Psychology 1315 Final Review

Five students had the following scores on a psychological test: 10, 10, 15, 25, and 40. The median of these five scores is

15

If you find no relationship between two variables, what is the correlation coefficient?

0.00

Five students had the following scores on a psychological test: 10, 10, 15, 25, and 40. The mean of these five scores is

20

Suppose a researcher finds that for every 10 hours an adolescent spends playing video games in a week, his or her score on a hand-eye coordination test increases by 1 point. How could this relationship be described?

A direct relationship

Suppose a study found that, after 30 min of meditation, the average score on a focused attention test was 80, whereas the baseline average before meditation was 20. How could this result be described?

A four-fold increase

In which of the following jobs would an individual best be able to apply his or her knowledge of developmental psychology with the most positive outcome?

A psychiatric hospital employee

The "Law of Effect" states that "following a behavior with a reward will increase the behavior." Which of the following is an example of this?

A trainer teaches a dog to sit by giving it a treat every time it sits on command.

People tend to view members of out-groups as more homogeneous (i.e., similar to each other) than the members of a group they belong to. Which of the following is the best example of this?

A woman prefers spending time with men instead of other women.

Which of the following is most likely to be a personal view, not a based on empirical evidence?

After returning from giving birth, Staci says her cat has been misbehaving because he is jealous of the attention her new baby is getting.

Suppose a researcher is interested in answering the question: "Does having children improve happiness?" How could this be rewritten to be less ambiguous, while at the same time maintaining the essential nature of the question?

Do parents rate their life satisfaction as higher than do comparable adults without children?

Suppose a graduate student is trying to decide what research question about psychotherapy to address in her dissertation. Which of the following would be a poor choice because it is ill-defined?

Does psychoanalysis take too long?

Group A received progressive relaxation training prior to test-taking while Group B received no treatment. Group A is the ________ group, while Group B is the ________ group.

Experimental: control

An experimenter wants to study the relationship between caffeine and reaction time. She assigns participants as follows: Group One receives 100 mg of caffeine; Group Two receives 200 mg of caffeine; Group Three receives 300 mg of caffeine; and, Group Four receives no caffeine. Twenty minutes later all participants complete the reaction-time test. Which group is the control group?

Group Four

Suppose a study finds a positive correlation between levels of a particular enzyme in the brain and the severity of mania in people suffering from bipolar disorder. Which of the following is the most accurate conclusion to make based on this evidence?

Having high levels of the enzyme is associated with mania

You want to determine the relationship between caffeine intake and performance on a mid-quarter exam. As students sit down to take the exam, you ask them to write the number of cups of tea, soda, or coffee they ingested two hours prior to the exam. You also obtain their exam scores. You calculate the correlation coefficient between the two variables to be +0.82. What can you conclude?

Higher caffeine consumption is related to higher exam scores

Female rat pups injected with testosterone soon after birth display male typical sexual behaviors when they reach maturity. Which of the following is the best conclusion to draw from this?

Hormone levels during early life can alter development and change adult behavior

An example of an ill-defined research questions is: "Do adolescents with authoritarian parents engage in more ___________ on average, compared to other adolescents?"

Immoral behavior

Dr. Ambrose feels that a particular intelligence test is probably culturally biased. Which of the following test questions would concern Dr. Ambrose the most?

In which month of the year is the Super Bowl played?

Which research question would be best investigated by a correlational study?

Is there a relationship between body weight and personality

Suppose an experienced clinician claims that a particular therapeutic technique does not work. His argument is based on the fact that his patients do not seem to respond to the technique when he uses it. Which of the following is true regarding this argument?

It is based solely on personal experience

Which of the following represents a way that an individual with a bachelor's degree in psychology could contribute positively to the welfare of the community?

Join a mentoring program to instill positive traits in adolescents

In order to scientifically study imprecise concepts such as love, sadness, and intelligence, psychologists create ___________, which are specific descriptions of how a variable is going to be measured.

Operational definitions

Research has shown that parents who are overly permissive with their children and do not set or enforce rules tend to have children who grow up to be selfish and lack social skills. Which of the following would be an oversimplified argument to make based on this research?

Parenting style can affect emotional development

Which of the following facts is LEAST connected with the theory that sleep is necessary for the body and brain to restore themselves and fix accumulated damage?

People often dream about events that occurred during the previous day.

Suppose an industrial/organizational psychologist conducts an experiment where employees from a variety of companies are randomly assigned to work from home or the office for several months. She finds that there was no statistical difference in the average productivity of the workers in the two groups. Which of the following is the best conclusion to be drawn from this result?

Productivity will remain the same if companies allow employees to work from home

Suppose a researcher is running a white and a brown lab rat through a maze. The white rat consistently has a faster time than the brown rat. Which of the following would be the best explanation for why it would be a mistake for the researcher to conclude that white lab rats are faster than brown lab rats?

The behavior of one white rat should not be generalized to all white rats

One way to model drug abuse in animals is to allow rats to self-administer narcotics by pressing a lever. Suppose a new drug is injected into a group of rats that have been self-administered cocaine. After the injection the rats show a significant reduction in the number of times they press the lever to receive cocaine. Which of the following would be a valid argument about the new drug based on this result?

The drug ,may be an effective way to help a human fight a cocaine addiction.

Suppose a study compares the effectiveness of three treatments for bipolar disorder. Subjects receiving Treatment A had statistically fewer symptoms than those receiving Treatments B or C. Subjects receiving Treatments B and C were not statistically different, but subjects in all three treatment groups had fewer symptoms than no treatment controls. Which of the following conclusions should the researchers argue?

Treatment A is the only effective treatment

In science, the term theory refers to...

a general set of principles that attempts to explain what is known about a phenomenon

A study indicated a strong positive correlation between two variables. This means that...

as one variable increases, the other also increases

A correlation coefficient indicates the ________ between two variables.

degree of relationship

Thinking that ethnic out-groups are not only different but are worse than your group is called

ehtnocentrism

In a double-blind experiment,

either researched nor participants know who is in the control or experimental group

A researcher notices that Asian participants usually score higher than Americans on the introversion sub scale of the personality test she uses. This difference is most likely due to

experimental bias

The placebo effect refers to the

finding that people feel better simply because they are reiceving medication

You believe that working women are happier than women who do not work outside the home. You predict that working women are less socially isolated than women who work at home. You have just formulated two...

hypotheses

The modern term for "mental retardation" is

intellectual disability

The ________ of a group is determined by adding up participants' scores and dividing by the number of participants.

mean score

When compared with adolescents who do not play violent video games, adolescents who do play these games are

more likely to engage in delinquent acts

The idea of "do onto others as you would have them do onto you" best describes

reciprocity

Dr. McCall found that class projects were of poorer quality when students worked in groups compared to when each student did an individual project. This difference can be explained by the phenomenon of

social loafing

A correlational study is used to determine

the relationship between variables

The bystander effect occurs because

~ We tend to look to the behavior of others for cues about what to do. ~If no on else is helping, we assume help is not needed ~Responsibility is diffused among witnesses