AP PSYCH UNIT 0

Mrs. Alavrez Albert.

Which of the following correlation coefficients shows the strongest negative correlation?

-0.98

A study that tests the same sample repeatedly at different intervals of time employs which type of design?

Longitudinal.

Which of the following research methodologies would not only provide an in-depth look at the onset of mental disorders and how to treat them, but also potentially help the client?

Case study.

A longitudinal study would be useful in assessing which of the following?

Changes in behavior over time.

A group of scientists is interested in studying how political views change throughout the course of a person's life. They have a group of people complete a survey every five years from the time the people are 15 until the age of 50.

Which of the following BEST describes this type of study?

Longitudinal.

From time to time, someone suffers a brain injury due to an accident such as impaling the skull with a nail from a nail gun.

Often these accidents lead to a change in behavior that is best understood using which research method?

Case study.

Descriptive studies differ from correlational studies in that correlational studies:

show that one factor is predictive of another.

A researcher is studying the impact of sugar consumption on mood.

Which of the following research methods would allow the researcher to conclude that there is a causal relationship between the two variables?

Experiment.

Why might a cross-sectional design be preferable to a longitudinal design when doing developmental research?

Cross-sectional designs require less time to complete and generally have much less participant attrition than longitudinal designs.

A high school student wants to research how a new curriculum affects academic outcomes of students. After the first semester, she gathers data from twenty freshman and twenty seniors.

What type of study is she conducting?

Cross-sectional study.

In which of the following research scenarios would the case study method be the MOST useful?

The examination of the social and cognitive effects of a very rare neurological disorder.

With an election coming up, Ayla is curious about people's political affiliation and their age. Therefore, she sets out to create a study in which she asks people who are 18, 30, 45, 60 and 80 years old what political party they affiliate themselves with and what two issues are most important to them. Ayla gathers her results and tries to look for patterns among voters in each age group to see what the average person in those groups thinks.

This is considered to be what type of study?

Cross-sectional

Which of the following research methods would be BEST for testing the hypothesis that decisions made by sports officials, such as referees, on the field of play are influenced by the color of players' jerseys?

Experimental.

One advantage of naturalistic observation over experimentation is that naturalistic observation tends to have higher

ecological validity.

A researcher wants to find out how well high school attendance predicts student academic performance.

Which type of research method should he or she use to determine the answer to this question?

Correlational study.

Rachel moves in with Joey. Within days of moving in, Joey's refrigerator stops working. Joey believes that it is Rachel's fault that the refrigerator stopped working because she just moved in.

Joey's assumption that Rachel's arrival is related to the refrigerator breaking is an example of

illusory correlation.

The major obstacle in conducting longitudinal research is that

some participants may drop out for reasons that affect the conclusion of the study.

Dr. Mitchem has created a new drug for treating attention deficit disorder. He believes that patients who take his drug are able to focus for longer periods of time. He knows the drug will go through several rounds of medical testing before it becomes available to purchase.

What must Dr. Mitchem do to allow for a smooth replication of his study?

Operationally define the dosage that will be given, as well as what specific behaviors the researcher expects to see if patients are more focused.

Dr. Adams wants to create a study of how people's crystallized intelligence evolves over time based on the number of hours they have listened to a particular music artist. The doctor hypothesizes that people's crystallized intelligence will decrease the more they listen to a particular artist.

In order to ensure the most accurate results possible, what data collection method should Dr. Adams use?

Longitudinal study.

A researcher determines that the crime rate in a city changes with the win-loss record of the city's professional football team. He concludes that the performance of the team influences the city inhabitants’ behavior.

What error did he make?

He incorrectly inferred causation from correlation.

Sarah volunteered for a flu study to earn extra spending money in college. Upon arriving at the study site, the researchers told her that after contracting the flu, she would receive a pill, which could be a placebo or real medication. She could not find out whether she had received real medicine or not until the debriefing after the study.

This study was

a blind study to prevent participant bias.

A pharmaceutical company is testing the effects of a new antipsychotic drug. Neither the doctors who administer the drug to their patients nor the patients themselves know if they are in the experimental or control group.

This is an example of a

double-blind procedure.

Elisa believes that students who start their day with a cup of coffee do better in their first-period class. She conducts an experiment to prove or disprove her point.

Which of the following is the independent variable in this experiment?

Whether students drank a cup of coffee or not.

Good health and wealth are positively correlated.

Which of the following statements is a proper conclusion to draw from this fact?

A wealthier individual is likely to be in better health than someone who is not as wealthy.

Michael and his friends decide to find out if light affects the appetites of their goldfish. After measuring the amount of food eaten by the fish as a baseline, they each purchase a different color light bulb for their fish tanks, except for Michael. He is not going to change the lighting in his fish tank.

Why is this a good idea?

Michael's fish will be the control group for the experiment.

During the spring baseball season, concession stand attendants notice a negative correlation between the home team's score and total sales of food. This means:

the more runs scored by the home team, the lower the total sales of food.

Which of the following is the BEST example of a double-blind experiment?

Dr. Phillips is conducting research on a new anti-anxiety drug. He has two randomly assigned groups. One receives the new drug and the other receives a placebo. Neither the participants nor Dr. Phillips is aware of which group received the experimental medication.

A pharmaceutical company is conducting experiments to determine the impact of antipsychotic medication on tardive dyskinesia symptoms in rats. The findings will later be generalized to the human population.

What is the dependent variable in this experiment?

Tardive dyskinesia symptoms.

Many crossing lights at many crosswalks are operated by a timer, yet still feature an inactive button for pedestrians to push in order to cross. These types of buttons are sometimes referred to as "placebo buttons."

What does the word placebo imply?

The button has no effect, but people still push it because they believe it does.

Dr. Richards wants to discover whether his new medication is going to be effective for treating depression.

In order to BEST eliminate his own biases, as well as the biases of the participants, he should:

conduct a double-blind study in which neither the participants nor the researchers know who is in the control and experimental groups.

Most experiments involve just a sample of an entire population.

Researchers are able to generalize their findings by making use of:

random selection.

Research shows a strong positive correlation between watching television and childhood obesity. Rather than blame television for obesity, some claim this is a case of reverse causality.

Which of the following statements BEST supports this claim?

Children who are overweight likely prefer to watch television because physical activity is more difficult for them.

If a high score on the Big Five trait of Openness has a strong positive correlation with job satisfaction, which of the following statements are true?

Employees who score higher on the openness personality scale are more likely to enjoy their job than those with lower scores.

The principal of Jackson High School has discovered that participation in extracurricular activities positively correlates with academic achievement. With this information, what is a reasonable next step for the principal?

Share the information with parents and encourage them to consider extracurricular participation for their children.

Due to ethical and practical limitations, scientists often use rats as subjects in laboratory testing of new drug treatments before moving on to human trials.

Treatments for which of the following symptoms would be MOST difficult to test using rats as test subjects?

Ruminations.

A researcher is using a survey to collect data on attitudes toward using medication to treat depression and ADHD. To ensure that survey respondents accurately represent the population, the researcher divides the population into four subgroups by age and selects an equal number of participants from each subgroup.

This method is called:

stratified sampling.

Students with better school attendance show better grades in school. It is easy to assume that attendance leads to better performance in school, but just as likely, both factors are driven by a third factor.

Which of the following statements supports this idea?

Some students are more motivated to do well in school, leading to better attendance and better grades.

Serenity wants to see whether students who take classes in the morning perform better on the same written exam than those who take the same class in the afternoon. To conduct her research, she asks one teacher who teaches the same course with a similar number of students in both the morning and afternoon to provide data concerning the students' performance on the same unit test. After analyzing the data, she concludes that students who take courses in the morning do better than those who take courses in the afternoon.

Which of the following might be a confounding variable affecting Serenity's research?

The intellectual abilities of the students in the particular classes.

A team of psychiatrists is testing a new ADHD medication using human subjects.

The team is least likely to be able to reduce the impact of which of the following when conducting an experiment that adheres to APA ethical guidelines?

The Hawthorne effect.

Recent candy bar commercials claim that "You're not you when you're hungry." Actors in the commercials show a variety of emotional outbursts until they have a chocolate bar and calm down.

If someone conducted an experiment to find out if "You're not you when you're hungry" is really true, what would "hunger" represent

The independent variable.

Anton wants to know if there is a relationship between someone's age and their preferred political party. Which of the following research methods would best help Anton answer this question?

Correlational

How do research psychologists know their results are NOT likely due to chance?

A small p value and a large sample with a correlation coefficient close to 1 or -1.

Which of the following effects describes why a longitudinal design may be preferable to a cross-sectional design in developmental research?

Cohort effect.

Which of the following BEST defines an alternative hypothesis?

The alternative hypothesis is that the treatment did have an effect in the experiment.

Valerie is creating a survey for a correlational study she is doing on the relationship between physical activity and stress. Valerie needs to ensure that the survey questions she creates are all related to physical activity and stress; otherwise, it could be argued that her survey lacks

construct validity.

A cognitive psychologist conducts a study to examine differences in cognitive functioning across stages of adulthood. He opts to study one group of young adults ages 21-28, one group of middle-aged adults aged 41-48, and one group of older adults aged 61-68. He finds that the young adult group outperforms both other groups on a variety of cognitive tasks and that the middle-aged group outperforms the older group. He concludes that age relates to cognitive performance on these tasks.

Which of the following statements would be a valid criticism of this study's conclusion?

The groups are different in more ways than their ages. Specifically, the young adult group was born and raised more recently, and therefore under different conditions than the middle-aged and older adult groups.

Researchers are using inferential research methods to determine whether a new drug will decrease the number of hallucinations and delusions in all schizophrenia patients.

Which of the following conclusions describes a Type I error?

Concluding that the drug decreases hallucinations and delusions in all schizophrenia patients when, in reality, there is no relationship between the drug and the symptoms.

When a finding is considered statistically significant, the likelihood of the results occurring as a result of chance is less than

5%

Which of the following is an example of a null hypothesis?

There will not be a significant difference in GPAs of students who were enrolled in single-gender courses compared to those enrolled in mixed-gender courses.

At the end of a three-year longitudinal study, a researcher is positive that he did not disprove the null hypothesis. He is so disappointed that he rushes out of his lab and ignores his graduate student. The student takes another look at the data and realizes that the researcher's work did yield a significant difference between groups.

Which type of error is the researcher guilty of?

Type II error.