rich are well fed, but the semi starved poor are often thin. In which country will the heritability of body weight be greater?

The heritability (difference due to genes) of body weight will be greater in country X, where environmental differences in available nutrition are minimal.

One reason false memories form is our tendency to fill in memory gaps with our reasonable guesses and assumptions, sometimes based on misleading information. This tendency is an example of

The misinformation effect

Obese people find it very difficult to lose weight permanently. This is due to several factors, including the fact that

There is a genetic influence on body weight.

How have students reacted in studies where they were made to feel rejected and unwanted? What helps explain these results?

These students basic need to belong seems to have been disrupted. They engaged in more self-defeating behaviors, underperformed on aptitude tests, and displayed less empathy and more aggression.

Use the concepts of crystallized and fluid intelligence to explain why writers tend to produce their most creative work later in life, and scientists may hit their peak much earlier.

Writers' work relies more on crystallized intelligence, or accumulated knowledge, which increases with age. For top performance, scientists doing research may need more fluid intelligence (speedy and abstract reasoning), which tends to decrease with age.

After an eight hour hike without food, your long-awaited favorite dish is placed in front of you, and your mouth waters in anticipation. Why?

You have learned to respond to the sight and aroma that signal the food about to enter your mouth. Physiological cues (low blood sugar) and psychological cues (anticipation of the tasty meal) heighten your experienced hunger.

Children can be accurate eyewitnesses if

a neutral person asks non leading questions soon after the event, in words the children can understand

Sternberg's three types of intelligence are:

academic, practical, and creative

Long-term potentiation refers to

an increase in a cell's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation

The environmental influence that has the clearest, most profound effect on individual development is

being raised in conditions of extreme deprivation

The psychological terms for taking in information, retaining it, and later getting it back out are _____, _______, and ______.

encoding, storage, and retrieval

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is best able to tell us

how the test-taker compares with other adults in vocabulary and arithmetic reasoning

An example of a physiological need is ____. An example of a psychological drive is ______.

hunger; a "push" to find food

Sensory memory may be visual ____ memory or auditory ____ memory.

iconic; echoic

The strongest support for heredity's influence on intelligence is the finding that

identical twins, but not other siblings, have nearly identical intelligence scores

Ebbinghaus' "forgetting curve" shows that after an initial decline, memory for novel information tends to

level out

When you feel sad, why might it help to look at pictures that reawaken some of your best memories?

memories are stored within a web of many associations, one of which is mood. When you recall happy moments from your past, you deliberately activate these positive links. You may then experience mood-congruent memory and recall other happy moments, which could improve your mood and brighten your interpretation of current events.

A psychologist who asks you to write down as many objects as you can remember having seen a few minutes earlier is testing your

recall

Our short term memory for new information is limited to about ___ items

seven

When forgetting is due to encoding failure, meaningless information has not been transferred from

short term memory into long term memory

Emotionally intelligent people tend to

succeed in their careers

When tested immediately after viewing a list of words, people tend to recall the first and last items more readily than those in the middle. When retested after a delay, they are most likely to recall

the first items on the list

To say that the heritability of intelligence is about 50 percent means that 50 percent of

the variation in intelligence within a group of people is attributable to genetic factors