AP Psychology Semester Review

Units 1-8

Which perspective would be most useful when explaining how people from different countries express anger?

Social-Cultural

The debate about the relative contributions of biology and experience to human development is most often referred to as what?

The nature-nurture issue

Which of the following professionals is required to have a medical degree?

Psychiatrist

Which psychological principle best explains why studying an hour a day for a week is more effective than one 7-hour study session?

Distributed practice

Which of the following kinds of psychologists would most likely explore how we process and remember information?

Cognitive

According to the behaviorist perspective, psychological science should be rooted in what?

Observation

Which of the following psychologists would most likely conduct psychotherapy?

Clinical

Which field of psychology is most interested in studying the link between mental activity and brain activity?

Cognitive neuroscience

What was the main difference between the psychological thinking of Wilhelm Wundt and earlier philosophers who were also interested in thinking and behavior?

Wundt and his students gathered data about human thinking and behavior in a laboratory setting

Which school of psychology focused on the adaptive nature of thinking and how our consciousness evolves to meet our needs?

Functionalist

The study of the importance of satisfying love and acceptance needs best describes which school of psychology?

Humanistic psychology

Which of the following statements is the best example of applied research?

Using psychological concepts to boost worker productivity

Self-reflective introspection about the elements of experience best describes a technique used by which school of psychology?

Structuralists

Which psychological perspective is most likely to focus on how our interpretation of a situation affects how we react to it?

Cognitive

The science of behavior and mental processes is the definition of which field of study?

Psychology

Which descriptive statistic would a researcher use to describe how close a student's SAT score is to a school's average SAT score?

Standard Deviation

Which method should a psychology researcher use if she is interested in testing whether a specific reward in a classroom situation causes students to behave better?

Experiment

When a distribution of scores is skewed, which of the following is the most representative measure of central tendency?

Median

A researcher wants to conduct an experiment to determine if eating a cookie before class each day improves student grades. He uses two psychology classes for the experiment, providing daily cookies to one and nothing to the other. At the end of the semester, the researcher compares the final grades of students in the two classes. What is the independent variable for this experiment?

The presence or absence of cookies

Which of the following represents naturalistic observation?

Researchers watch and record how elementary school children interact on the playground

"Monday morning quarterbacks" rarely act surprised about the outcome of the weekend football games. This tendency to believe they knew how the game would turn out is best explained by which psychological principle?

Hindsight Bias

Researchers studying gender have found that…

There are more similarities than differences between the genders

A journalism student is writing an article about her school's new cell-phone policy, and she'd like to interview a random sample of students. Which of the following is the best example of a random sample?

The writer pulls the name of five students from a hat that contains all students' names. She interviews the five selected students.

Which of the following is a positive correlation?

As study time decreases, students achieve lower grades

Why is random assignment of participants to groups an important aspect of a properly designed experiment?

If the participants are randomly assigned, the researcher can assume that the people in each of the groups are pretty similar

Which of the following demonstrates the need for psychological science?

Our intuitions about human thinking and behavior are not always accurate

Which of the following is a potential problem with case studies?

They may be misleading because they don't fairly represent other cases.

Which of the following is *not* an ethical principle regarding research on humans?

Participants should always be informed of the hypothesis of the study before they agree to participate

There is a negative correlation between TV watching and grades. What can we conclude from this research finding?

We can conclude that a student who watches a lot of TV is likely to have lower grades

A scientist's willingness to admit that she is wrong is an example of

Humility

Why do researchers study the brains of nonhuman animals?

The same principles govern neural functioning in all species

What is the brief electrical charge that travels down an axon called?

Action Potential

An individual is having trouble with cognitive tasks related to learning and memory. Which of the following neurotransmitters is most likely to be involved with the problem?

Acetylcholine

Which is the most influential of the endocrine glands?

Pituitary Gland

What is the purpose of the myelin sheath?

Speed the transmission of information within a neuron

In an effort to reveal genetic influences on personality, researchers use adoption studies mainly for what purpose?

To evaluate whether adopted children more closely resemble their adoptive parents or their biological parents

What is the purpose of the iris?

To allow light into the eye

Neurons that fire in response to specific edges, lines, angles, and movements are called what?

Feature Detectors

Signal detection theory is most closely associated with which perception process?

Absolute Thresholds

Which of the following represents perceptual constancy?

We know that the color of a printed page has not changed as it moves from sunlight into shadow

Our tendency to see faces in clouds and other ambiguous stimuli is partly based on what perception principle?

Perceptual Set

The process by which rods and cones change electromagnetic energy into neural messages is called what?

Transduction

Which of the following is most likely to influence our memory of a painful event?

The intensity of pain at the end of the event

Frequency Theory relates to which element of the hearing process

Rate at which the basilar membrane vibrates

Which of the following best represents an absolute threshold?

A cook can just barely taste the salt she has added to her soup

Which of the following describes a perception process that the Gestalt psychologists would have been interested in?

How an organized whole is formed out of its component pieces

Which perception process are the hammer, anvil and stirrup involved in?

Transmitting sound waves to the cochlea

Which of the following might result from a disruption of your vestibular sense?

Dizziness and a loss of balance

When we go to the movies, we see smooth continuous motion rather than a series of still images because of which process?

Stroboscopic movement

Two monocular depth cues are most responsible for our ability to know that a jet flying overhead is at an elevation of several miles. One cue is relative size. What is the other?

Relative Motion

Which of the following phrases accurately describes top-down processing?

The effect that our experiences and expectations have on perception

Sudden sleep attacks at inappropriate times are symptomatic of which sleep disorder?

Narcolepsy

Which of the following is associated with deep sleep?

Delta

Recurring problems in falling asleep or staying asleep are characteristic of which sleep disorder?

Insomnia

What is the pineal gland's role in sleep?

The production of melatonin

What are bursts of rapid, rhythmic brain-wave activity that occur during NREM-2 sleep?

Sleep Spindles

Which of these drugs, which acts as both a stimulant and a hallucinogen, can also cause dangerous dehydration?

Ecstasy

Increasing amounts of paradoxical sleep following a period of sleep deprivation is known as what?

REM Rebound

Most recent research most consistently supports the effectiveness of hypnosis in which of the following areas?

Pain Relief

What are the three major categories of drugs?

Hallucinogens, depressants and stimulants

Jarod's muscles are relaxed, his body is basically paralyzed, and he is hard to awaken. Which sleep stage is Jarod probably experiencing?

Paradoxical

The effects of opiates are similar to the effects of which neurotransmitter?

Endorphins

Slowed reactions, slurred speech, and decreased skill performance are associated with the abuse of which drug?

Alcohol

What term did Ernest Hilgard use to describe a split between different levels of consciousness?

Dissociation

Psychologists who study the brain's activity during sleep are most likely to use which of these techniques?

EEG

What term describes the brain's adaptation to a drug's chemistry, requiring larger and larger doses to experience the same effect?

Tolerance

Which of the following most accurately describes an impanct of punishment?

Punishment can be effective at stopping specific behaviors quickly

Which of the following is an application of shaping?

A mother who wants her daughter to hit a baseball first praises her for holding a bat, then for swinging it, and then for hitting the ball

What is one of the principal functions of mirror neurons?

To be the mechanism by which the brain accomplishes observational learning

Which of the following illustrates generalization?

A rabbit that has been conditioned to blink to a tone also blinks when a similar tone is sounded

What did Albert Bandura's Bobo Doll experiments demonstrate?

Children are likely to imitate the behavior of adults

What did Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner's experiments establish?

The importance of cognitive factors in classical conditioning

What does Edward Thorndike's law of effect state?

That rewarded behavior is more likely to happen again

Which of the following processes would produce the acquisition of a conditioned response?

Pair a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus several times

Which of the following would help determine what stimuli an organism can distinguish between?

A discriminative stimulus

Taste aversion studies lead researchers to which of the following conclusions?

Taste aversion is a universal survival mechanism

A student studies diligently to avoid the bad feelings associated with a previously low grade on a test. In this case, the studying behavior is being strengthened because of what kind of reinforcement?

Negative reinforcement

Mary checks her phone every 30 minutes for incoming text messages. Her behavior is being maintained by what kind of reinforcement schedule?

Fixed-interval

A dog is trained to salivate when it hears a tone associated with food. Then the tone is sounded repeatedly without an unconditioned stimulus util the dog stops salivating. Later, when the tone sounds again, the dog salivates again. This is a description of what part of the conditioning process?

Spontaneous recovery

Latent learning is evidence for which of these conclusions?

Cognition plays an important role in operant conditioning

Classical and operant conditioning are based on the principles of which psychological perspective?

Behaviorist

What does the "magical number seven, plus or minus two" refer to?

The capacity of short-term memory

Which of the following describes long-term potentiation (LTP)?

Changes in synapses allow for more efficient transfer of information

Which of the following abilities is an example of implicit memory?

Riding a bicycle wile talking to your friend about something that happened in class

Which of the following statements concerning memory is true?

Memories are often a blend of correct and incorrect information

The basketball players could remember the main points of their coach's halftime talk, but not her exact words. This  is because they encoded the information

Semantically

When someone provides his phone number to another person, he usually pauses after the area code and again after the next three numbers. This pattern underscores the importance of which memory principle?

Chunking

Which of the following is true regarding the role of the amygdala in memory?

The amygdala helps make sure we remember events that trigger strong emotional responses

Which of the following illustrates the serial position effect?

Alp is unable to remember the middle of a list of vocabulary words as well as he remembers the first or last words on the list

Mnemonic devices are *least* likely to be dependent upon which of the following?

Massed rehearsal

You are more likely to remember psychology information in your psychology classroom than in other environments because of what memory principle?

Context-effects

Which of the following kinds of information is *not* likely to be automatically processed?

New information

Which of the following is an example of source amnesia?

Stephen misremembers a dream as something that really happened

"Chair", "freedom", and "ball" are all examples of what?

Concepts

People are more concerned about a medical procedure when told it has a 10 percent death rate than they are when told it has a 90 percent survival rate. Which psychological concept explains this difference in concern?

Framing

Which of the following illustrates a heuristic?

Using new reports of corporate fraud to estimate how much business fraud occurs in American business

Which of the following most likely represents a prototype for the concept indicated in parentheses?

A golden retriever (dog)

The inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective is called what?

Fixation

Which phrase best describes the concept of phonemes?

Units of sound in a language

Which concept best explains why people often underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete a project?

Overconfidence