Mock Questions
1. How does our appraisal of an event affect our stress reaction, and what are the three main types of stressors?
Our appraisal of an event significantly affects our stress reaction. If we appraise an event as threatening, we experience more stress than if we appise it as challenging or benign.
The three main types of stressors are:
Catastrophes: Unpredictable large-scale events, such as natural disasters or wars.
Significant life changes: Personal life transitions, like marriage, job loss, or the death of a loved one, that require adaptation.
Daily hassles: Annoying everyday events, such as traffic, long lines, or arguments.
2. How does a perceived lack of control affect health?
A perceived lack of control over one's environment or life events can significantly affect health. It is associated with increased stress hormones, impaired immune system functioning, higher blood pressure, and a greater likelihood of developing stress-related health problems and learned helplessness.
3. What is the faith factor, and what are some possible explanations for the link between faith and health?
The faith factor is the phenomenon that religiously active people tend to live longer and have better health outcomes than those who are not.
Possible explanations for the link between faith and health include:
Healthy Behaviors: Many religions promote healthier lifestyles (e.g., abstinence from smoking, alcohol, and drug use).
Social Support: Religious communities often provide robust networks of social support, which reduces feelings of isolation.
Positive Emotions and Meaning: Faith can offer a sense of hope, purpose, and meaning in life, fostering positive emotions like optimism and gratitude that are linked to better health.
Reduced Stress: Religion can provide coping mechanisms for stress, such as prayer and meditation, and a belief in a coherent plan, reducing anxiety.
4. How do the peripheral route persuasion and central route persuasion differ? Provide examples.
Peripheral route persuasion and central route persuasion differ in how they influence attitudes:
Central Route Persuasion: Occurs when interested people's thinking is influenced by the strength of the arguments and facts. It involves analytical processing and leads to more durable attitude change.
Example: A person buys a new phone after meticulously researching its technical specifications, battery life, and user reviews.
Peripheral Route Persuasion: Occurs when people are influenced by incidental cues, such as a speaker's attractiveness, endorsements, or emotional appeal. It relies on superficial cues and often leads to temporary attitude change.
Example: Someone buys a phone because a popular celebrity uses it in an advertisement or because it comes in an attractive color.
5. What did Milgram’s obedience experiments teach us about the power of social influence.
Milgram's obedience experiments taught us about the powerful nature of social influence, demonstrating that ordinary people can be compelled to obey orders from an authority figure, even when those orders conflict with their personal conscience and involve potentially harming another person. The experiments showed that situational factors, such as the legitimacy of the authority, the proximity of the victim, and the absence of dissenting peers, can strongly influence obedience.
6. How does the presence of others influence our actions, via social facilitation, social loafing, and deindividuation.
The presence of others can influence our actions in several ways:
Social Facilitation: The tendency for well-learned or simple tasks to be performed better in the presence of others due to increased arousal.
Social Loafing: The tendency for individuals in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward a common goal than when individually accountable, often due to a diffusion of responsibility.
Deindividuation: A loss of self-awareness and self-restraint that can occur in group situations that foster arousal and anonymity, often leading to uninhibited behavior.
7. What three factors are indicated in causing us to befriend or fall in love with some people and not others?
Three factors indicated in causing us to befriend or fall in love with some people and not others are:
Proximity: Geographic closeness increases the likelihood of interaction and the "mere exposure effect" (repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases our liking for them).
Physical Attractiveness: A significant predictor of initial attraction and how frequently people date.
Similarity: We tend to be attracted to those who share similar attitudes, interests, values, and backgrounds.
8. What is altruism? When are people most - and least - likely to help?
Altruism is the unselfish regard for the welfare of others; helping behavior without the expectation of personal reward.
People are most likely to help: When they are not in a hurry, are in a good mood, have just observed someone else helping, feel guilty, perceive the person in need as deserving, the situation is unambiguous, or the person in need is similar to them. Also, when there are fewer bystanders (reducing the bystander effect).
People are least likely to help: When there are many other bystanders (due to diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect), when they are in a hurry, when the situation is ambiguous, or when the costs of helping are high (e.g., danger or significant effort).
9. What was Freud’s ‘iceberg” view of personality? Feel free to draw and label the iceberg image. Add your description of the three components of Freud’s personality.
Freud's 'iceberg' view of personality posits that the mind is mostly hidden, like an iceberg, with only a small portion visible and a much larger part beneath the surface. The components are:
Id: Operates entirely in the unconscious, driven by the pleasure principle, which seeks immediate gratification of basic sexual and aggressive drives. It is the primitive, instinctual part of the personality.
Ego: Functions mostly in the conscious and preconscious mind, operating on the reality principle. It mediates between the demands of the id, the superego, and reality, aiming to gratify the id's impulses in realistic ways that bring long-term pleasure.
Superego: Partially conscious, represents internalized ideals and provides standards for judgment (the conscience) and for future aspirations. It strives for perfection, causing feelings of pride or guilt based on actions that align with or deviate from these ideals.
10. How did Freud think people defended themselves against anxiety? Give two examples.
Freud believed that people defended themselves against anxiety using defense mechanisms, which are the ego's unconscious methods of distorting reality to reduce anxiety arising from conflicts between the id and superego.
Two examples are:
Repression: Banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness. For example, a person who experienced severe childhood trauma might have no conscious memory of the event.
Displacement: Shifting aggressive or sexual impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. For example, a student angry with their professor might go home and yell at their roommate instead.
11.What are projective tests, how are they used, and what are some criticisms of them?
Projective tests are personality tests that provide ambiguous stimuli designed to trigger the projection of one's inner dynamics and reveal unconscious motives and conflicts.
How they are used: Clinicians present ambiguous images (like inkblots or pictures) or incomplete sentences, and the individual's descriptions or stories are interpreted to uncover hidden emotions, internal conflicts, and psychological needs.
Criticisms: They are often criticized for their lack of reliability (different interpreters may find different results) and validity (they often fail to predict behavior or diagnose disorders accurately), leading to subjective interpretations and poor empirical support.
12. How did humanistic psychologists view psychology, and what was their goal in studying personality?
Humanistic psychologists viewed psychology from a perspective that emphasized inherent human potential for growth, self-actualization, and free will. They rejected the deterministic nature of psychoanalysis and behaviorism, focusing instead on healthy personal development.
Their goal in studying personality was to understand individuals' subjective experiences, their capacity for self-determination, and their innate drive to fulfill their unique potential (self-actualization), aiming to foster personal growth, self-acceptance, and a positive self-concept.
13.What are some common misunderstandings about introversion that Susan Cain spoke about in her TED Talk?
In her TED Talk, Susan Cain addressed several common misunderstandings about introversion:
Introversion is not shyness: Cain clarified that shyness is a fear of social judgment, whereas introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Introverts can be highly sociable but prefer interactions in smaller doses or less intense settings.
Introverts are not antisocial: While introverts gain energy from solitude, they are not necessarily antisocial. They often value deep connections and can be excellent listeners and thoughtful companions.
Introverts are not incapable leaders or assertive individuals: Cain highlighted that introverts often possess strengths advantageous to leadership, such as careful contemplation, deep listening, and a focus on significant issues rather than superficial ones. They can be quietly assertive and effective.
Introverts are not quiet because they have nothing to say: Often, introverts process information deeply before speaking, contributing thoughtful and well-considered insights when they do choose to speak.
14. How do social-cognitive theorists view personality development, and how do they explore behaviour?
Social-cognitive theorists view personality development as an interaction between a person's traits (thinking), their behavior, and the environment (social context), a phenomenon known as reciprocal determinism. They emphasize that we learn many of our behaviors by observing and imitating others, and by processing information about our experiences.
They explore behavior by focusing on how individuals interact with their situations, conducting experiments to observe how people's situations affect their behavior. This involves studying how people think about and respond to different situations, and how their beliefs, expectations, and goals influence their actions.
15. How and why do clinicians classify psychological disorders, and why do some psychologists criticize diagnostic labels?
Clinicians classify psychological disorders to describe, estimate prevalence, guide treatment, and inform research. Critics argue that diagnostic labels can lead to stigmatization, oversimplification, medicalization of normal behavior, and have issues with reliability and validity.
16. How do generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and specific phobias differ? Give examples.
These anxiety disorders differ as follows:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): Persistent, excessive, and uncontrollable worry about various things (e.g., constant worry about job, finances, health).
Panic Disorder: Unpredictable, recurrent panic attacks (sudden episodes of intense fear with physical symptoms) and fear of future attacks (e.g., avoiding crowded places after a panic attack).
Specific Phobias: Intense, irrational fear of a specific object or situation that poses little or no actual danger (e.g., overwhelming fear of heights).
17.What is PTSD?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that develops after experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event, characterized by intrusive memories, avoidance, negative mood changes, and altered arousal and reactivity.
18. How can the biological and social-cognitive perspectives help us understand depressive disorders and bipolar disorders?
The biological perspective attributes depressive and bipolar disorders to genetic predispositions, brain chemistry imbalances (neurotransmitters like serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine), abnormal brain structure/function, and stress hormones/inflammation.
The social-cognitive perspective links these disorders to learned helplessness, negative explanatory styles, rumination, and the impact of stressful life events and lack of social support.
19. How do chronic schizophrenia and acute schizophrenia differ?
Chronic schizophrenia (process schizophrenia) develops gradually, often with progressive withdrawal and persistent negative symptoms, leading to lower recovery rates. Acute schizophrenia (reactive schizophrenia) develops suddenly, often triggered by stress, with rapid onset of positive symptoms and a generally better prognosis.
20.What patterns of perceiving, thinking, and feeling characterize schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia's characteristic patterns include:
Perceiving: Hallucinations (e.g., auditory), distorted sensory perception.
Thinking: Delusions (false beliefs), disorganized thinking/speech (loose associations, neologisms), impaired logic.
Feeling: Flat affect (reduced emotional expression), alogia (poverty of speech), anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure), avolition (lack of motivation), social withdrawal.
21.What are the three clusters of personality disorders? What behaviours and brain activity characterize antisocial personality disorder?
The three clusters of personality disorders are:
Cluster A (Odd/Eccentric): Paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal.
Cluster B (Dramatic/Erratic): Antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic.
Cluster C (Anxious/Fearful): Avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive.
Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, including deceitfulness, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and lack of remorse. Brain activity shows reduced activity in the frontal lobes and a smaller amygdala.
22.Why is there controversy over attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder?
Controversy over attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) stems from concerns about overdiagnosis, the widespread use of stimulant medication and its potential side effects, the influence of cultural factors on diagnostic prevalence, and questions about its diagnostic validity and comorbidity with other disorders.
23. How do psychotherapy and the biomedical therapies differ?
Psychotherapy involves a trained therapist and client using psychological techniques (e.g., talking, listening) to address problems and foster growth, focusing on the mind and behavior. Biomedical therapies physically change the brain's functioning using drugs, electrical/magnetic stimulation, or psychosurgery, assuming biological roots for disorders.
24.What are the goals and techniques of the cognitive therapies and of cognitivebehavioral therapies?
Cognitive Therapies (CT): Goals are to change dysfunctional ways of thinking by replacing irrational thoughts with realistic ones. Techniques include cognitive restructuring, Socratic questioning, and thought records.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies (CBT): Goals are to integrate cognitive and behavioral approaches to change both maladaptive thoughts and behaviors. Techniques combine CT methods with behavioral ones like exposure therapy, systematic desensitization, and behavioral activation.
25.What three elements are shared by all forms of therapy?
All forms of therapy share three elements: a hope for demoralized people, a new perspective, and an empathic, trusting, and caring relationship (therapeutic alliance).
26. How are brain stimulation and psycho surgery used in treating specific disorders? Give examples.
Brain stimulation methods directly stimulate brain areas for severe, resistant conditions:
- Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT): Electrical current for severe depression.
- Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS): Magnetic energy for depression and OCD.
- Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS): Implanted electrodes for severe OCD, depression, Parkinson's.
Psychosurgery involves removing or destroying brain tissue as a last resort:
Modern psychosurgery (e.g., cingulotomy): Precise lesions for severe OCD or depression.