PSC 1Y Final
*The colors in set A differ mainly in _______, whereas the colors in set B differ mainly in _______.
) Saturation / Brightness
The most significant problem with current medication-based treatments for schizophrenia is:
Patients often stop taking the medications and then have a relapse
*Which of the following is a major difference between classic Piagetian and Dynamic Systems theories?
Piaget emphasized qualitative changes, whereas Dynamic Systems emphasizes continuous, quantitative changes
According to the study discussed in lecture, poverty during childhood may lead to:
Poor health outcomes during adulthood by increasing allostatic load
*One day, Alex is playing hide-and-seek with his older sister. He hides behind a curtain that covers his head, but his legs are easily visible to anyone walking by. His sister finds him immediately, and he says "No fair, you must have watched me hide!" because he doesn't realize how easy it was for his sister to see him. Given this information, Alex is probably in the:
Preoperational stage
Professor A conducts a study of IQ in homozygous (identical) twins that were adopted into different families and finds that genes account for 80% of the variation in IQ in these twins. Professor B conducts a similar study of IQ in homozygous (identical) twins that were adopted into different families and finds that genes account for only 40% of the variation in IQ in these twins. What might explain this large difference in the estimated heritability of IQ?
Professor A studied families that were all quite similar to each other, whereas Professor B studied families that were highly variable in factors such as income and education
*The two most common undergraduate majors for students who end up being admitted to medical school in the U.S. are Biology and Biochemistry. What's the third most common?
Psychology
*Imagine that you have a family member who is suffering from moderate depression and would like to receive psychological therapy (e.g., CBT). Which of the following is least likely to offer this kind of treatment?
A psychiatrist
*Which of the following could prescribe antidepressant medications in the state of California?
A psychiatrist
Which of the following is an example of episodic memory?
10 years from now, you can remember what the phrase "wordstem completion" task means even though you don't remember that you learned it in
Most researchers find that there are [ Select ] dimensions of temperament in young children. For Buss & Plomin and also for Rothbart, one of these dimensions is related to [ Select ] . Rothbart included a dimension of [ Select ] , and Buss & Plomin later added a similar dimension.
3 emotion Effortful control
*Over the course of a lifetime, an average person with a bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences makes approximately ______ more money than an average person with bachelor's degree in English.
5%
If a person with an average IQ today took the 1910 IQ test, that person would have __________ IQ score compared to an average person from 1910.
A much higher
Piaget proposed that development occurs by the processes of assimilation and accommodation. An example of assimilation would be A child goes from knowing three color names (red, blue, green) to knowing six color names (red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple) , and an example of accommodation would be A child learns that silver isn't actually a color; we need to add the concept of "shininess" to the concept of "color" to understand what silver is .
A child goes from knowing three color names (red, blue, green) to knowing six color names (red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple) A child learns that silver isn't actually a color; we need to add the concept of "shininess" to the concept of "color" to understand what silver is
*Imagine that you have a family member who is feeling depressed. Which of the following people could not provide assessment and treatment?
All of the above people could assess and treat someone with depression.
Kuzumaki et al. (2011) found that messenger RNA levels for the BDNF gene became greater after a few weeks in mice who were living in an enriched environment compared to mice who were living in an impoverished environment. This is an example of: [Select all that are correct.]
An environmental effect An epigenetic effect Experimental research
If the Rosenhan (1973) study were repeated today, it is unlikely that the pseudopatients would be diagnosed with schizophrenia or hospitalized for a long period. What are three major factors that are responsible for this change? [Select 3 of the following options.]
Antipsychotic medications are now available that are effective in at least 70% of patients The system is now designed to minimize long- The diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia have changed dramatically since 1973
Which of the following are true of the Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) study of racial discrimination in employment? [Select all that are correct.]
Applicants with names that sounded European-American were approximately 50% more likely to be invited to interview than applicants with names that sounded African-American The study contained an experimental manipulation and was not simply correlational
In Solomon Asch's classic obedience experiment, participants were asked which of three lines matched a reference line. When participants were tested alone, their performance was [ Select ] . In the main experiment, the participant was tested in a group that contains several confederates. A confederate is someone who [ Select ] . Starting on the third trial of the group testing condition, all the confederates gave the wrong answer on most trials. On these trials, most participants at least occasionally gave the same wrong answer as the confederates. However, it's clear that the participants knew that this answer is incorrect because [ Select ] .
Approximately 99% correct Is working for the experimenter but appears to be just another participant The rate of conformity is greatly reduced if the participants write down their answers privately rather than saying them aloud
For Pavlov's original classical conditioning experiment, match each element of the experiment with the corresponding term
Bell- Conditioned Stimulus Meat Powder- Unconditioned Stimulus Salivation by bell- Conditioned response Salivation by meat- Unconditioned response
*A researcher puts two equal sized balls of dough in front of a 3-year-old child, and then rolls one of them into a log shape while the child watches. The researcher then asks the child which of the two pieces contains more dough.
Both (a) and (b)
*Social Identity Theory suggests that Americans may feel particularly good after Team USA wins an Olympic gold medal because:
Both A and C
Gender-typical behaviors in children—such as roughhousing in boys and playing with dolls in girls—can be influenced by:
Both social expectations and biological factors
The classic "readiness potential" study of Libet provided evidence that
Brain activity corresponding to a choice occurs before a person is conscious of having made the choice
What are the two main mechanisms by which neurotransmitters are cleared out of the synaptic cleft? [Select the two correct answers.]
Breakdown (the transmitters are broken down into smaller molecules by means of enzymes) Reuptake (the transmitters are taken back up into the axon terminals for re-use)
The case of Kitty Genovese is famous among psychologists for showing:
Bystander Apathy
Brain stimulation studies provide evidence for a causal link between mind and brain because they show that:
Changing the pattern of activity in the brain can cause a change in the state of the mind
Imagine that you're at an amusement park, and you're on a ride that's completely in the dark. Every now and then, the ride swerves suddenly, which leads you to automatically tense your muscles. Right before each swerve, the ride makes a clanking sound. By the end of the ride, you find that you tense your muscles as soon as you hear the clanking sound. This is an example of Sensitization because Your tensing is not contingent on the clanking sound .
Classical conditioning The swerving is not contingent on your tensing
As described in the lecture videos, the goals of psychology are to ____ the human mind and human behavior. [Select all correct options.]
Control Describe Predict Explain
Studies such as the one by Kim Noble and her colleagues showing structural brain differences in children from lower-income families are examples of (choose all that apply):
Correlational research Effects of the environment on development
*Laura loves riding her motorcycle, and she prides herself on being safe, courteous, and responsible. She travels to the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, where she is one of ~500,000 motorcyclists. Her friends are surprised when they hear that, during the rally, she was driving recklessly and cutting off car drivers. Laura's behavior during the rally can be explained by
Deindividuation
People who score high on self monitoring tend to exhibit: [Select all that are correct]
Different patterns of behavior in different situations
For the treatment of psychological disorders, which of the following are major disadvantages of drug therapies relative to psychological therapies? [Select all that are correct.]
Drug therapies are typically effective only while the patient is taking the medication Drug therapies may impact the body and not just the brain Drug therapies often have significant side effects
Learning to speak a language requires the development of functioning vocal chords, development of the ability to control the vocal cords, learning the words of the language, and learning the grammar of the language. Which perspective on development would emphasize the interactions among all these factors in explaining the development of speech?
Dynamic Systems
*Anna, Prisha, and Jing are all 14 years old, and Prisha has already started dating. Neither Anna nor Jing feels ready to start dating, but for different reasons. Jing is very social but has been slow to develop physically. Anna is physically mature, but she is shy and doesn't feel comfortable interacting with boys. These differences would be most naturally explained by theories of development that emphasize:
Dynamic systems
When possible, studies of psychological therapies use active control conditions rather than no-treatment control conditions. This is because active control conditions are designed to:
Equate the expectations of the participants in the treatment group and the control group
Researcher A conducts a study in which she surveys 50 college students and finds that students who report eating a high-protein breakfast have a substantially higher GPA than students who report that they eat a low-protein breakfast. She finds that this difference was statistically significant. A blogger hears about this finding and writes a blog saying that all students would get better grades if they started eating a high-protein breakfast. Which of the following statements are potential problems with this conclusion about what students should do? [Select all that are correct.]
Even though the effect was statistically significant, there is still a chance that it might be a fluke The result was based on self reports, and it's possible that the students' reports are not accurate Although the effect might be true on average, it might not be true of all people The blog is drawing a conclusion about causation based on a mere correlation
You are sitting in a coffee shop, and the people at the table next to you are talking loudly about how hot it is. Although you are trying to ignore them, you keep hearing them say words like "hot" and "heat". This will lead to:
Increased activation of the concept of cold in your conceptual network (because hot is related to cold)
If all human behavior is caused by physical interactions among the components of the brain, this calls into question whether humans have free will. The question of whether people actually have free will is an important practical issue because:
In the U.S. legal system, people are not usually held responsible for actions that were not performed freely
Learning is a result of changes in the strengths of synapses. Which of the following is an example of something that would increase the strength of a synapse?
Increase in the number of receptors on the postsynaptic side of the synapse
Why is it important to rigorously test the effectiveness of psychological therapies? [Select all that are correct.]
If a therapy is ineffective, people who use it may lose the opportunity to try an effective therapy (an opportunity cost) Some psychological therapies can actually make people worse
Why do randomized controlled trials randomly assign patients to the different interventions rather than letting the patients choose which intervention they prefer?
If the patients chose the intervention, there might be preexisting differences between the groups, making it impossible to know if the interventions caused any observed differences in outcome
Which of the following statements are true of biological explanations for the etiology and symptoms of psychological disorders?
In many cases, there are large differences in brain structure and function between people with a given disorder and healthy control participants One's total set of genes strongly predicts whether one will experience a given psychological disorder
*Which of the following is FALSE?
In most states, clinical psychologists can prescribe drugs but counseling psychologists cannot
*Which of the following has been used as evidence that faces are "special" (processed by special-purpose perceptual systems)?
Inverting an image has a larger impact on the perception of faces than non-face objects
Patient H.M. had a severe impairment in _____________.
Explicit long term memory
Researcher A conducts a study in which she tests 50 college students and finds that students who eat a healthy breakfast have a slightly higher GPA than students who don't eat a healthy breakfast. Researcher B conducts the same study with a new group of 50 college students and finds no difference in GPA between students who do and do not eat a healthy breakfast. This would be a:
Failure to replicate
Allostasis reflects the body's ability to:
Flexibly adapt to changing environmental demands
Which of the following would be an example of social loafing? [Select all that are correct.]
Four students are working together on the final project for a class, and each of them works only an hour per week on it. Another student in the same class is working alone on the project and spend three hours per week on it.
Imagine that a researcher studies a group of people who are dieting and finds that dieters who skip breakfast are less successful at losing weight than dieters who reduce snacks during the day. The researcher then explains this in terms of differences in the release of the hormone ghrelin in the morning versus other times of day. This explanation is at the scope of:
Groups of people
Phineas Gage sustained major damage to his left prefrontal cortex in a construction accident. Which of the following symptoms did he exhibit following this damage?
His personality was changed He became impulsive He became rude
The field of health psychology focuses on
How attitudes, behaviors, and social factors affect health
Match the hypothetical psychological entity with its central characteristic
ID- Basic Desires Ego- Rational, Conscious Superego- Moral Values
Which of the following are properties of emotion (as defined by psychologists)? [Select all that are correct]
Involve conscious feelings Are triggered by specific internal or external events Involve changes in behavior Are relatively brief Occur rapidly Involve physiological responses
The idea of dualism is appealing to many people because:
It is not clear how the mind, which does not seem to be physical, could be causally related to the brain, which is clearly physical
The critical distinction between the James-Lange and Cannon-Bard theories of emotion is:
James-Lange says physiological responses cause subjective feelings, whereas Cannon-Bard says physiological responses and subjective feelings happen separately and simultaneously
Evidence for materialism includes: [Select all that are correct.]
Lesion studies show that mental processes are changed in systematic ways when specific brain areas are damaged Brain stimulation studies show that it is possible to change the state of the mind by changing the state of the brain Recordings of brain activity show that the pattern of brain activity changes as the contents of the mind change
Although most developmental psychologists focus on infants, children, and adolescents, some developmental psychologists also look at developmental changes across adulthood and old age. This is called the study of:
Lifespan development
The case of "Joey" is fairly typical of the development of schizophrenia. People who later develop schizophrenia often exhibit Hallucinations and Impaired social engagement in early childhood, and they often exhibit [ Select ] ["Suspiciousness and paranoia", "Full commitment", "Violent behavior", "Psychosis"] prior to meeting the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. The most common age of schizophrenia onset is
Neuromotor abnormalities Impaired social engagement Suspiciousness and paranoia In early adulthood
The first part of a classical conditioning experiment is typically a Baseline Phase, which is used to show that the stimulus that will be used as the conditioned stimulus is initially a/an [ Select ] ["Biological", "Unconditioned", "Pavlovian", "Neutral"] stimulus that does not produce a/an [ Select ] ["Unconditioned", "Observational", "Biological", "Pavlovian"] response and that the stimulus that will be used as the unconditioned stimulus does produce a/an Unconditioned response. The second part is a Conditioning Phase, in which the [ Select ] ["Neutral and Conditioned responses", "Neutral and Unconditioned stimuli", "Conditioned and Unconditioned responses", "Neutral and Conditioned stimuli"] are paired for several trials. The final part is a Test Phase, in which the experimenter determines whether the Conditioned stimulus now produces a/an [ Select ] ["Neutral", "Unconditioned", "Conditioned", "Biological", "Pavlovian"]
Neutral Unconditioned Unconditioned Neutral and Unconditioned Conditioned Conditioned
*Which of the following standard principles of good science were present in the Stanford Prison Experiment?
None of the above
Bees are able to learn an association between an odor and the presence of sucrose after a single pairing of these two stimuli. Researcher A explains this in terms of natural selection, saying that this ability must exist because it increases the ability of bees to survive and reproduce. The shortcoming of this explanation is that [ Select ] . However, natural selection would be a valid explanation if [ Select ] .
Not all traits exist because they increase the likelihood of survival and reproduction Eliminating this ability leads to decreased survival and reproduction
A researcher conducts an experiment in which a rat eats a piece of peanut butter, which it has never tried before. The peanut butter has been laced with a small amount of a tasteless, odorless poison, and this makes the rat feel sick. The next day, the rat is given a chance to eat some peanut butter and some cheese, and it avoids the peanut butter but eats the cheese. This experiment demonstrates which of the following? [Select all that are correct]
One trial learning Conditioned taste aversion
A class decides to pull a prank on their professor during a lecture. Every time the professor stands on the left side of the room, the class smiles and pays attention to the what the professor is saying. Every time the professor stands on the right side of the room, the class frowns and looks away from the professor. After about 15 minutes of this, the students notice that the professor is lecturing almost exclusively from the left side of the room. This is an example of . When the professor stands on the left side of the room, this is the . When the students smile and pay attention, this is the .
Operant conditioning Operant response Reinforcer
What are the four main approaches to assessing the personality of a "target" individual? [Select the four correct options]
Reports of the target's behavior by people who know the target Assessment of life outcomes from archival data Direct observation of the target's behavior Reports of the target's thoughts and behavior by the target
All of these cubes should appear to be the same except for their positions. This exemplifies which of the following principles? [Select all that are correct.]
Shape constancy Perception involves an active construction of a representation of the world
An infant who is reactive will exhibit _________ physiological responses to a loud sound and exhibit __________ behavior around unfamiliar people.
Strong / inhibited
Freud's theories weren't very scientific because they were not:
Testable
One day, Ashley is standing at the edge of a sharp dropoff at the Grand Canyon, which makes her a little nervous. All of a sudden her friend Julia sneaks up behind her and yells "boo!", which causes a strong fear response in Ashley. From that point onward, Ashley feels an intense fear whenever she sees a sharp dropoff. If we think of this as classical conditioning, the conditioned stimulus is The loud "boo!" sound , the unconditioned stimulus is , the conditioned response is The fear response , and the unconditioned response is
The Sharp Drop off The loud Boo sound The fear response The fear response
*• The "other-race effect" appears to mainly be a result of:
The amount of experience an individual has with people of a given racial/ethnic group
Two sonar operators, Janie and Jamie, have been training for a year on a battleship. The captain wants to determine which one is now better at determining whether a submarine is present or absent. The captain shows Janie and Jamie a sonar display in which the captain knows a submarine is present but in which the signal is weak. Janie reports that a submarine is present in the display, and Jamie reports that no submarine is present. From this test, who does the captain decide has better sensitivity for determining whether a submarine is present or absent?
The captain cannot know who has better sensitivity from a single trial, because we cannot separately assess sensitivity and threshold (bias) from a single trial
Which of the following best predicts long-term outcome (e.g., employment) in people with schizophrenia?
The degree to which basic cognitive processes are impaired
Which of the following statements are true of the Big 5 personality dimensions: [Select all that are correct]
The dimensions are largely independent, which means that a person's score on one dimension is not very predictive of that person's score on the other dimensions Most personality psychologists agree that the Big 5 dimensions provide a reasonable approximation of the main dimensions of personality
It's not a good idea to try to diagnose psychological disorders in yourself and others. However, you should become concerned and seek professional help if:
The problem leads to significant distress that lasts for a couple weeks and interferes with normal activities
*At some universities, fraternities engage in rigorous hazing rituals, in which new recruits may be beaten or humiliated. Those recruits who remain in the fraternity are typically very loyal, despite having experienced real abuse. This could be explained in terms of cognitive dissonance by assuming that:
The recruits believe that the fraternity must be great or they would not have stayed
In an operant conditioning experiment, the reinforcer is contingent on the operant response. This means that:
The reinforcer is presented ONLY if the subject responds (but not necessarily every time the subject responds)
Most scientific journals use peer review. This means that:
The research is reviewed by other expert scientists to determine if it is sufficiently sound and novel to warrant publication
Researcher A conducts a study in which she tests 50 college students and finds that students who eat a healthy breakfast have a slightly higher GPA than students who don't eat a healthy breakfast. However, this effect was not statistically significant. This means that:
The researcher cannot conclude that this effect is present in the general population of college students
Cognitive psychologists use the term "information processing" to describe thinking because:
Thinking often consists of taking mental representations of information and transforming them into new representations
When possible, studies of both drug treatments and psychological therapies use blind ratings of symptoms as outcome measures. Why?
To avoid unconscious biases on the part of the raters that might influence their ratings
Which of the following have been shown to be effective treatments for depression?
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Psychological therapies such as cognitive behavior therapy Electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT) Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
*Baby Avi learns that banging a toy makes a funny sound. He then tries banging a block and finds that it also makes a funny sound. Then he bangs an egg and finds that it breaks instead of making a funny sound. The next time he has an egg, he bangs it to see if it will make a funny sound. This would be an example of:
Using assimilation when accommodation would have been better
According to the circumplex model of emotion, the two major dimensions of emotion are [ Select ] and [ Select ] .
Valence (whether the emotion is positive or negative) Arousal (the degree of physiological activation)
*Research using the minimal groups paradigm shows that:
We readily form groups based on unimportant similarities and differences among people
When preparing for an exam, it is not usually very useful to recopy your notes. However, there might be occasional cases were this would be useful. In which of the following cases, if any, would recopying your notes likely help you remember the relevant material for an exam?
You are preparing for an anatomy exam in which it is important to know what the anatomical structures look like, and your notes are mainly drawings of the structures
*Imagine that you stare at a red X on a gray background for 30 seconds. The display is then changed to be solid gray, with no red X in the middle. According to the opponent process theory of color perception, you should have an afterimage that looks like:
a green x
In development, a "critical period" is a period of development during which:
an infant's or child's biology makes it especially easy to learn some specific thing or acquire some specific ability
Applied behavior analysis is an example of behavioral therapy , and it based on laboratory studies of semantic memory
behavioral therapy operant conditioning
*The video monitor/projector producing this image takes advantage of trichromatic vision by using three colors of light to produce a large number of perceived colors. To produce the patch of color below, the monitor/projector will primarily emit _____ light, whereas to produce the white background on this slide, it will emit equal intensities of _____ light.
green / blue, green, & red
*If you saw a pure light with a wavelength of 450 nm, and then the wavelength was increased to 700 nm (with everything else held constant), you would perceive this mainly as a change in ___________
hue
In obsessive-compulsive disorder, obsessions are
recurring, intrusive thoughts
The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Initiative is used to classify psychological disorders for research purposes and clinical treatment and characterizes a given individual according to a set of discrete categories
research purposes only continuous dimensions (domains)
A postsynaptic potential is analogous to [ Select ] because it is [ Select ] . An action potential is analogous to [ Select ] .
squeezing the trigger of a gun continuously variable a bullet firing from a gun
In the phrase "associative long-term potentiation," the term associative means that the brain is learning an association between two things, the term long-term means , and the term potentiation means .
that the brain is learning an association between two things the potentiation will last for hours, weeks, months, or years neural responses are increased as a result of the learning
It takes a fair amount of time for an action potential to travel down a long axon, but the speed of transmission can be increased if [ Select ] . When an action potential reaches an axon terminal, it typically [ Select ] . In general, information flows from the [ Select ] .
the axon is coated in myelin leads to the release of neurotransmitter molecules into the synaptic cleft presynaptic cell to the postsynaptic cell
Reedier & Karpicke (2006) found that studying for 7 minutes and then being tested for 7 minutes led to much better memory than studying for 14 minutes, but only when the final memory test occurred after a substantial delay and not when the final memory test occurred right away .
the final memory test occurred after a substantial delay the final memory test occurred right away
Clever Hans was able to answer questions correctly by [ Select ] . One piece of evidence for this is that he was unable to answer questions correctly if [ Select ]
watching his owner's unconscious facial expressions his owner did not know the answer
