Psychology Quizzes 1 & 2

Which correlation coefficient best represents a moderate relationship showing fewer anxiety symptoms in people who report higher life satisfaction?

-0.5

Psychoanalytic theory focuses on __________ and early childhood experiences.

A person's unconsciousness

Introspection refers to a process by which someone examines ________ as objectively as possible.

Another person's consciousness

Dr. Matter is interested in knowing more about brain injury to the occipital cortex, and he studies patients individually in order to gain in-depth knowledge about their behaviors. These studies would best be described as ________.

Case studies

Ashya wants to focus on the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders and other problematic patterns of behavior. What area of psychology should she work in?

Clinical psychology

Sandra strongly believes that attending daycare is detrimental to children's development so she decides to write her psychology term paper on this topic. She does a literature search and finds several sources supporting her opinion, but she finds that the majority of research indicates that children attending daycare experience healthy development. She writes a paper using the sources that find negative associations with daycare attendance. This is an example of ________.

Confirmation bias

A ________ is a variable that affects both variables of interest and may falsely give the impression of a cause-and-effect relationship.

Confounding variable

The ________ group does not get the experimental treatment.

Control

Harrison et al. are conducting a study assessing the ability of depressed versus non-depressed participants to remember negative emotions in a short story about a family whose car breaks down. They plan to ask participants to read the story and then make a list of the emotions expressed in the story. Before beginning the study, they make a list of negative emotions (e.g., sadness and anger) that they will record from the participants' responses. In this example, negative emotions are the ________.

Dependent variable

A major advantage of case studies is ________.

Detailed information

Lucy wants to study changes in cognitive skills, moral reasoning, and social behavior across the lifespan. Lucy should specialize in ________ psychology.

Developmental

Which of the following research designs will allow cause-and-effect conclusions?

Experimental

Which of the following does not influence perception?

Gestalt

A series of dots arranged in the shape of a face will be perceived as a face, not a series of dots. A psychologist studying this phenomenon is applying the principals of ________.

Gestalt psychology

Spurling et al. investigated the effects of two vocabulary learning strategies on word retention two weeks later. In this example, learning strategy is the ________ variable and word retention is the ________ variable.

Independent; dependent

Guillermo spends some time each day applying the principles of structuralism to examine his own conscious experience as carefully as possible. Guillermo is engaged in ________.

Introspection

Which of the following is a criticism of evolutionary psychology?

It ignores non-genetic factors in determining human behavior.

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of good a hypothesis?

It is complex

A group of preschool-age children are enrolled in a study that plans to follow them over time in order to assess behaviors and other characteristics that may predict later development of schizophrenia. This is an example of a ________ design.

Longitudinal

Patwardhan et al. report data from a study where they hired experimental confederates to attend speed dating events, posing as daters, and carefully take notes on the behaviors of the daters. What type of research design did they use?

Naturalistic observation

Which aspect of the scientific method occurs first?

Observation

I provide Ralph with the positive reinforcement of a candy bar when he does something I like. I punish him by squirting him with a squirt gun when he does something I don't like. I am applying the principles of ________ in an attempt to modify Ralph's behavior.

Operant conditioning

A ________ is a description of how the researchers will measure the variables of interest.

Operational definiton

For a scientific explanation to be testable, it must also be ________.

Perceivable and measurable

Edmund wants to identify relatively consistent patterns of thought and behavior, measure these traits, and determine how these traits interact in a particular context to determine how a person will behave in any given situation. Edmund wants to conduct research in the area of ________.

Personality

Dr. Bogdarian noticed that one of her students addresses her with the word mother instead of the word professor or doctor. Dr. Bogdarian applies the principles of ________, and hypothesizes the student misspeaks because he is unconsciously associating her with his mother.

Psychoanalytic theory

In order to maximize the chances that experimental groups represent the population of interest, researchers should conduct ________ and ________.

Random sampling; random group assignment

Stan and Jenny are in a psychology course that requires them to repeat an experiment that researchers have conducted in the past, in order to determine whether they produce the same results. This is called ________.

Reduplication

Green et al. used a ________ from their ________ of interest in order to make a ________.

Sample; population; generalization

Susan wants to study prejudice, attraction, how we explain our own behavior versus how we explain the behavior of others, and how we resolve interpersonal conflicts. Susan should conduct research in the area of ________.

Social psychology

Select the correctly ordered list of psychological perspectives, with the earliest perspective listed first.

Structuralism, functionalism, humanism, behaviorism

Behaviorism focuses on making psychology an objective science by ________.

Studying overt behavior and deemphasizing the importance of unobservable mental processes.

Behaviorists all focuses on _______.

The internal motivation for action.

Which of the following is a criticism of structuralism?

The process was highly subjective.

Research shows that people who smoke cigarettes are more likely to get lung cancer than those who do not smoke. This research alone demonstrates that ________.

There is a relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

Magali and Jean-Gabriel have been asked to design a study investigating happiness across the lifespan. They decide their study will involve going to the mall and asking people of a variety of ages if they are happy or unhappy. What is the most serious flaw of this design?

They have not defined happiness or how it will be measured.

What do structuralism, Gestalt psychology, and Sigmund Freud all have in common?

They were all concerned with describing and understanding the inner experience.

Devine et al. are interested in assessing whether active versus passive play causes a preference for sweet or salty foods in toddlers. They assign groups of children to either an active play, passive play, or no play group and record their food choices when presented with a variety of sweet and salty foods. In this study, ________ is the independent variable and ________ is the control group.

Type of play; no play

A negative correlation means ________.

one variable decreases as the other increases

Cognitive psychology focuses on studying ________.

thoughts and their relationship to our experiences and our actions