Studied by 6 PeopleTags & Description
Functionalism was a school of psychology that focused attention on the
adaptive value of conscious thoughts and emotions.
In its early years, psychology focused on the study of _, but from the 1920s into the 1960s, American psychologists emphasized the study of _.
mental life; observable behavior
Humanistic psychologists focused on the importance of
healthy growth potential.
Which perspective is most relevant to understanding the impact of strokes and brain diseases on memory?
Biological
Dr. Kozak has concluded that the unusually low incidence of alcohol dependence among citizens of a small African country can be attributed to strong fundamentalist religious influences in that region. This belief best illustrates a(n) ________ perspective.
Social-cultural
Dr. Tiao conducts basic research on the effects of head injuries on people's problem-solving and abstract-reasoning skills. Which psychological specialty does her research best represent?
biological psychology
Dr. Karima conducts basic research on the relative effectiveness of massed practice and spaced practice on a person's ability to remember information. Dr. Karima is most likely a ________ psychologist.
Cognitive
The psychologist who would be least likely to participate in devising ways to improve teaching and learning in a classroom would be a(n) _______ psychologist.
experimental
Robert wants to pursue a degree in a field in which he could help people learn how to change their lives, such as determining what career best suits them. The subfield that is most applicable in this area is
counseling psychology.
Alexandra is told that research supports the value of cosmetic surgery for boosting self-esteem. Belinda is told that the esteem-enhancing value of cosmetic surgery has been refuted by research. Both women would consider the findings to be common sense. This best illustrates the power of
the hindsight bias.
Thinking that she had outperformed most of her classmates, Glenda was surprised to receive just an average grade on her psychology test. Glenda's experience best illustrates
overconfidence.
Professor Trinh contends that parents and children have similar levels of intelligence largely because they share common genes. His idea is best described as a(n)
theory
Dr. Wescott hypothesized that students in a classroom seating 30 would get higher course grades than students seated in an auditorium seating 300. In this example,
classroom size has been operationally defined.
Professor Mata was skeptical about the accuracy of recently reported research on sleep deprivation. Which process would best enable her to assess the reliability of these findings?
replication
In 1953, H.M. underwent surgery to control his seizures. Doctors removed tissue from the hippocampus. As a result H.M.'s memory was severely impaired. Psychologists studied H.M.'s memory function until his death in 2008. Which research method did the psychologists utilize in this situation?
case study
If the correlation between the physical weight and reading ability of children is +0.85, this would indicate that
better reading ability is associated with greater physical weight among children.
Which of the following correlation coefficients expresses the strongest degree of relationship between two variables?
-0.67
To study the effects of noise on worker productivity, researchers have one group of subjects work in a noisy room and a second group work in a quiet room. To ensure that any differences in the productivity of the two groups actually result from the different noise levels to which the groups are exposed, the researchers would use
random assignment.
In the hypothesis "Students who study a list of terms in the morning, just after waking up, will recall more terms than students who study the list just before falling asleep", what is the dependent variable?
number of terms remembered
Seven members of a boys' club reported the following individual earnings from their sale of cookies: $2, $9, $8, $10, $4, $9, and $7. In this distribution of individual earnings
the median is less than the mean and greater than the mode.
Professor Teruya noticed that the distribution of students' scores on her last biology test had an extremely small standard deviation. This indicates that the
students' scores tended to be very similar to one another.
One function of the glial cells is to
provide nutrients to interneurons.
The depolarization of a neural membrane can create a(n)
action potential.
With regard to the process of neural transmission, a refractory period refers to a time interval in which
dendrites transmit more electrical signals to axons.
Molecules that are similar enough to a neurotransmitter to bind to its receptor sites on a dendrite and block that neurotransmitter's effects are called what?
Antagonists
The peripheral nervous system is to sensory neurons as the central nervous system is to
interneurons
Messages are transmitted from your spinal cord to your digestive system's stomach muscles by the
sympathetic nervous system.
Information travels from the spinal cord to the brain via
interneurons
Hormones are the chemical messengers of the
endocrine system.
The sequence of brain regions from the evolutionarily oldest to newest is
brainstem; limbic system; cerebral cortex.
After Kato's serious motorcycle accident, doctors detected damage to his cerebellum. Kato is most likely to have difficulty
playing his guitar.
If Professor Freeborn lesions the amygdala of a laboratory rat, the rat will most likely become
less aggressive.
The occipital lobes are to ________ as the temporal lobes are to ________.
seeing; hearing
If a blind person uses one finger to read Braille, the brain area dedicated to that finger expands as the sense of touch invades the visual cortex. This is an example of
brain plasticity.
The ability to recognize faces with the right hemisphere but not with the left hemisphere best illustrates
lateralization.
Someone skilled at word processing thinks several letters ahead while typing, whereas a beginner must focus on one letter at a time. A novice is most likely using _________ to complete the task.
conscious sequential processing
Studies of identical twins who had been reared apart most clearly highlight the importance of ________ in personality development.
genetic predispositions
The prevalence of genetically predisposed traits that have a reproductive advantage is best explained in terms of
natural selection.
Evolutionary psychologists would be most likely to predict that
children are more likely to be valued by their biological fathers than by their stepfathers.
Evolutionary psychologists are most likely to emphasize that human adaptiveness to a variety of different environments has contributed to human
reproductive success.
Because she was listening to the news on the radio, Mrs. Schultz didn't perceive a word her husband was saying. Her experience best illustrates
selective attention.
If an adult develops cataracts, his or her
absolute threshold for light is likely to increase.
The horizon Moon appears to shrink in size if it is viewed through a narrow tube that eliminates the perception of distance cues. This best illustrates the importance of
context effects.
Which process allows more light to reach the periphery of the retina?
dilation of the pupil
Rods are
more light-sensitive and less color-sensitive than are cones.
The ability to simultaneously process the pitch, loudness, melody, and meaning of a song best illustrates
parallel processing.
The principles of continuity and closure best illustrate the importance of
top-down processing.
Which of the following is most helpful in perceiving the distance of objects far away from you?
monocular cues
The steadily increasing size of the retinal image of an approaching object is especially important for perceiving the object's
motion.
Which of the following circumstances is most likely to contribute to conduction hearing loss?
misuse of Q-tips (cotton swabs) in cleaning your ears
The mechanical vibrations triggered by sound waves are transduced into neural impulses by
hair cells.
Which of the following best explains why we have difficulty locating sounds that are directly overhead?
When the sound is directly overhead, it reaches both ears simultaneously.
Taste and smell are both what kind of senses?
Chemical
Receptor cells for kinesthesis are located in the
joints, tendons, bones, and ear.
The ability to detect whether your body is in a horizontal or vertical position depends most directly on
the vestibular sense.
The green-colored ham and eggs had such a strange appearance that they tasted terrible to Sam. This illustrates the importance of
sensory interaction.
Until reading this question you were unaware that your shoes are pressing against your feet. This focusing of your conscious attention, or selective attention, illustrates that
conscious awareness is one part of the dual processing that occurs in our two-track minds.
Cindi prefers to take exams in the late afternoon rather than during the morning, because her energy level and ability to concentrate are better at that time. Her experience most likely reflects the influence of the
circadian rhythm.
Forty-year-old Lance insists that he never dreams. Research suggests that he probably
would report a vivid dream if he were awakened during REM sleep.
The circadian rhythm is influenced by light-sensitive retinal proteins that trigger signals to the
suprachiasmatic nucleus.
Chronic sleep debt is most likely to promote
obesity.
Nightmares are to ________ as night terrors are to ________.
REM sleep; NREM-3 sleep
Greg remembered a recent dream in which his girlfriend suddenly grabbed the wheel of his speeding car. Greg's therapist suggested that the dream might be a representation of the girlfriend's efforts to avoid sexual intimacy. According to Freud, the therapist was attempting to reveal the ________ of Greg's dream.
latent content
The best indication that dreaming serves a necessary biological function is provided by the fact that
most mammals experience REM rebound.
The change in brain chemistry that offsets the effects of a psychoactive drug is called
neuroadaptation
After drinking three cans of beer, Akiva felt less guilty about the way he mistreated his wife and children. Akiva's reduced guilt most likely resulted from the fact that his alcohol consumption has
reduced his self-awareness.
A sea slug learns to withdraw its gill after repeatedly being squirted by water. After repeated squirting, the withdrawal response lessens. Which term would learning theorists use to describe this reaction?
habituation
An organism learns associations between events it does not control during the process of
classical conditioning.
To assess whether Mrs. Webster had Alzheimer's disease, researchers conditioned her to blink in response to a sound that signaled the delivery of a puff of air directed toward her face. In this application of classical conditioning, the sound was a
CS.
Which of the following is an unconditioned response?
sweating in hot weather
Laurie's thumb sucking has become habitual because she begins to feel less anxious whenever she sucks her thumb. This best illustrates the process of
operant conditioning.
You would be most likely to use operant conditioning to teach a dog to
retrieve sticks and balls.
Jacinda has a glass of wine after work because it relieves her anxiety. Her wine drinking is likely to continue because it is followed by a ________ reinforcer.
negative
Blake is a carpet installer who wants to be paid for each square foot of carpet he lays rather than with an hourly wage. Blake prefers working on a ________ schedule of reinforcement.
fixed-ratio
Compared with apartment dwellers whose landlords pay their electricity costs, those apartment dwellers who pay their own electric bills use less electricity. This most clearly illustrates that consumer electricity usage is influenced by
operant conditioning.
Laura fails to recognize any connection between her unsafe sexual practices and the likelihood of contracting a sexually transmitted infection. Laura's lack of perceptiveness best illustrates the dangers of
an external locus of control.
An individual who perceives an internal locus of control would most likely show signs of a
strong ego.
The transmission of cultural fads and fashions best illustrates the impact of
observational learning.
Experiments suggest that children exposed to a model who says one thing and does another will
talk in ways consistent with what the model says and act in ways consistent with what the model does.
After prolonged exposure to television violence, viewers became more indifferent to violence when later viewing a brawl, whether on TV or in real life. This finding best illustrates
desensitization.
Students who restudy course material at the end of a semester in order to pass the AP final exam are especially likely to demonstrate long-term retention of the course material. This best illustrates the value of
the spacing effect.
The use of acronyms to improve one's memory of unfamiliar material best illustrates the value of
chunking.
Most Americans still have accurate flashbulb memories of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. This best illustrates that memory formation is facilitated by
the body's release of stress hormones.
The day after Kirsten was introduced to 13 people at a business luncheon, she could recall the names of only the first 4 people to whom she had been introduced. Her effective recall of these particular names best illustrates the impact of
the serial position effect.