# Answers to Gary Brill's online sakai assigment questions from General

Psychology 101 Fall 2007.

Which of the following is true about the Research Participation Requirement?

If you submit a paper on a research paper at the end of the semester, then you don't have
to earn any RPUs.
You completed an RPU experiment six weeks ago but no RPUs for that experiment
appear on your RPU report. What action should you take to rectify the situation?
Contact the experimenter via the RPU web site.
The two bookstores that carry the specially-ordered package that includes the textbook
and clicker at a special price are:
Livingston Bookstore and New Jersey Books
The total number of RPUs you can earn for participation in online (web-based)
experiments is:
1.
According to the position known as determinism,
every behavior has a cause.
The nature-nurture issue can best be defined as the study of
how differences in behavior relate to differences in heredity and environment
Psychology is best defined as the study of
behavior and experience.
Two people with the same psychological disorder seek help--one from a psychiatrist and
the other from a clinical psychologist. What is the most likely difference in the way they
will be treated?
The clinical psychologist will try harder to find treatments that do not require drugs.
Who is credited with being the founder of American psychology?
William James
The first laboratory for psychological research was founded in 1879 by
Wilhelm Wundt.
To determine whether a theory is parsimonious, we pay attention to the
simplicity of its assumptions.
A proponent of ESP claims that ESP shows up only when the vibrations are right and that
there is no way to know whether the vibrations are right except to see whether ESP shows
up. What is wrong with this theory from a scientific standpoint?
It is not falsifiable.
An investigator repeats the procedures of another researcher's experiment but obtains
different results. Scientists would say that the results of the first experiment were not
replicable.
The word science derives from a Latin word meaning
knowledge.
Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist, attempted to help his patients by
analyzing patients' dreams and tracing current behavior to childhood experiences.
Women now receive approximately ____ of the doctoral degrees awarded in psychology in
the North America and Europe.
two thirds
Both Calkins and Washburn were famous as
prominent women in the early history of psychology.
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Galton's studies of eminent men and their sons led him to the conclusion that intelligence
is
inherited.
For a time during the 1930s and 1940s Clark Hull was the most influential figure in
American psychology. Hull's research focused mostly on
maze learning in rats.
Which of the following statements would be correct concerning the ranking of intellectual
ability of animals?
The correct ranking depends on the task being studied.
Which approach to psychology was advocated by William James in the late 1800's?
functionalism
Study of the functions of the mind (the actions the mind performs, rather than the ideas
the mind has) was advocated by
William James.
Which psychologist is known for his equations explaining maze learning in rats?
Clark Hull
Based on her observations, a psychologist predicts that children who view violent
programs on television will display more aggressive behavior. This testable prediction is
known as a/an
hypothesis.
A researcher believes that men are more likely than women to commit an act of
unprovoked aggression. Several experiments have been done, but in each case, the results
fall a bit short of statistical significance. The researcher then combines all of the studies
into a single analysis as if they were all one very large study. This procedure
is called a meta-analysis.
Two serious objections to claims of extrasensory perception are that the explanations are
not ____ and that the results are not ____.
parsimonious...replicable
A researcher hypnotizes twenty volunteers an suggests to them that they will become
more creative. Later the researcher compares stories these people write to stories written
by 20 other people, and reports a difference. The main problem with this study is that it
LACKS:
random samples and blind observations.
Survey questions written by opponents of stem cell research led most people to express
____, and survey questions written by supporters of stem cell research led most people to
express ____.
opposition...support
Researchers have found that people who live in crowded cities are more likely than others
to develop schizophrenia (a psychological disorder). From these results, which of the
following conclusions (if any) can we draw?
The results do not justify any of these conclusions.
An investigator finds that it is possible to use measurements of people's speed of response
as a moderately accurate predictor of their grades in school. From this information we
can conclude that the correlation between speed of response and grades is
either positive or negative but not zero.

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Which of the following is the BEST conclusion regarding the ethical treatment of animals
in research?
Psychologists' attitudes vary on this issue, but there are agreed upon guidelines for the
proper care and use of animals in research.
The main difference between a correlational study and an experiment is that in an
experiment,
the investigator manipulates the independent variable.
To test the effects of eating on learning, Professor Lee permits her morning class to bring
snacks to class but forbids her afternoon class from bringing snacks. To measure
performance, she counts the number of "intelligent questions" asked by students in each
class, and reports getting more such questions in the morning class. What are two serious
flaws in this experiment?
lack of random assignment and lack of blind observations
On the first test the mean is 70 and the standard deviation is 10. On the second test the
mean is 70 and the standard deviation is 5. On the third test the mean is 70 and the
standard deviation is 15. You get a score of 90 on all three tests. On which test did you do
best, relative to other students?
the second test
Which of the following would best describe the kind of research a psychologist would use
to study whether facial expressions have the same meaning for various people throughout
the world?
cross-cultural study
An experimenter exposed students to 1 hour of soft, intermediate, or loud noises and then
tested their ability to solve puzzles. What was the dependent variable in this experiment?
the students' scores on the puzzles
Under which of the following circumstances is the median a much better indicator of most
people's scores than the mean is?
Most scores were low but a few scores were very high.
An investigator conducts a statistical test to determine whether the difference between the
experimental group and the control group was statistically significant. Other things being
equal, the difference is most likely to be significant if
the mean of one group was much larger than the mean of the other group.
Which of the following is an operational definition of intelligence?
a score on an IQ test
A study was conducted to test a new hay fever drug. Patients were randomly assigned to
experimental and control groups. For 6 weeks, experimental patients took the drug daily
and control patients took nothing. Each patient recorded hay fever attacks. The drug
users had fewer and less severe attacks. What would best improve the design of this
study?
use a placebo rather than a "nothing" group
One of the most common techniques for finding out about people's beliefs or attitudes is to
ask a large number of people a series of questions. This technique is called
a survey.
A survey company that wants to know the views of the average person sends an agent to a
shopping mall to interview anyone who is available. The people who are interviewed
constitute a

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 convenience sample.
An investigator finds no consistent relationship between how much sleep students get at
night and their grade point average in school. According to that study, the correlation
between sleep and grades is
zero.
You apply for a job selling diet marshmallows because an ad says that the average
company employee earns $50,000 a year. Later you discover that the company has a
president, a sales manager, and 30 salespeople; you also learn that each salesperson earns
$14,000 a year. How can the company's claim be correct?
The mean is $50,000 because of high salaries for the president and sales manager.
On the first test the mean is 70 and the standard deviation is 10. On the second test the
mean is 70 and the standard deviation is 5. On the third test the mean is 70 and the
standard deviation is 15. You get a score of 60 on all three tests. On which test did you do
best, relative to other students?
The third test.
Remembering how to play the piano is an example of ____ memory.
procedural
If you glance at a bright scene on television and close your eyes and still see the exact
image for less then a second, the image is in your
sensory store.
Jane reads something ("Patient survives head transplant!") and dismisses it as unreliable
(she read it as a National Enquirer headline while in line at the grocery store). If Jane
retains her semantic memory but forgets her episodic memory for this event, Jane may
start to believe that she read about the transplant in a legitimate publication.
In working memory the component that is responsible for governing shifts of attention is
called thevgva
central executive.
When individuals recall "flashbulb" memories, they are typically
subject to distortion just like other memories.
Research in the 1950's suggested that the capacity of short-term memory is
about seven items.
If you are trying to memorize a list of words, which of the following would be the best
advice?
Go through the list thinking about the meaning of each word.
Although you thought you had completely forgotten your high-school Spanish, you do
much better in your college Spanish course than your roommate who never studied
Spanish before. This comparison illustrates which method of testing memory?
savings
In Ebbinghaus's studies of memorization of nonsense syllables, who did the memorizing?
Ebbinghaus himself
Many clinicians now use the term dissociation to refer to
a memory that is stored but that cannot be retrieved.
Studying as close as possible in time to the beginning of a test, under conditions as similar
as possible to the test situation,
decreases the effects of retroactive interference.
Which of the following is likely to occur in our recall of an event?

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 Details that don't fit in with the rest of the story will be omitted or distorted.
According to the encoding specificity principle, what type of cue will be best for the word
iron, which you learned along with sweep and wash?
household chores
Which of the following is an example of retroactive interference?
You have had a new combination lock each of the last 3 years. As a result, you can no
longer remember the combination you had 3 years ago.
The term "working memory" has been adopted by many researchers to replace the more
traditional term
short-term memory.
One component of working memory is the "central executive," which is responsible for
shifting attention between two or more tasks.
When you remember how a clock works, what type of memory is that?
semantic
In the SPAR method, the letters S, P, A, and R stand for
Survey, Process, Ask, Review
Emotional arousal is associated with activation of certain peripheral nerves that extend
into the brain enhances the formation of long-term memories by
raising the level of epinephrine in the brain.
When someone is trying to memorize a list of items, memory will be better if the person
organizes the items into related categories. Who is most likely to do so?
people who have attended school for some length of time
Paul and Pam both got 85% correct on the first test. Pam studied hard for the next two
tests while Paul quit studying altogether. Now, strangely, the final exam turns out to be
almost identical to the first test. Who will do better on the final exam, and why?
Paul, because Pam will be hampered by retroactive interference.
You learn how to operate machine A. Later you learn to operate machine B. You may
forget how to operate B faster than does your friend, who learned only B. Why?
proactive interference
Which of the following would be an example of hindsight bias?
Saying "I knew I would get an A on that test" after receiving your grade of A.
Studies of the neurological patient H.M. and similar patients lead to the conclusion that
people have several separate kinds of memories.
Infant amnesia occurs because
of several possible physical and processing causes.
The "binding problem" is the question of how we
perceive what we see, hear, and touch as a single object.
After brain damage, Deborah has lost control of fine movements of her fingers. Where is
the damage in her brain probably located?
rear portion of the frontal lobe
Which of the following most accurately describes how the control of speech is localized in
the brain?
Almost all right-handed people and about 60% of left-handed people have speech
control localized in the left hemisphere.
After damage to the corpus callosum, a person cannot
see something on the left side and point to it with the right hand.

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The parasympathetic nervous system controls
digestion and other activities that occur during rest.
Which branch of the peripheral nervous system is responsible for controlling the internal
organs?
autonomic
The primary drawback to using either the electroencephalograph (EEG) or the
magnetoencephalograph (MEG) technique to study brain activity is that these techniques
record ongoing brain activity, but not the precise location of the activity.
If you cover your right eye, what happens to the visual information that reaches the two
hemispheres of the cerebral cortex?
Each hemisphere receives half as much visual information as usual.
Which of the following structures controls muscles in the head (such as those used to chew
and swallow)?
pons
What does it mean to say that "p < .05"?
The probability of getting such a pattern of results by accident is less than 5%.
Holly suffers from cortical blindness, which means she has suffered damage to her
occipital lobe.
Insulin is a hormone that increases the storage of food as fats. In what way is insulin
better suited for this purpose than a neurotransmitter would be?
Insulin affects a larger number of cells for a longer time.
The autonomic nervous system controls the ____ of the body.
internal organs
The "binding problem" is most related to which problem in psychology?
mind-brain problem
Which branch of the peripheral nervous system is responsible for muscle control?
somatic
Biological psychologists explain Parkinson's disease in terms of
deficiency of a particular neurotransmitter.
Angela is blind and spends a great deal of her time reading Braille with her fingers.
According to the research, what changes are likely in the anatomy of Angela's brain?
the brain area representing the fingers will expand
Nearly all medical and recreational drugs that modify people's experiences exert their
effects at
synapses.
During the chemical process called an action potential, ____ enters the cell (excitation)
then ____ leaves the cell (return to the resting potential).
sodium; potassium
Which of the following is true regarding glia cells?
They are smaller than neurons.
The information transmitted from an axon to another neuron can be either
excitatory or inhibitory.
When Otto Loewi collected the fluid from synapses that were involved in slowing a frog's
heart, then injected it near the heart of a second frog, he demonstrated that
at least some neurons communicate by releasing chemicals.
The strength of an action potential

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 remains constant as the action potential travels down an axon.
A single nerve cell, which sends and receives information, is called a
neuron.
Which of the following statements is TRUE regarding the brain and experience?
Experience alters connections and reorganizes the brain without expanding it.
Anesthetic drugs such as Novocain block the transmission of impulses in the brain by
preventing sodium from crossing the membranes.
Which theory of color vision emphasizes the importance of comparing and contrasting the
color of light coming from different areas of the retina?
retinex theory
As explained in your text, William Dobelle has created an apparatus which takes an image
from a camera attached to a blind person's sunglasses and sends a message directly to
the visual cortex.
Why can you see fine detail better if you look straight at an object than if you look out of
the corner of your eye?
The object falls on the fovea, where there are many cones
Which of our senses detects part of the electromagnetic spectrum?
vision
Which of the following observations most strongly supports the trichromatic (Young-
Helmholtz) theory of color vision?
People can match any color of light by mixing three colors in various amounts.
When a given bipolar cell increases its activity over its spontaneous rate, you see green.
According to the opponent-process theory of color vision, when that cell decreases its
activity below its spontaneous rate, you will see
red.
Within the retina, cones are adapted for ____ and rods are adapted for ____.
color and detail...detection of faint light
Korsakoff's syndrome, which produces a severe memory impairment, is caused by
a prolonged deficiency of vitamin B-1.
What have psychologists learned about memory from studies of the patient H.M.?
It is possible to lose the ability to store new memories, without necessarily losing the
ability to recall old memories.
Which of the following would cause someone to experience negative afterimages?
staring at a red object and then looking at a white surface
Perception of faint light is best in the parts of the retina where
huge numbers of receptors converge their responses onto the next cells.
When you see something,
energy goes into your eye.
After light stimulates receptors at the back of the retina, they send their information to
other cells within the eyeball, closer to the pupil.
Distracting an injured person can decrease their experience of pain by altering
the pain sensation only.
Because of dark adaptation, the absolute sensory threshold for vision
decreases as a person stays in a dimly lit room.
Gestalt psychologists rejected the belief that
visual perception involves the passive adding up of lines and dots.

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The vestibular system detects the
position of the head.
The Ames room is used to study
optical illusions.
Motion pictures are actually a series of still photos, each slightly different from the last.
Our tendency to perceive them as moving is an example of
stroboscopic movement.
The receptor cells along the basilar membrane, which give rise to hearing, are known as
hair cells.
Which of the following supports the feature-detector model of pattern recognition?
Hubel and Wiesel found that some brain cells responded only to angles
Which of the following claims about subliminal perception is true?
People's facial movements change depending on whether a happy, neutral, or angry face
is presented subliminally.
Suppose we want to measure how well someone can detect faint sounds. We find that the
person responds "yes" 80% of the time after presentation of a 10 dB sound. According to
signal detection theory, we also need to know
the person's false alarm rate.
The ____ is the middle score in an ordered set of values.
median
If Sally is generally outgoing and adventurous while Rachel is more shy and reserved, we
would say these two people differ in
temperament.
Beginning at about 8 weeks after conception and throughout the remainder of the
prenatal period, a developing human is called a/an
fetus.
Researchers have studied pairs of twins who were reared in separate homes as children
and then reunited as adults. Researchers examined their hobbies, habits, and preferences
and found that
monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic twins.
The residents of Utopiaville have created a society where all children are provided with an
equally good environment. Under these conditions, one would predict that the heritability
of behaviors would ____ relative to the more common conditions of differing
environments.
increase
A genetic difference is largely responsible for the fact that people in some parts of the
world consume more dairy products than do people in other parts of the world. How does
that gene affect behavior?
by altering the metabolism of milk sugars
We now know that the detrimental effects of alcohol in infants is caused by
a decrease in the total excitation of neurons, so that they eventually self-destruct.
An X-linked recessive gene is more likely to exert its effects on ____ than on ____.
men...women
Infants with low birth weight
may catch up in development to infants with higher birth weights if they experience
similar environments.

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A gene is
a unit of chromosomal material that controls development.
A gene that controls the ability to metabolize lactose is common in people in some parts of
the world and rare in other parts of the world. That gene is largely responsible for
variations in the probability that a person will
enjoy dairy products as an adult.
Monozygotic twins
develop from a single fertilized egg and have identical genes.
Which of the following exerts effects on both men and women, but is more likely to exert
its effects in men than in women?
an X-linked recessive gene
Adults who had been initially identified as "inhibited" or "uninhibited" as infants were
tested with functional magnetic resonance imaging, a procedure that measures brain
activity, while looking at photographs of unfamiliar people. Results of this study showed
greater activity in the amygdala of the "inhibited" adults.
As a rule, a preoperational child who is asked which row of coins "has more" answers
that the longer one has more (even if the two rows both have seven coins). What kind of
experience is most likely to enable the child to give the correct answer?
First ask the same question about rows of three coins each.
When children begin to show self-recognition they will typically also begin to show
embarrassment.
Children in Piaget's preoperational stage of development lack
the concept of conservation.
Psychologists have studied children's ability to use a small room as a map or model of a
larger room. They find that most 2 1/2 year old children
can solve it only if they are given different instructions.
Two-day-old infants typically would spend the most time looking at a
drawing of a human face.
One-day-old Mark sucks on a nipple to turn on the sound of his mother's voice. After a
while the experimenters substitute the sound of a different woman's voice. They
periodically switch back and forth from one voice to the other. Which of the following
results would indicate that Mark recognizes and prefers the sound of his own mother's
voice?
On the average, Mark sucks more for his own mother's voice.
A little boy in the preoperational stage would have trouble understanding that
his mother is also someone's daughter.
What is a cohort?
a group of people born at a particular time
To determine whether or not a child has reached the stage of formal operations, a
psychologist might test whether the child can
answer hypothetical and abstract questions.
The major benefit to a sequential design is that
the research can first make longitudinal comparisons across groups, and then make
cross-sectional comparisons within groups
In Piaget's terminology, what is it that sometimes gets assimilated and sometimes gets
accommodated?

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 a schema
An investigator repeatedly plays a recording of the sound "ba" while checking the rate
that an infant sucks on a nipple. After the infant's rate of sucking decreases, the
investigator switches to the sound "pa." What is the investigator probably trying to
determine?
Can the infant detect the difference between the two sounds?
In which kind of study does an investigator repeatedly study the same group of people as
they get older?
longitudinal
To test whether an infant has the concept of object permanence, what would Piaget be
most likely to examine?
whether the infant looks for the object after it has been covered up
Researchers have determined that, if a question is phrased in the right way, even 3-year-
olds can
distinguish between reality and appearance.
Below are descriptions of four children. Which one is in Piaget's stage of formal
operations?
performs well on tests of object permanence, conservation, and hypothetical questions
When Lev Vygotsky spoke of a child's zone of proximal development, he referred to the
difference between
what a child can do alone, and what the child can do with help.
Egocentrism, or the tendency to think others must know what we know, is found
in both adults and children.
What do children do in the formal-operations stage that they do not do in the concrete-
operations stage?
develop a systematic strategy for solving a problem
One study examined children who had spent their first two years of life in orphanages in
Romania, where they had received very little attention. Results indicated that
many of the children behaved in ways unlike any of the usual attachment styles.
In which situation does a child have the best chance of normal development?
The child enters day care at age 3 and day care is adequate.
Modern behaviorists generally believe that
behavior is a product of an individual's past history of stimuli and responses, as well as
responses to current stimuli.
According to Erik Erikson, the main concern of a newborn infant is
forming a trusting attachment.
Research that seems to show that first born children have higher IQs than later born
children
actually shows that average IQ is higher in smaller families than larger families.
Someone who sets high goals early in life but who does not start working toward them is
likely to go through which experience at about age 40?
midlife transition
Adolescence can be described as a period of "storm and stress," marked by moodiness,
conflict with parents, and risky behaviors. Research suggests that this pattern
varies among individuals, families, and cultures.

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Research that has explored the personality of adopted children and their parents has
shown
almost no correlation between adoptive parents and their adopted children.
When comparing African-Americans and European-Americans with respect to divorce, it
is generally true that African-Americans experience less
stress as a result of divorce.
Adolescents are likely to overestimate their successes and underestimate their risks in
what is termed the ____. Middle-aged adults show ____.
personal fable...many of these same attitudes
Which of the following would a behaviorist be least likely to study?
human thought processes
The British and American legal systems are similar to radical behaviorism in that both
insist upon a description of what an individual did, not why they did it.
Terror Management Theory states that much of our anxiety and neuroses are caused by
our fear of death.
Someone in Erikson's age of basic trust vs. mistrust would be in which age group?
infant
People are most likely to become emotionally upset during a midlife transition (at about
age 40) if they
had set goals early in life and then failed to work toward them.
Adolescents who have not given serious thoughts to their future but have already made a
decision about their future are said to have
identity foreclosure.
A psychologist reports that authoritative parents tend to have well-behaved children, and
suggests that the parenting style influenced the children's personality development. Before
we accept this conclusion, it would be most important to check whether the same results
also occur in
adopted children.
A researcher tests all the students in one college and finds that the first-borns have higher
GPAs than later-born children, on the average. One possible explanation is that the
results reflect the influence of birth order. The other explanation is that the results
depend on differences between
one-child families and larger families.
A psychologist reports that sympathetic, understanding parents tend to have well-behaved
children. Which of the following conclusions, if any, follows from these results?
None of these conclusions follow from the results.
Research on spanking (as a form of physical punishment) indicates that spanking
is most likely to stop the unwanted behavior in the short term if it is quick and
predictable.
Rats drink saccharin-flavored water while also seeing bright lights and hearing loud
noises. Almost at once, they receive an electric shock to their feet. As a result of this
experience, what do they avoid?
bright lights and loud noises
After classically conditioning some response, how might one produce extinction of the
response?
Repeatedly present the CS alone, without the UCS.

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A study presented participants with a variety of Pokemon characters and asked them to
respond to a "target" character. Some other characters were consistently paired with
either positive words or pictures or with negative words or pictures. When asked to rate
the Pokemon characters after the study, participants gave the most favorable ratings to
the Pokemon paired with positive words or pictures.
When someone acquires a complex response through reinforcement for gradual
approximations to the response, the training procedure is known as
shaping.
A dog wags its tail whenever it sees its master. If this is a learned response, what would
the dog have to do in order to demonstrate stimulus generalization?
wag its tail when it sees someone who looks similar to its master
What is chaining in operant conditioning?
training a sequence of behaviors in which the reinforcement for one behavior is the
opportunity to perform the next behavior
What is the procedure for producing extinction in operant conditioning?
Give no reinforcement after the response.
If someone achieves fame and fortune for a new style of singing, other people will copy
that style even though they have never been reinforced for it themselves. Which of the
following attempts to account for this observation?
social-learning approach
In classical conditioning, responding increases in both ____ and ____.
spontaneous recovery...acquisition
In an experiment on classical conditioning, a tone is followed by a puff of air to the eyes.
After several repetitions, subjects blink their eyes when they hear the tone. In this
experiment blinking is
both the conditioned response and the unconditioned response.
If your employer gave you bonus pay for working overtime you would probably work
overtime more. This is an example of
positive reinforcement.
In operant conditioning, UNLIKE classical conditioning,
the individual's response controls the outcome (reinforcement or punishment).
A person who has suffered damage to her amygdala
is slow to process emotional information.
The nerves that carry information from the sense organs to the spinal cord and brain, and
from the spinal cord and brain to the glands and muscles, are collectively known as the
peripheral nervous system.
The main distinction between the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain
is that the left hemisphere controls ____ and the right hemisphere controls ____.
the right side of the body...the left side of the body
The left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex cannot communicate with each other
after the ____ is cut.
corpus callosum
B. F. Skinner was known for his objection to
the use of mental terms in describing behavior.
Psychologists who argue that psychologists should only study observable, measurable
behaviors are called

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 behaviorists.
A behaviorist would state that your thoughts and feelings do not cause your behavior
because
these thoughts and feelings are caused by events in the past and present environment.
People are shown a pair of complex figures, and they are asked whether one figure could
be rotated to match the other figure. Their speed of responding depends on
the number of degrees one figure would have to be rotated in order to match the other
figure.
The availability heuristic is based on the assumption that
the number of events of a certain type that we can remember is proportional to the
number of such events that have occurred.
When defining the category "vehicle", a car is a ____ while water skis are ____.
prototype; marginal member
The Stroop effect occurs because
people are so used to reading words that they cannot suppress the habit.
In decision making, the maximizing strategy approximates the use of ____ whereas
satisficing is more of a ____ approach.
an algorithm; heuristic
If you strongly associate LION with TIGER, then hearing the word LION will
temporarily increase your speed and accuracy of seeing or hearing the word TIGER. The
type of "priming" is evidence in favor of the idea of
spreading activation.
A heuristic is
a way of simplifying a problem.
Subjects in an experiment were shown photographs of a scene and were asked to identify
the scene. Some subjects were shown two versions (the first one extremely out of focus and
the second slightly out of focus) while others saw only the second, slightly blurry photo.
What were the results and why?
Subjects who saw both pictures were worse at identifying the second because they
formed hypotheses about the first one.
Under what circumstances is an expert chess player more successful than an unskilled
player at memorizing the positions of chess pieces on a board?
when the pieces have been arranged as they might be in an actual game
People often fail to notice something that occurs slowly, or while they are blinking their
eyes or while moving their eyes. This phenomenon is called
change blindness.
You are given cards with letters on one side and numbers on the other side. You are given
the following 4 cards: A T 4 7 and are instructed to test the hypothesis that "any card that
has a vowel on one side has an even number on the other side." Which two cards do you
need to turn to test this hypothesis?
A and 7
You are looking for a well-camouflaged animal in an exhibit at the zoo. Finding it will
require
an attentive process.
Which of the following is an example of base-rate information?
The population consists of 10,000 mosquitoes and 2 rare kwiny bugs

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An investigator presents a conditioned stimulus followed by an unconditioned stimulus
until an animal is classically conditioned. Then she exposes the animal to an extinction
procedure. If she waits a while and then tests the animal again, she is likely to see
spontaneous recovery.
A dog drools saliva whenever he hears the "doggy snacks" cupboard open. Which of the
following is true?
The sound of the cupboard is the CS; the doggy snacks are the UCS.
A nursing mother puts her baby to the breast as soon as she hears it cry. After a few days,
her milk begins to flow as soon as the baby cries. In terms of classical conditioning, what
is the conditioned response?
the flow of milk
Thorndike's cats were relatively quick to learn that pushing a pole would open a door;
they were slow to learn that they could open the door by scratching themselves. One of the
explanations for this effect is referred to as the
principle of belongingness.
Suppose your wall has two switches. When you flip the one on the left, you turn the lights
on or off. When you flip the one on the right, you get an electric shock. You soon learn to
flip only the one on the left. What kind of learning has taken place, or is there not enough
information to decide?
operant conditioning
When your professor arrives and opens her notes, you stop talking to the person next to
you and prepare to take notes. This situation is most clearly an example of
a discriminative stimulus.
According to social-learning theory
much human learning occurs because of imitation.
Which of the following is most likely to increase your feelings of self-efficacy?
successful performance of tasks similar to the one you are considering
In those rare cases where children are not exposed to language (for example, separated
from adults and growing up in a forest), they
have not developed a language of their own and learn very little language when exposed
to it.
How do the language abilities of bonobos used in recent studies differ from those of the
common chimpanzees used in earlier studies?
Bonobos are more likely to use symbols to describe objects they are not requesting.
The sequence of words as they are actually spoken is called the ____ of a sentence.
surface structure
In one study, students watched an experimenter fill two jars with sugar. They were then
given two labels and instructed to put whichever label they wanted on each jar; one of the
labels said "sucrose, table sugar" and the other said "not sodium cyanide, not poison."
Later, when making Kool Aid, most subjects used the sugar from the jar labeled ____.
These results are consistent with the idea that people ____.
"sucrose, table sugar"...have difficulty understanding negatives
Which of the following is NOT an important factor in human language capabilities?
decreased connections among cortical areas
The speech of two-to three-year-old children suggests that they
act as if they knew and applied grammatical rules.

14
How many phonemes are in the word "thoughtfully"?
7
Some species (e.g., dolphins, whales) have brains that are physically larger than humans.
It looks as if large brains and high intelligence
do not automatically produce language.
Deciding what you heard when you heard a word that contained an ambiguous sound
(e.g., it could have been either "dent" or "tent") is influenced by
the immediate context following the word, but not the delayed context.
Which of the following types of people would be least likely to show the word-superiority
effect?
someone who is just learning how to read
One study taught German-speaking subjects real words in Italian or Japanese, and then
also taught them either real (although unfamiliar) or made-up rules of grammar. The
results of this study indicated that
subjects showed increased activity in language areas of the brain only when they learned
real grammatical rules.
Suppose your task is to find the one squirrel in a photo with other animals. If finding the
squirrel depends on a PREATTENTIVE process, then
you will find it just as fast among many other animals as you would among a few.
Which task is more difficult for an experienced reader to perform than it is for someone
just learning to read?
Look at the names of colors written in different colors and say the color of each word,
rather than the word itself.
You look at a series of gauges. Most have their indicators pointing the same direction (to
the right), but one is pointing a different direction. You notice the odd one immediately,
regardless of how many other gauges are present. This pattern indicates that you found
the discrepant indicator by
a preattentive process.
The process of establishing rules for administering a test and for interpreting its scores is
known as
standardization.
If a psychologist wanted to test Spearman's concept of a "g" factor in intelligence, what
kind of data should the psychologist collect?
correlations between performances on various intellectual tasks
Sternberg has developed a newer distinction among types of intelligence: analytical,
creative, and ____.
practical
An experienced taxi driver becomes more and more skilled at finding various addresses
within a city, without improving other kinds of intellectual skills. We can say that the
driver has increased his or her
crystallized intelligence.
Which of the following is impossible?
a test with low reliability and high predictive validity
An item on an IQ test is suspected of being biased against women. Which of the following
would be the strongest evidence of such bias?

15
 Women with low IQ scores are just as likely as women with high IQ scores to answer
the item correctly.
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences differs most strongly from Spearman's concept
of a "g" factor with regard to the answer given to the following question:
Are all types of intelligence positively correlated with one another?
Identical twins reared apart are more similar in IQ than fraternal twins reared apart. A
researcher who believes in the influence of environment more than heredity might explain
this in what way?
the environments of the identical twin pairs were more similar
Theoretically, why should the Progressive Matrices test be more culture-fair than the
Wechsler tests?
The matrices call for no verbal responses and no specific factual information.
Since the early days of IQ tests, psychologists have periodically rewritten the tests. Their
revisions have intentionally made the tests more ____ than they used to be.
difficult
Spearman's theory has been called a monarchic theory of intelligence because it
included a dominant ability that ruled over lesser abilities.
"Stereotype threat" refers to the observation that Black students' test performance
deteriorates when
they are nervous about their performance or expect to do poorly.
The average IQ score
is 100.
Julia takes a new psychological test several times and gets the same score every time she
takes it. Other people also find that whatever their first score is, they continue to get that
same score every time they take the test. We can conclude that this test has
high reliability.
When considering school performance, the predictive validity of most popular IQ tests
range from about .3 to .6. These figures suggest that success in school depends
on a combination of skills, some of which are measured by the tests and some of which
are not.
The WAIS-III test is given to ____; the WISC-IV test is given to ____.
adults.. children up to age 16
You are given five bottles of clear fluid, and you are asked to find the combination that
can be mixed to create a yellow fluid. You label the bottles A through E and proceed to try
combinations AB, AC, AD, AE, BC, and so forth until you have tried every possible
combination. Your solution to this problem makes use of
an algorithm.
Dr. Kuremmall has a patient whose symptoms strongly resemble Tweedledee syndrome,
but they also resemble Tweedledum syndrome almost as strongly. Before she decides what
disease the patient has, she checks how common or rare those two diseases are. We say
that she is making use of
base-rate information.
You are asked to determine which of two people is an expert chess player. (The other one
is a beginner.) You could quickly do so by answering the following question:
Which one is better at memorizing the positions of chess pieces arranged on the board as
they might actually occur during a game?

16
Psychologists say that people go through four phases in solving a problem. Which of the
following is one of the four phases?
generating one or more hypotheses
During reading, the eyes alternate between fixations and saccades. Reading--in the sense
of understanding the words--occurs during
fixations only.
The language errors of 2- to 3-year-old children reveal that the children
seem to be applying grammatical rules, even when exceptions should apply.
A saccade is
an eye movement that occurs when you read.
Following extensive training, the use of symbols by common chimpanzees has failed to
show the flexibility of human language. Greater success has been demonstrated in studies
using
bonobos.
One possible explanation for the "g" factor in intelligence is the fact that
nutrition and other factors that promote development of one kind of ability promote
development of other abilities also.
One advantage of the Wechsler intelligence tests, such as the WAIS-III and WISC-IV, is
that they
provide separate scores representing a number of separate abilities.
Which of the following has been proposed as the underlying skill that could account for g?
all of the above have been proposed to account for g
To say that a test has low predictive validity is to say that
the scores do not enable us to predict some other behavior.
Over the last 50 years or so, what have psychologists had to do in order to make sure the
mean score on an IQ test remains at 100?
make the test harder
A psychologist who gives a group of people the same test several times is probably trying
to measure the ____ of the test.
reliability
Research has shown that people who sleep 9 or more hours per night spend a lot of that
time in REM sleep, while those who sleep less than 6 hours get less REM sleep. This
implies that
the body needs a certain minimum amount of non-REM sleep.
During sleep, mammals
lower their body temperatures.
In one task, participants were asked to view two stimuli with one stimulus being projected
to the right eye and a different pattern projected to the left eye. Participant viewing the
stimulus reported perceiving a pattern that alternated between the two patterns being
observed. This phenomenon is called
binocular rivalry effect.
What does the EEG record for stage 4 sleep look like (compared to other stages of sleep)?
It includes many long, slow waves.
Research on dreams in children under 5 has found that
these children report vivid dreams in fewer than half their REM awakenings.

17
Tests of memory and reasoning ability might underestimate the capacities of older adults
if the research is done
in the late afternoon or evening.
You are given a list of grocery items to remember to purchase on your trip to the store.
These items are; apples, bread, celery, lettuce, grapes, and onions. According to the
recency effect, what item are you most likely to remember?
onions
Your memory of the rules of basketball or golf is a type of
semantic memory.
If you remember the events of moving into your current home, what type of memory is
that?
episodic
Korsakoff's syndrome is most common in
chronic alcoholics.
Which of the following questions might an investigator ask in order to evaluate whether
the James-Lange theory is correct?
Which occurs first after a stimulus, physiological changes or the experience of emotion?
Arousal of the sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for
vigorous activity.
In the U.S. and Europe, the eyebrow raising greeting indicates "I'm happy to see you."
What about other cultures?
The expression occurs in all known cultures and has the same meaning in each.
In 1848, Phineas Gage was involved in a freak accident in which his prefrontal cortex was
damaged by an iron rod. Following the accident, Gage showed a loss in each of the
following except
language.
A micro expression refers to
a very brief, involuntary expression of emotion.
Jack has just taken a pill that will increase his sympathetic nervous system arousal.
According to Schachter and Singer's theory of emotions, what procedure would increase
the chance that Jack will experience a strong emotion?
Put him in a situation that might arouse emotions and tell him that the pill will have no
effect.
Robert is a participant in a study of emotions. He is asked to indicate how happy he feels
on a scale from 1 (not at all happy) to 7 (extremely happy). What measurement technique
is being used in this study?
self report
Psychologists have tried to measure a concept called "emotional intelligence," using a test
similar to that of other kinds of intelligence tests. One major problem with this effort is
that
it is difficult to determine what are right and wrong answers for this test.
According to the trichromatic theory (Young-Helmholtz theory) of color vision, how do
we perceive the difference between one color and another?
by the relative amount of excitation of three types of cones
Which theory attempts to explain why a given injury may produce much pain in one
person and less pain in another, or more at one time and less at another?

18
 gate theory
Suppose you have been watching an object. Under which of the following circumstances
are you most likely to perceive that the object is moving?
Its image on your retina changes relative to its background.
Gestalt psychologists emphasized the ways in which perception depends on
overall patterns.
The tendency to interpret a line drawing as simple, symmetrical figures is an example of
the Gestalt principle of
good figure.
Which of the following is evidence that humans, like cats and monkeys, have feature
detectors in the visual cortex of their brain?
After people have stared at narrow bars for awhile, other bars look wider than they
usually do.
According to Selye's concept of stress, ____ would count as an example of something that
produces stress, but ____ would not.
getting married...lifelong poverty
In contrast to the standard lie-detector test, the guilty-knowledge test
almost never identifies an honest person as a liar.
Stressful events cause physiological changes characterized by activation of the
sympathetic nervous system.
One predictor of whether someone will engage in violent behavior is
growing up in a violent neighborhood.
New research on the influence of wealth on happiness has led researchers to conclude that
there is little or no relationship between wealth and subjective well-being.
A person who fears dental work is given a series of mild shocks to the teeth before going to
the dentist to help her in coping with the stress associated with dental work. The
technique being used here is
inoculation.
Researchers measure changes in the startle reflex as an operational definition of
anxiety.
What is the action potential of a neuron?
a sudden change in the electrical charge across the membrane
Undifferentiated cells that have the ability to develop into additional neurons are known
as
stem cells
The tendency to defer gratification is a personality variable related to a person's ability to
choose a larger, delayed reward rather than an immediate, smaller reward.
Bobby's parents want him to stop drawing on the walls. So for a few weeks they pay him
to draw on the walls, then stop paying him. Sure enough, when they stop paying, he stops
drawing. Which principle did his parents make use of?
overjustification effect
People who develop anorexia nervosa are mostly described as having been ____ since
early childhood.
perfectionists
Damage to the hypothalamus can lead to
severe undereating or overeating.

19
What evidence is there, if any, that homosexuality may be partly the result of genetics?
Most homosexual men had homosexual fathers or grandfathers.
In the early 1900s psychologists and psychiatrists advocated the "enlightened" view that
homosexuality was
a sign of disease.
When workers set a "do your best" goal for themselves, their level of productivity is
about the same as it is with no goal at all.
In one study, a professor gave firm deadlines to one section of his course and let students
in his other section choose their own deadlines. What were the results?
Students who chose deadlines evenly spaced through the semester did better than those
who chose deadlines at the end.
The eyebrow-raising greeting
lasts about one-third second in people of all cultures.
Which of the following is evidence that there may be more than just six basic emotions in
people?
People from other cultures, such as India and Japan, recognize basic emotions that
Americans do not.
How does a voluntary smile typically differ from a full, spontaneous, Duchenne smile?
Only Duchenne smiles include contractions of the muscles around the eyes.
In general, which of the following factors decreases the probability that a given person
will come to the aid of a person in distress?
having other people around who might also help
In the Trust game, most people start off by cooperating. After the first round, your
behavior depends on
how people have treated you in the past.
Which of the following would decrease social loafing?
convince group members that their contribution to the success of the project is unique
Someone who operates at the highest level of moral reasoning in Kohlberg's system would
probably agree with which of the following statements?
Sometimes it is right to do something that violates the law.
Results from one research study suggested that professional polygraph administrators
were able to identify ____ of the guilty suspects as liars but also classified ____ of the
innocent suspects as liars.
76%; 37%
The polygraph test is based on the assumption that when people lie, they will show an
increase in
heart rate, breathing rate, and sweating.
Stress, by itself, can lead to
fever, fatigue, and sleepiness.
One of the most effective ways to cope with stress is to
increase your perceived ability to predict or control the situation.
Research on prejudices (racism, sexism, and so forth) has demonstrated that
even well-meaning people who are doing their best to avoid and overcome prejudice
show evidence of prejudice that may be operating at an unconscious level.

20
A minority of the members of some organization continues presenting their views, even
though they are consistently defeated in all votes. What is a likely outcome of their
efforts?
If the message is simple and the minority seems united, the majority may eventually
adopt a position similar to what the minority advocated.
According to the primacy effect in impression formation, you will be more influenced by
information received first, rather than that received later.
When we observe the behavior of other people, we are most likely to notice and remember
when an ____ individual does something ____.
unusual...unusual
A Likert scale is commonly used to measure
attitudes.
According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, people who accept a very small payment
to tell a lie to another person are likely to
come to believe their own lie.
The foot-in-the-door technique is one trick to facilitate persuasion. What is another way
that involves doing just the opposite?
Begin with a very large request and then scale it back.
Participants in a study are asked to press the left button if they see an unpleasant word or
a photo of a White person, and to press the right button if they see a pleasant word or a
photo of a Black person. The probable purpose of this procedure is to measure
subtle prejudices that people do not admit to themselves.
Most people would be least influenced by seeing their favorite actress or actor on TV
attempting to persuade them to
vote for a certain candidate.
Jennifer seems alert and interested during her literature class. You are likely to attribute
her behavior to an external cause (as opposed to an internal cause) if
most other students in the class seem alert and interested also.
Some people intentionally put themselves at a disadvantage on a given task in order to
provide themselves with ____ attribution for a possible failure.
an external
Which of the following was NOT one of the reasons teachers in Milgram's experiment on
obedience to authority obeyed the experimenter and delivered shock to the learner?
The subjects knew that they were not actually delivering any shock.
A woman who feels anxiety about her dishonest tax returns attributes similar behavior to
other people, claiming that most people cheat on their income taxes. Her claim is an
apparent example of which of Freud's defense mechanisms?
projection
In Asch's experiment, participants were to judge the length of bars after hearing other
people give a wrong answer. What happened?
Most people did not conform if they had an "ally" who gave the correct answer.
Sigmund Freud based his theories mainly on
what he inferred must have happened in his patients' early experience.
During which of Freud's stages of psychosexual development does the Oedipus Complex
occur?
phallic

21
The term "groupthink" refers to the observation that
groups sometimes make bad decisions because they fail to challenge one another's
decisions.
Alfred Adler's goal was to help people overcome psychological disorders by
examining the assumptions behind each person's style of life.
In one recent study, people watched married couples have three-minute videotaped
conversations. Participants then rated how satisfied each couple was, and these estimates
were then compared to the couples' own reported satisfaction. Participants who were
MOST accurate were
people who were themselves in either highly satisfying or highly unsatisfying marriages.
Maslow thought people with self-actualized personalities show all of the following
EXCEPT
avoidance of ambiguous perceptions.
What kind of behavior would you expect of someone with an unusually strong superego?
inhibited behavior dominated by feelings of guilt
In general, people judge others to be most attractive if their facial features (nose, mouth,
eyes, etc.) are
average.
Dement tried to deprive people of REM sleep for seven consecutive nights. On the first
night he woke the average subject 12 times. By the seventh night, what happened?
He had to awaken the average subject 26 times.
Freud believed that dreams had two levels of meaning, the ____ content, which is the
content that appears on the surface, and the ____ content, which is hidden and only
represented symbolically.
manifest...latent
People who consistently work on the night shift (midnight to 8 a.m.) may or may not fully
adjust their circadian rhythms to this schedule. Which of the following would be most
likely to help people adjust their rhythms?
bright lights while at work at night
Which of the following is the proper order of sleep stages in a cycle?
(NREM-1), 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, (REM-1)
Criminal profiling can be thought of as an example of applied personality testing. At this
point in time, which of the following would be the fairest conclusion about profiling?
The results have been relatively unimpressive so far, although it would be premature to
say profiling is impossible.
Dr. Tester designs a new personality test and administers it to 100 subjects. Later she
gives the results of the test to each of those subjects and asks them whether they agree that
the results are correct. We should be skeptical of what the subjects say, because
people tend to accept almost any description of their personality made by an expert.
Some critics of the big five approach argue that its description of personality is incomplete
because
at least nine other personality dimensions have been identified that do not correlate
strongly with any of the big five.
Which two traits do most personality theorists agree are the most powerful?
neuroticism and extraversion
A client provides answers to the Thematic Apperception Test by

22
 telling stories.
One of the main ways psychologists have studied the causes of differences in personality
among people is to
compare the personalities of parents, their biological children, and their adopted
children.
How can you determine whether a test is standardized?
Determine whether the test has a known distribution of scores.
According to personality tests that have been given to different cohorts of children since
the 1950's, which aspect of personality has shown a large, steady increase over the last few
decades?
anxiety
One study asked 170 college students to complete a personality questionnaire that
measured aggressiveness. Then the participants were asked to keep track of daily
behaviors related to aggressiveness, such as yelling at another person. The researchers
found that the personality questionnaire
was modestly, but positively correlated with actual behavior.
Factor analysis is a technique for answering which of the following questions?
How many traits do we need for a parsimonious description of personality?
The tendency to be compassionate toward others is called
agreeableness.
What is the MMPI used for?
to measure personality tendencies
The MMPI includes some items concerning rare virtues, such as "Without fail, I always
stop to help a person who is having trouble." Why?
to check whether people are answering honestly
According to personality theorists, a tendency to experience negative emotions easily is
defined as ____. A tendency to enjoy new experiences and seek the company of other
people is defined as ____.
neuroticism...extraversion
IQ tests were originally designed to predict school performance. Recent research has
shown that IQ tests
do a good job of predicting school performance and also predict other "real life"
outcomes such as car accidents.
The general part of the SAT is highly correlated with the SAT achievement tests. For that
reason,
it does not make sense to require both since they could predict grades just as well from
one score as from both.
Suppose people take a given IQ test twice. Those who got the highest scores the first time
get scores much closer to the class average the second time. The test must have
low reliability.
While it is common for students of psychology to think they have a disease after reading
about various psychological disorders, a diagnosis of a psychological disorder should be
reserved for people with problems that seriously interfere with their lives.
Suppose someone finds that 75% of patients who receive psychotherapy for depression
report feeling better within 6 months. What conclusion can we draw, if any? If none, why
not?

23
 We can draw no conclusion, because of the lack of a control group.
Someone changes periodically from one identity to another, complete with different
names, memories, and preferred activities. What condition does this person have?
dissociative identity disorder
Nearly all forms of psychotherapy have certain important features in common. Of the
following, which one varies strongly among forms of psychotherapy--that is, which is true
of some forms and not of others?
emphasis on understanding unconscious thoughts and motivations
Who pioneered person-centered therapy?
Carl Rogers
Free association is
an attempt to gain access to the unconscious.
What is DSM-IV?
a book about psychological disorders
Groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous which provide support for people with similar
problems without using a trained therapist are ____ groups.
self-help
Which of these types of therapy might be used to enlist the parent's help in monitoring the
eating habits of someone who has anorexia nervosa?
family therapy
In a biopsychosocial model, the psychological roots of abnormal behavior include
an individual's vulnerability to stress.
Multiple surveys have found that about ____ of all adults in the United States qualify for a
psychiatric diagnosis in any given year, and that almost ____ qualify at some time in life.
25%...50%
Experiments comparing various forms of psychotherapy have generally found that
all common forms of psychotherapy are about equally effective.
The primary goal of rational-emotive therapy is to get the client to
replace irrational beliefs with more realistic internal sentences.
Which type of therapy focuses more on changing what people do than what they think?
behavior therapy
Which of the following statements regarding depression is NOT true?
Depression is common in adolescence and becomes less common as people age.
Some obsessive-compulsive people engage in long checking rituals but derive little
satisfaction from them because
they distrust their memory of whether they have completed the ritual.
People who have schizophrenia exhibit a deterioration of daily activities and show at least
two of the following:
hallucinations, delusions, incoherent speech, thought disorder, inappropriate emotions,
disorganized behavior.
Which of the following is a useful substitute for morphine and heroin, because it satisfies
the craving without disrupting behavior as greatly as morphine and heroin do?
methadone
The drugs that effectively relieve the symptoms of schizophrenia have one factor in
common: They all decrease the activity of the neurotransmitter
dopamine.

24
Cigarette smokers who switch to "low nicotine" brands tend to smoke ____ cigarettes
than before and inhale ____ deeply.
more...more
People are UNLIKELY to develop a phobia of an object if
they have a feeling of control over it.
Research by psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema has found that when faced with
emotional distress, men tend to ____ and women tend to ____.
distract themselves...ruminate
Which of the following is NOT characteristic of mania?
sudden attacks of anxiety
What would a therapist using flooding do to treat a phobia of snakes?
Have the client imagine being in a place with many snakes.
Which of the following is TRUE about suicide?
Many people who attempt suicide and survive are likely to attempt suicide again.
In John B. Watson's attempt to produce a phobia of white rats through classical
conditioning, a loud noise was the
unconditioned stimulus.
People who fail a task are most likely to become depressed if they attribute their failure to
their own laziness or stupidity.
The season-of-birth effect for schizophrenia only seems to occur in
northern climates.
Which of the following is characteristic of men who are vulnerable to alcoholism (men
with an alcoholic father)?
a tendency to underestimate their own degree of intoxication after drinking
Which of the following is NOT one of the characteristics of schizophrenic thought?
repetitive thoughts that one cannot stop thinking
It is hard to get rid of superstitions, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors because
they are similar to which kind of learning?
avoidance learning
Schizophrenia generally has its onset at about what age?
late teens or the 20s
Someone who has generalized anxiety disorder would be most likely to
be constantly plagued by exaggerated worries.
One major disadvantage of using ECT for depression is that
its benefits are not likely to last long.

25