To a learning psychologist, experience in the environment leads to a change in _____ , whereas to a cognitive psychologist, experience in the environment leads to a change in _____ .
behavior; knowledge or beliefs, which then leads to behavior change
Who was the naturalist scientist who wrote The Origin of Species and proposed that natural selection leads to the evolution of behavioral tendencies that promote survival and reproduction?
Certain specialties within psychology, such as sensory psychology, perceptual psychology, and the psychology of motivation, do not correspond to the different levels of analysis discussed in your textbook because they:
might use any or all of psychology's levels of analysis to understand the specific topics they study.
Jim is conducting a series of experiments on obedience. His interest in the processes through which people are influenced by other people is consistent with _____ psychology.
Andreina, a cultural psychologist, would be most interested in studying:
differences in discipline styles among parents from three countries.
How did the contributions of Charles Darwin help make the world ripe for psychology?
He helped convince people that humans are part of the natural world and can be analyzed in the same way as nonhuman species.
Proposed in the 19th century, _____ refers to the notion that specific parts of the brain serve specific roles in the control of mental experience and behavior.
localization of function
Hobbes's materialism proposed that:
the soul is a meaningless concept and that apparently voluntary choices are the result of mechanistic operations of the body and brain.
A cultural psychologist would most likely investigate jealousy by:
examining significant differences in romantic and sexual behavior across different countries.
What was the significance of evidence published by the nineteenth-century scientist Paul Broca that loss of the ability to speak is linked to damage in a specific area of the brain?
It suggested the idea that different parts of the brain serve different mental functions
What physiological concept proposed that different sensory experiences excite different parts of the brain?
localization of function
In a study of conformity, Asch found that if a single confederate disagreed with the others, subjects were:
less likely to conform than when the confederates were unanimous, even if the dissenting answer was wrong.
In group polarization, group discussion tends to lead:
like-minded individuals to a more extreme view than they had held initially.
Which of the following lists the defining characteristics of a social dilemma?
an action that benefits the person who takes it, harms others in the group, but would cause more harm than benefit to everyone if everyone took the action
_____ and _____ are opposing emotional responses to our own self-perceived characteristics or performance; the former increases and the latter decreases self-esteem.
When we think of ourselves as independent individuals with self-interests distinct from those of other people, we are thinking of ourselves in terms of:
Larissa was opposed to animal cruelty and decided to attend an animal rights rally. After the rally, Larissa experienced intensification in her views. Specifically, she became a vegetarian and decided to stop using products tested on animals. Her shift in opinion could be explained by:
After playing the clarinet for only a few weeks, Shelly learns to play a simple song fairly well during practice. Unfortunately, she finds that she cannot play it in front of her family without making one mistake after another. It might help Shelly to feel better if she knew this was probably a function of:
Social psychologists are interested in games based on the hypothetical conflict experienced by two prisoners who must each independently choose between confessing to a crime or remaining silent. This is because such games:
incorporate the basic elements of social dilemmas.
Cialdini and his colleagues investigated the effects of implicit norms on people's behavior by creating different signs aimed at decreasing the pilfering of petrified wood from Petrified Forest National Park. The sign that was effective in decreasing the amount of stealing well below the base-line rate implied that:
stealing wood is rare and wrong.
In some versions of Milgram's obedience experiment, a confederate of the experimenter shared the task of "shocking" the learner. Most of the subjects:
refused to continue if the confederate refused to continue.
Bernardo is asking people in his dorm to donate money to an environmental cause with which he is involved. Before asking for a donation, he does one of three things: He gives the person a bumper sticker, asks them to sign a petition, or does both. In which case would he be least successful in acquiring the donation?
when he does both
If the answers that a research subject gives to interview questions are affected by the preconceived notions of the interviewer, the answers are biased by:
the observer-expectancy effect.
Using subjects who are initially different from subjects in the larger group that a researcher is interested in is known as using a ______ sample.
Suppose, to determine whether college men or women are faster sprinters, you located 15 women at the sports complex and 15 men at the library and asked them all to run a 100-yard dash. Suppose the women ran faster than the men, and the results were statistically significant. The most justified criticism of this study is that the:
samples were biased.
Suppose I decide to measure your intelligence by weighing you on a highly accurate scale. This measure would have _____ reliability, _____ validity, and _____ face validity
high; low; low
A psychologist is studying mastectomy patients in local hospitals to learn whether a patient's age at the time of surgery is related to postsurgical emotional adjustment. The psychologist is carrying out a:
Which of the following is the best way to eliminate observer-expectancy effects?
Keep the person who is testing the subjects blind (uninformed) as to which condition each subject is in or what effects are hypothesized by the experimenter.
A shorter person usually weighs less than a taller person. Which of the following correlation coefficients between height and weight might possibly describe this relationship?
One way to keep observer-expectancy and subject-expectancy effects from occurring in an experiment is to:
let neither participants nor experimenters know which groups the participants are being assigned to
A researcher is interested in exploring the kinds of behaviors that people engage in at their gyms. She observes and records how much time they spend on aerobic activity, how much on resistance training, and how much on activities other than exercise, such as conversation or resting. She is conducting a(n):
Research institutions that receive public funding are required to have ethics review panels that have the power to prevent certain studies from being conducted. The main purpose of these panels is to:
protect subjects from harmful or otherwise unethical procedures.
A professor wants to draw some conclusions about how her students regarded her course. The professor administers a questionnaire to students who received an A in the course on the grounds that they will take the task more seriously than students who received a lower grade. The most obvious problem with this technique is:
a nonrepresentative sample.
If a trait varies in a continuous, graded manner among different individuals, then it is probably a:
Premature human infants exhibit a strong grasping reflex with both fingers and toes. This reflex is an example of a(n):
What did the Eibl-Eibesfeldt learn from studying facial expression in children born blind or blind and deaf?
Their expressions are basically the same as those of sighted children, which suggests that human facial expression need not be learned.
When a human sperm and egg unite, the resulting zygote:
contains 23 paired chromosomes, one member of each pair coming from each parent.
Which of the following statements about dominance and recessiveness is TRUE?
Some pairs of alleles do not involve a dominant/recessive pattern but rather blend their effects
Ultimate and proximate explanations of behavior
answer different types of questions, one concerning the behavior's role in survival and reproduction, the other concerning the physiological mechanism underlying the behavior.
Suppose we carry out a Mendelian study, beginning with two purebred strains of the same species of plant. One strain produces red flowers, the other yellow. We cross the strains and find that all of the resulting plants have red flowers. What should this tell us about the genes for red and yellow flowers?
Yellow is recessive.
Suppose we carry out a Mendelian study, beginning with two purebred strains of the same species of plant. One strain produces red flowers, the other yellow. We cross the strains and find that all of the resulting plants have red flowers. What should we get when we breed these offspring among themselves?
Three-fourths of the plants should have red flowers, the other one-fourth yellow flowers.
Which of the following is most clearly an example of an operant response?
Your dog barks so you'll let him go outside.
A small child is scolded for chasing a ball into the street and thereafter does not do it again. What has caused this result?
What was Pavlov's term for the environmental event that elicits an unlearned reflexive response?
A toddler cries at the sight of a red plastic to y sword for weeks after his brother strikes him with it. He also cries at the sight of a red umbrella and a red broom but not in response to a red beach ball or a black umbrella. This example illustrates:
In discrimination training for an operant response, the discriminative stimulus:
sets the occasion for the response.
When viewed in terms of adaptiveness, it makes sense that _____ schedules produce faster response rates than _____ schedules.
Suppose a drug addict usually takes his fix in an alley. One day the police are watching the alley, and the addict takes his fix in a bus depot men's room. He dies. Why would the same dose that he could tolerate in the alley kill him in the men's room?
Stimuli in the alley that had become conditioned stimuli for physiological responses that counteract the drug's effect were absent in the men's room.
Which of the following theorists did not concentrate on the stimuli that followed the learned response?
Suzy is making fun of her little brother because she has a cookie and he has none. Her mother sees this and takes away her cookie. What kind of punishment is this?
Which of the following will lead to a decrease in the likelihood that a response will be repeated?
When people purchase clothes in response to the latest fashion trends seen on TV or in magazines, they engage in ___.
both imitation and observational learning
Walter Cannon proposed that we can understand drives in terms of the body's need to keep internal conditions—for example, oxygen levels—within restricted ranges. He called this process:
Most Americans are not obese because of a leptin deficiency, but because they are _____ to the hormone
Ben believes that his body wears out during the day and that sleep is necessary to put it back in shape. Ben's beliefs are most consistent with the _____ of sleep.
The EEG of a person who is awake and relaxed, with closed eyes, thinking of nothing in particular, will generally consist of:
Many of the neurons in the pathway essential for the "wanting" component of reward use _____ as their transmitter.
The idea that different drives correspond to neural activities in different sets of neurons in the brain describes what theory?
central-state theory of drives
According to the _____, dreams don't serve any purpose at all, but are merely the result of neurons active in the brain for other reasons during sleep.
How do drives and incentives complement each other?
If one is weak, the other must be strong in order to motivate goal-directed behavior.
According to research, the more older brothers a male has, the greater the likelihood of that male being homosexual. What is this influence called?
fraternal birth-order effect
Conduction deafness is due to _______ while sensorineural deafness is due to _____.
middle ear rigidity; inner ear or auditory nerve damage
Suppose that a blindfolded person is holding 10 pennies in one hand and that 3 pennies have to be added before the person reports that the pennies feel heavier. According to Weber's law, how many pennies would have to be added to get a jnd if the person were holding 50 pennies?
According to Georg von Békésy, the auditory system codes pitch in terms of:
the relative rate of firing from various places on the basilar membrane.
Generally speaking, the value of sensory adaptation is that it:
allows our attention to focus on the changes that occur in our environment.
The receptors for a given sense will respond to an appropriate stimulus with changes in membrane permeability and consequent changes in the electrical charge across the membrane. This electrical change is called _____, and it is the essence of the process called _____.
the receptor potential; transduction
Jacob and Aiden have both been wounded to similar degrees but neither feels any pain. _____ accounts for Jacob's lack of pain, as he was just stabbed by a mugger and has to get away. However, _____ accounts for Aiden's lack of pain because he has spent hours meditating in order to pierce his cheeks for a religious ceremony.
Stress-induced analgesia; belief-induced analgesia
In general, qualitative coding occurs because individual receptor cells:
are tuned differently than other individual receptor cells, so different cells respond best to somewhat different stimuli.
Which triggers transduction in smell?
The terminals of olfactory sensory neurons contain receptor sites that bind molecules of odorous substances.
By directly observing the action of the basilar membrane, Georg von Békésy discovered that traveling waves for high-frequency sounds peak:
near the proximal end (the end closer to the oval window).
Research on pain sensitivity following injury suggests that generally:
heightened sensitivity to pain occurs at the injury site as a result of local changes there as well as increased sensitivity in the central nervous system.
Research on selective listening shows that subjects hearing two messages and shadowing one will:
notice only physical characteristics of the unattended message, such as the gender of the speaker.
Shalita is actively processing information for her general psychology exam—asking questions, drawing comparisons, thinking of examples. The method by which this information will be placed into her long-term memory is known as:
Tyler saw a certain type of candy at the store and suddenly remembered that his grandma had always given it to him as a kid. This candy served as a stimulus that primed a particular memory for Tyler and is referred to as a(n):
Because Jeff often eats hot dogs while attending football games, the thought of one of these things makes Jeff think about the other. This can be best accounted for by the principle of:
association by contiguity.
Suppose you are concentrating on driving through a busy intersection when your passenger asks you a question you don't attend to. You say "What?" but before the question is repeated, you "hear" it from your own memory. Presumably, a trace still existed in your:
You have just been hired as an elementary school teacher. What technique would best help your students commit the lessons to their long-term memory?
utilization of elaboration
Sensory memory can hold information for a very _____ period of time, and contains _____ of the sensory input that enters the sensory system.
The knowledge that enables a skater to execute graceful moves on the ice would be an example of _____ memory.
In the modal model of memory, attention, encoding, and retrieval are known as _____ processes.
Which of the following has emerged as a general conclusion from studies of brain mechanisms of preattentive processing and attention?
Attention magnifies the activity level that stimuli produce in sensory and perceptual areas of the brain.
In Hoffman's taxonomy of discipline styles, induction refers to a style in which parents:
use verbal reasoning to encourage the child to think about the consequences of his or her actions.
What is one contributing factor to the gender differences seen between boys and girls at an early age?
All of these possibilities are contributing factors.
Martha has spent the afternoon throwing darts at her sister's favorite posters and has ruined them all. If Martha's mother were to say, "That's it, now I'm going to throw away every poster on your bedroom walls," she would be using the technique of:
Shonda recently went back to college to earn her teaching certificate, so she could quit her assembly line job at a local factory and become a high school teacher. According to Kohn and Slomczynski, this change from a job low in self-direction to one high in self-direction will have which of the following effects on Shonda's parenting style?
She will become more concerned with her children's ability to make decisions and less concerned with obedience for its own sake.
In every culture, young men are more eager than young women to have sexual intercourse without long-term commitment. The standard evolutionary explanation of this is founded on the theory of ________________, thus a woman's sexual interest frequently lies in _____________.
parental investment; reserving intercourse until she can afford to be pregnant
A 1-year-old child is placed in an unfamiliar room containing a variety of toys. She confidently explores the room when her mother is present, becomes upset and plays less when left alone, then eagerly goes to the mother upon her return. By this test the child's attachment to her mother would be classed as:
Rina is 15 and has not seen her father for 11 years. She lives in a community in which her single-parent, father-absent family structure is typical. If we were to predict based only on these facts, research might lead us to guess that Rina:
is more promiscuous than adolescents in intact homes.
In one experimental condition, Harry Harlow raised young monkeys with two surrogate "mothers." One was made of wire and held a baby bottle that provided the young monkey with its only source of nourishment. The other was made of cloth and contained no source of nourishment. When young monkeys raised with both surrogates were frightened, they usually:
clung to the cloth surrogate.
Which of the following is NOT a central aspect of Kohlberg's theory of moral development?
Higher stages of moral development involve a greater concern for personal relationships than do lower stages.
Sandra and Jim are a happily married couple. Which of the following is most likely to be a characteristic of their relationship?
They think of themselves not just as wife and husband, but as best friends and confidants.
A young American man drives more recklessly when his friends are in the car with him than when he is alone. A young Efe man acts more aggressively if he is insulted in front of his friends than if he is insulted when they are not around. Such acts best support:
Wilson and Daly's "young-male syndrome."
Studies of human newborns have demonstrated that:
by the time infants are born, they prefer their own mother's voice to another woman's voice.
Which of the following would NOT be characterized as a chronic mental disorder derived from irreversible brain damage?
Gene was kidnapped and terrorized while being held under extremely inhumane conditions for a week when he was 13 years old. For several years after his ordeal, he frequently relived incidents from his captivity and experienced sleeplessness, nightmares, and depression. In other words, he apparently suffered from:
posttraumatic stress disorder
The heritability of bipolar disorder has been assessed through research on _____, which has revealed _____ genetic influences.
twins and adoptees; strong
If a patient is diagnosed with the same illness by 20 different doctors, the method used for the diagnosis is said to be:
In Burlington, Vermont, there are no dangerous snakes; yet the most common specific phobia among the citizens of Burlington is snake phobia. This observation was presented in the textbook as evidence:
against the behaviorists' theory that phobias come from classical conditioning.
False beliefs held in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary are called _____ and are among the major symptoms of _____.
Susie totally avoids walking on anything but paved surfaces outdoors because she has an intense fear of grasshoppers. Her fear of grasshoppers is irrational and powerful. Which of the following would Susie most likely be diagnosed with?
a specific phobia
______ is a congenital (present at birth) disorder that causes damage to many regions of the developing brain, such that the person goes through life with moderate to severe mental retardation. This is a defect caused by an error in ______.
Down syndrome; meiosis
The 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality from its list of mental disorders is an example of the:
role of culture in determining what is or is not a "disorder."
Sally tries to find reasons within her for things going wrong in her life compared to John who looks at his environment and tends to act out aggressively while Sally dwells mentally. This is because women tend to _______ while men tend to _______.
Anorexia nervosa, a disorder characterized by extreme thinness, a preoccupation with body weight, and a refusal to eat, is found:
primarily among young, middle- to upper-class women in Western (or Westernized) cultures, providing evidence of cross-cultural variation in mental disorders.