Choose the best answer to each of the following 100 questions.  Questions are drawn from the text and lectures in roughly equal proportions, with the understanding that there is considerable overlap between the two sources.  Usually, only one question is drawn from each major section of each chapter of the required readings; again, sometimes this question also draws on material discussed in class.  Read the entire exam through before answering any questions: sometimes one question will help you answer another one. 

 

Most questions can be correctly answered in one of two ways: (1) by fact-retrieval, meaning that you remember the answer from your reading of the text or listening to the lecture; or (2) inference, meaning that you can infer the answer from some general principle discussed in the text or lecture.  If you cannot determine the correct answer by either of these methods, try to eliminate at least one option as clearly wrong: this maximizes the likelihood that you will get the correct answer by chance.  Also, go with your intuitions: if you have actually done the assigned readings and attended the lectures, your "informed guesses" will likely be right more often than they are wrong.  

 

A provisional answer key will be posted to the course website tomorrow, after the window for the exam has closed. The exam will be provisionally scored to identify and eliminate bad items. The exam will then be rescored with bad items keyed correct for all responses.  Grades on the rescored exam will be posted to the course website.  A final, revised, answer key, and analyses of the exam items, will be posted on the course website after grades are posted.

   

 

Noncumulative Portion

 

 

1.  The people born in the 1990s have different interests and attitudes than the people born in the 1950s. This is due to a difference in

A. role diffusion.

B. syntax.

C. cohorts. **

D. assimilation.

62% of the class got this item correct; item-to-total r_pb = .45.  Remember the Flynn effect? Over the years, people’s performance on IQ tests has gradually increased so that each generation does better on the tests than the previous generation. Researchers have also found generational differences in personality. For example, over the years, beginning in the 1950s, measurement of anxiety has steadily increased. Generations also differ in other aspects of personality. From the 1980s to 2006, American college students showed a steady increase in measures of narcissism, self-centeredness. Narcissism relates to self-confidence, which is generally a good thing, but it also relates to risk taking, selfishness, and troubled romantic relationships. The general point here is that the era in which you live exerts a major influence on personality development.  Chapter 5.

 

 

2.  Suppose a newborn sucks to turn on a recording of its father’s voice. Eventually the response habituates. Now the experimenters substitute the sound of a different man’s voice. What should we conclude if the sucking rate remains the same?

A. The newborn prefers the sound of the father’s voice.

B. The newborn hears a difference between the voices.

C. The newborn does not hear a difference between the voices. **

D. The newborn prefers women’s voices to men’s voices.

92% correct, r_pb = -.02.  If the frequency increased, we would conclude that the infant recognizes the difference between the father’s voice and the other voice. If the frequency remained the same, we would conclude that the infant did not notice a difference. If the sucking frequency decreased, we would assume that the infant preferred the sound of the father’s voice.  Chapter 5

 

3.  According to Piaget, a child who has the concept of conservation understands which of these?

A. The weight and mass of an object stays the same when the shape changes. **

B. One should work out a strategy before starting on a complex task.

C. An object continues to exist even when one does not see it.

D. A group of people has to take turns talking to one another and then listening.

69%, .32.  According to Piaget, preoperational children lack the concept of conservation. They fail to understand that objects conserve such properties as number, length, volume, area, and mass after changes in the shape or arrangement of the objects. They cannot perform the mental operations necessary to understand the transformations. For example, if we show two equal glasses with the same amount of water and then pour the contents of one glass into a third glass that is taller and thinner, preoperational children say that the third glass contains more water.  Chapter 5

 

4.  If an infant shows a secure attachment in the Strange Situation, what if anything can we predict about later behavior?

A. In elementary school, this child will probably do better at language than math.

B. In adulthood, this person is likely to form good romantic relationships. **

C. In adolescence, this person will have difficulties with self-esteem.

D. We cannot make any accurate predictions about later behavior.

54%, .32.  Most research on attachment has measured it in the Strange Situation, pioneered by Mary Ainsworth (1979). In this process, a mother and her infant come into a room with many toys. Then a stranger enters the room. The mother leaves and then returns. A few minutes later, both the stranger and the mother leave. Then the stranger returns, and finally, the mother returns. Researchers have shown that infants who are classified as securely attached continue to have a close relationship with the mother decades later. Those who show a secure attachment in infancy are more likely than others to form high-quality romantic attachments in adulthood and quick to resolve conflicts with romantic partners and other people.   Chapter 5

 

5.  What is psychologists’ current view about male-female differences in math abilities?

A. Men do better at math because of differences in brain anatomy.

B. Men do better at math because of activation by testosterone.

C. Men do better at math because of genetic differences that control this ability.

D. When women have equal opportunities, they do as well at math as men do. **

77%, .37.  Most people believe that men are better in mathematics. Males outperform females in math in countries where men have greater economic and political status than women. In countries where men and women have nearly equal status, the difference in average math performance disappears. In the United States, on average, females do as well as or better than males on standardized math test scores and grades in nearly all math courses from elementary school through college.  Chapter 5

 

6.  Suppose that the correlation between identical twins for “slithiness”, a newly discovered personality trait, is 0.45.  From this we can conclude that the majority of variance in slithiness is attributable to _____ factors.

A.  genetic.

B.  nonshared environmental **

C.  shared environmental

D.  the allocation of population variance to various factors cannot be determined from the information given.

57%, .31.  As it happens, the relative strength of both environmental components of personality, as well as the genetic component, can be estimated from the observed pattern of MZ and DZ correlations. Consider, first the entire distribution of a trait within a population, from those individuals with the lowest scores on Extraversion or Neuroticism to those with the highest scores on these traits. This distribution is typically represented by a more-or-less "normal" distribution -- the famous "bell curve". Each person's score on a trait measure -- Neuroticism, Extraversion, whatever -- is a measure of the person's phenotype -- how he or she "turned out" with respect to that dimension of personality. The entire distribution of individual scores within a population is the total variance on the trait(s) in question. This total variance in the trait (100%, or a proportion equal to 1.0) is the sum of genetic variance (i.e., variance in the trait that is accounted for by to genetic variability, or individual differences in genotypes) and environmental variance (i.e., variance in the trait that is accounted for by environmental variability, or individual differences in environments). If the correlation for MZ twins is 1.00, and the correlation for DZ twins is .50, we have the situation described earlier: all the variance on the trait is attributable to genetic variance, and no variance is attributable to either sort of environmental factor, shared or nonshared. If we reduce the MZ correlation substantially, but keep the DZ correlation pretty much the same, most of the variance is now attributed to the environment. There is some genetic effect, and some effect of each sort of environment. If we increase the MZ correlation, but also increase the DZ correlation, most of the variance is still attributable to the environment, but the strength of the genetic contribution diminishes markedly. If we use MZ and DZ correlations that roughly approximate those found in Loehlin's study of the Big Five, we find evidence of a substantial genetic component of variance, but also a substantial environmental component. Most important, we find that the contribution of the nonshared environment is much greater than that of the shared environment. In fact, the effect of the shared environment is minimal.  Lecture 33

 

7.  Parents are generally more protective of children who are sick or plain-looking.  This is an example of a _____ effect.

A.  child-driven **

B.  relationship-driven

C.  parent-driven

D.  family context

61%, .35.  Child-driven effects, also known as reactive effects, relate to the fact that each child brings certain physical and behavioral characteristics into the family, which in turn affect how he or she is treated by parents and others.  Some reactive effects reflect the environment's response to the physical appearance of the child. These reflect the evocation mode of the person-by-situation interaction. The clearest example, discussed in the lectures on Personality and Social Interaction, concern how the child's biological sex -- male or female -- affects gender-role socialization. Here the physical appearance of the child structures the environment, by evoking differential treatment by others, according to cultural prescriptions for the proper socialization of boys and girls.  There may be other examples, having to do with the child's physical appearance: whether the child is conventionally "pretty", or perhaps has some blemish or disfigurement; whether the child physically resembles the parents or others in the immediate family.   Lecture 34

 

8.  Twin studies show that the majority of variance in masculininity and femininity is accounted for by:

A,  heredity.

B.  the shared environment.

C.  the nonshared environment. **

D.  the child’s identity as a boy or a girl.

55%, .34.  A number of twin studies have been conducted to determine the various sources of individual differences in gender role. Unfortunately, these studies have construed masculinity and femininity as polar opposites, not independent dimensions of gender role, but their results are still interesting. In a pioneering study, Irving Gottesman et al. (1965, 1966), administered the masculinity-femininity scales of the MMPI and CPI to a sample of adolescent twins. Robert Dworkin and his colleagues repeated this testing with the same sample some 10 years later, when the subjects were adults. although these investigators did not calculate components of variance, the fact that the correlations for MZ twins were consistently higher than those for DZ twins givesprima facie evidence for a genetic contribution to individual differences in gender role. This isn't terribly surprising. But the relatively low magnitude of the MZ correlations suggests that the environment also plays a role in shaping this aspect of personality. In fact, if you apply the formulas discussed earlier, it's clear that the nonshared environment is by far the most powerful determinant of gender role. So much for the easy equation of biological sex (which, of course, is almost completely determined by the genes) and psychosocial gender. A more recent study by Loehlin et al., with a larger, more representative sample of subjects, came to much the same conclusions (Loehlin et al. tested both Americans and Europeans, but for purposes of comparison I show only the American results here). MZ twins were more similar than DZ twins, in terms of masculinity-femininity, but the nonshared environment was a much more powerful. So, it seems that the biological and social imprimaturs interact to produce the individual's gender identity and gender role, but (setting aside the issue of the masculinization of the brain) the chief effects of the genes and hormones are anatomical and physiological, not psychological. They endow the developing fetus with reproductive anatomy that is more or less recognizably male or female, and that is just about it.  Lecture 35

 

9.  Performance on the “false belief” task shows that, by age 5, normal children

A.  have the ability to understand formal logic.

B.  have reached the pre-conventional stage of moral development.

C.  have the ability to understand other people’s beliefs. **

D.  still believe that other people share their perceptual point of view.

29%, .08.  A bad item.  The development of a theory of mind is commonly indexed by what is known as the false belief task. This task, typically, involves an experimenter, a child, and a puppet. The puppet hides a ball in an oatmeal container. After the puppet is put away in a cupboard, the experimenter and the child together switch the ball from the oatmeal container to a box. Then the puppet is brought out of the cupboard, and the child is asked where the puppet will look for the ball. Children younger than 4 years of age typically answer that the puppet will look in the box, "because that's where it is". Children older than 5 years of age typically answer that the puppet will look in the oatmeal container, "because that's where he thinks it is. An early study by Wellman et al. found that children younger than 40 months typically failed the false-belief test, while children older than 50 months typically passed it. somewhere between the ages of 4 and 5, children get a theory of mind -- they understand that our minds are our own, and that different people will have different percepts, memories, knowledge and beliefs.  Lecture 36

 

10.  Researchers present a stimulus under two conditions--one in which people are conscious of it and one when they are not. Which of these characterizes the occasions when people are conscious of the stimulus?

A. The signal spreads more widely in the brain. **

B. The signal activates the pineal gland.

C. The signal activates the right hemisphere more than the left.

D. The signal releases the neurotransmitter GABA in the corpus callosum.

55%, .35.  In terms of brain activity, how does a stimulus that becomes conscious differ from one that remains unconscious? Brain recordings indicate that the stimuli activated the same areas of the visual cortex in both conditions but produced greater activation on trials when people become conscious of the crowd. On those trials, the activation spread from the visual cortex to more of the rest of the brains (Dehaene et al., 2001).  Chapter 10

 

11.  If you lived in a cave, or on a spacecraft, or in some other environment with no variation in light or temperature, what would happen to your rhythms of waking and sleeping?

A. You would feel wakeful or sleepy on a haphazard, unpredictable schedule.

B. You would remain in a constant state of drowsy wakefulness.

C. You would continue to follow a near-24 hour rhythm. **

D. You would feel wakeful whenever you had something to do, and otherwise sleepy.

57%, .36.  Circadian rhythm is a rhythm of activity and inactivity lasting about a day. The rising and setting of the sun provide cues to reset our rhythm, but we generate the rhythm ourselves. In an environment with no cues for time, such as near Polar Regions in summer or winter, most people generate a waking-sleeping rhythm a little longer than 24 hours, which gradually drifts out of phase with the clock. The sun resets the rhythm, but you generate it within your own body.  Chapter 10

 

12.  Sleepwalking occurs mostly in stages 3 and 4 of sleep. Why would it be unlikely in REM?

A. Brain activity is too low during REM.

B. Major muscles are paralyzed during REM. **

C. REM periods last only a few seconds.

D. Sleepwalking occurs mostly in children and REM occurs mostly in adults.

82%, .39.  During rapid eye movement sleep, the sleeper’s eyes move rapidly back and forth under the closed lids. REM sleep is paradoxical because it is light in some ways and deep in others. It is light because the brain is active and the body’s heart rate, breathing rate, and temperature fluctuate substantially. It is deep because the large muscles of the body that control posture and locomotion are deeply relaxed. Indeed, the nerves to those muscles are virtually paralyzed at this time.  Chapter 10

 

13.  The main similarity between hypnosis and dreams is that:

A. the person shows evidence of REMs.

B. the muscles are totally relaxed.

C. the person accepts contradictory information without protest. **

D. the person feels no pain.

39%, .17.  A bad item.  Hypnosis is a condition of increased suggestibility that occurs in the context of a special hypnotist subject relationship. The term hypnosis comes from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, although the similarity between hypnosis and sleep is superficial. People in both stats lose initiative, and hypnotized people, like dreamers, accept contradictory information without protest. Hypnotized people, however, walk around a respond to objects in the real world. Also, their brain activity is like that of a relaxed wakeful person, not a sleeper.    Chapter 10

 

14. Suppose that a shown a series of words, each followed by a masking stimulus. On a later task, he shows priming effects of those words. This outcome provides evidence of:

A. implicit memory

B. implicit perception **

C. implicit learning

D. implicit thought.

16%, -.10.  A bad item.  In his experiments, Marcel carried out a series of studies of masked semantic priming in which words like doctor facilitated lexical decisions of semantically related targets like nurse.  All the subjects had to do was to determine whether a letter string like “n-u-r-s-e” was a legal English word.  Now ordinarily, you'd think that was no big deal, because “doctor” and “nurse” are semantically related, and so presentation of one would be expected to prime processing of the other.  But because of the masking stimulus, the subjects were not consciously aware of the prime.  Attesting to the effectiveness of the masking procedure, detection of the primes was at chance levels, even when they had been presented 20 times. Yet the word was perceived unconsciously.  And we know it was perceived unconsciously because masked presentation of the word “doctor” primed the processing of the semantically related word “nurse”.  This was the case even after a single presentation of the prime, and this effect grew with increasing numbers of repetitions. So implicit perception goes beyond merely subliminal perception, and it goes beyond the simple question of whether a stimulus is detectable.  In the Marcel experiment, the subjects were actually reading words and understanding them, analyzing them for meaning, despite the fact that they weren't consciously aware of the words.  Masked semantic priming gives very good evidence for implicit perception – for unconscious perception.  Lecture 37

 

15.  What does the American Psychiatric Association's definition of abnormal behavior emphasize?

A. behavior that most people would regard as undesirable

B. behavior that reflects disorders of brain functioning

C. behavior that leads to distress, disability, or risk **

D. behavior that differs significantly from the average

66%, .27.  Deviations from normality can be defined in various ways: Deviance from Statistical Norms: By statistical convention, a score is "abnormal" if it lies more than 2 standard deviations above or below the population mean.  This frequency criterion is certainly objective, but it has some problems attached to it -- not the least of which is the problem of estimating population means for all the various mental characteristics on which people might deviate. There is also the problem of what to do about positive deviations. An IQ less than 70 is more than 2 standard deviations away from the mean IQ of 100, and (if other factors are also present) can lead an individual to be classified as mentally retarded. But an IQ of more than 130 is also more than 2 standard deviations away from the mean, and can lead an individual to be classified as a "genius". But while mental retardation is a form of mental illness, we usually don't think of genius that way. A further problem is that even negative deviations are not necessarily signs of mental abnormality. For example, a person who is more than 2 standard deviations below the mean on Extraversion might be merely shy. Deviance from Social Norms: Every group, organization, and society imposes certain expectations and demands on its members, and some people simply don't do what they are supposed to do. Given that human experience, thought, and action takes place in an expressly social context, this compliance criterion may well be useful for evaluating which deviations we should pay attention to, but it also has its problems. Norms vary across societies. In the former Soviet Union, political dissidents could be classified as mentally ill, and confined to mental hospitals, simply for disagreeing with their government.  Norms also vary across epochs within societies. When I began my graduate studies, in 1970, homosexuality listed in the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Then, about 1973, the American Psychiatric Association took a vote and decided that it wouldn't call homosexuality a mental illness any longer. One may agree with the vote (as I do), but the essentially political process by which the status of homosexuality was changed should give us pause. If we are looking for an objective standard by which to evaluate deviance, we want one that is constant across groups. The length of a foot or a yard doesn't vary from Denmark to Ghana -- why should the criteria for mental disorders be any different? Personal Distress: mental illness is usually manifested in symptoms that create problems for the patient, and cause considerable concern. This subjective criterion may be important in leading the patient to seek the help of a professional, but it too has a couple of problems.  People's self-perceptions are not always accurate. Some people believe they are ill when they are not; but more important in the present context, some mentally ill people do not believe that they are mentally ill, and resist diagnosis and treatment. This is a particular problem in schizophrenia and the personality disorders.  Even when people's self-perceptions are accurate, we would not want to substitute self-diagnosis for an objective assessment by a trained professional. We don't let patient’s self-diagnose cancer and heart disease -- why should we allow them to self-diagnose depression and anxiety disorder? Maladaptiveness: Mental illness often leads people to engage in behaviors that are harmful to themselves and others. For example, people with depression may be at elevated risk for suicide. People with antisocial personality disorder, by definition, engage in antisocial behaviors. Normal mental function is by definition adaptive, because the purpose of the mind is to aid the organism's adaptation to its environment, so a harmfulness criterion is helpful in diagnosing mental illness. On the other hand: Not all maladaptive behavior is a sign of mental illness. Criminal behavior is maladaptive, harmful to the people against whom the crime is perpetrated, and harmful to the criminal when he or she is caught and punished. But we do not label all criminal behavior as the product of mental illness. In fact, the insanity defense is attempted in only a very small minority of criminal cases, and it is successful in only a very small minority of these.   Chapter 15

 

16.  Why is agoraphobia common in people with panic disorder?

A. People with panic disorder fear embarrassing themselves in public. **

B. The gene for agoraphobia is on the same chromosome as the one for panic disorder.

C. Agoraphobia is a more severe form of panic disorder.

D. Both agoraphobia and panic disorder can be triggered by certain dietary deficiencies.

59%, .41.  Many people with panic disorder also develop agoraphobia (from agora, the Greek word for marketplace), a severe avoidance of other people and a fear of doing anything in public. They develop these fears because they are afraid of being incapacitated or embarrassed by a panic attack in a public place. In a sense, they are afraid of their own anxiety.   Chapter 15

 

17.  Young men who are known to be at risk for becoming alcoholics (because their fathers were alcoholics) are more likely than other young men to

A. have trouble walking a straight line even when they are sober.

B. handle stress more easily.

C. underestimate their intoxication after drinking a moderate amount of alcohol. **

D. report hangovers and other illnesses after drinking moderate amounts of alcohol.

83%, .28.  Several studies found that many alcoholics have difficulty estimating their won degree of intoxication. This study found that of the 81 who either did not sway much when walking or stated that they did not feel intoxicated, 51 became alcoholics within 10 years. Although the original study examined only men, a later study found similar results for women: Women with a family history of alcoholism are more likely than average to report low intoxication and experience little body sway after drinking a moderate amount.   Chapter 15

 

18.  Although antidepressant drugs increase activity at serotonin or dopamine synapses, many researchers doubt this effect explains the benefits of the drugs. Why?

A. The dose needed to alter transmitter release differs from the dose needed to benefit mood.

B. The benefits on mood are permanent, even after someone stops taking the drugs.

C. The drugs alter transmitter release much faster than they benefit mood. **

D. Damage to serotonin or dopamine synapses produces no effects on behavior.

52%, .36.  Three common classes of antidepressants are tricyclics, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Tricyclic drugs interfere with the axon’s ability to reabsorb the neurotransmitter dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin after releasing them. Thus, tricyclics prolong the effect of these neurotransmitters at the synapses. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors have a similar effect, but block reuptake of only serotonin. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors block the metabolic breakdown of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin by the enzyme monoamine oxidase. Thus, MAOIs also increase the effects of these neurotransmitters. Based on these descriptions of antidepressants, researchers long assumed that the cause of depression was inadequate release of serotonin or other transmitters. However, antidepressant drugs alter synaptic activity within an hour or so, whereas mood improvement begins 2 to 3 weeks later.   Chapter 15

 

19.  Which of these programs appears to be the most successful in preventing disorders?

A. prolonged discussion of a stressful experience shortly after the event

B. school programs to teach self-management and social relations skills **

C. “Scared straight” programs to frighten adolescents away from a life of crime

D. most programs intended to prevent anorexia nervosa or suicidal behaviors

54%, .11.  A self-help group, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, operates much like group therapy, except without a therapist. Each participant both gives and receives help. People who have experienced a problem can offer a special insight to others with the same problem. In some places, mental patients or former mental patients have organized self-help centers as an alternative to mental hospitals. These small, homelike environments may or may not include professional therapists. Instead of treating people as patients who need medical help, they expect people to take responsibility for their own actions. The ultimate of self-help is to deal with your own problems such as by writing about them.   Chapter 15

 

20.  The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) is based on the _____ view of categorization.

A. classical

B. prototype **

C. exemplar

D. theory

46%, .42.  It has not proved easy to define psychopathology in the abstract. By analogy with the concept of pathology in medicine, psychopathology may be defined as abnormalities in mental structures, processes, and states that give rise to abnormal, deviant behavior. But the concept of abnormality implies an opposite construct of normality, from which abnormality deviates. So what do we mean by normality? Normal mental and behavioral functioning is characterized by: Accurate and Efficient Cognition: Normal people generally see the world the way it is, remember things the way they happened, think clearly, and communicate comprehensibly. And beyond cognition, they tend to have feelings and desires that are appropriate to the situation. Self-Awareness: Normal people generally are aware of their thoughts, feelings, and desires, and of their behavior and its impact on other people.  Self-Control: Normal people generally are able to control their impulses and emotions, and to delay gratification.Self-Esteem: Normal people generally think reasonably well of themselves. Social Relations Based on Affection: Normal people generally treat others with respect, and not like objects. Productivity and Creativity: Normal people are generally productive at work, at play, and in their family lives; and although most of us can't become great artists, we are nevertheless able to create things on our own. This is a sort of prototype for "normality".  Lecture 38

 

21.  According to the “hopelessness” theory of depression, people become depressed when they make _____ attributions concerning uncontrollable aversive events.

A. external

B. stable  **

C. specific

D. all of the above

30%, .58.  Abramson, Alloy, and their colleagues subsequently modified Seligman's theory with the hopelessness theory of depression. They argued that the experience of uncontrollable aversive events was not enough to make people (or dogs, for that matter) depressed. Sometimes, people (and dogs) respond to uncontrollable aversive events with anger, instead.  Lecture 39

 

22.  According to the “hopelessness” theory of depression:

A.  exposure to uncontrollable aversive events serves as the diathesis factor.

B.  a particular attributional style serves as the diathesis factor. **

C.  the “short” version of the COMT gene increases a person’s risk level.

D.  the “long” version of the COMT gene increases a person’s vulnerability to coping failures.

43%, .29.  Abramson and Alloy proposed that uncontrollability led to depression only when the individual made a certain causal attribution concerning the uncontrollability. They argued that the explanations that people make for various events vary on certain dimensions: Internal vs. external -- does responsibility for the event lie with the person himself, or with some external agent? Stable vs. variable -- does the event always work out that way, or is the outcome sometimes different? Global vs. local -- is it everything that goes this way, or just some specific thing. They proposed that uncontrollability causes depression only when the individual makes an internal, stable, global attribution for the helplessness -- as if to say, I can't control this thing, it's my fault that I can't control it, I can never control this or anything else. If you thought like this, you'd get depressed, too, and that's the point. Abramson and Alloy pointed out that, in contrast to non-depressed people, depressed people are often starkly realistic about their inability to control events -- a characteristic of depressive realism that they contrasted to the illusion of control that is characteristic of non-depressed thought. That is, non-depressed individuals often have an unrealistically elevated sense of control (which is why many of us think we can control chance events by picking "lucky" lottery numbers), while depressed individuals are often quite realistic about the prospects.  Lecture 40

 

23.  The best evidence suggests that cognitive-behavioral therapy is superior to psychodynamic therapy in terms of:

A. overall effect size. **

B. lack of specificity

C. resistance to placebo effects

D. effect on neurotransmitter metabolism.

66%, .48.  The Smith et al. study contained an analysis that showed that the Dodo Bird Verdict is not quite right: some psychotherapies work better than others. This is already evident in the data presented earlier, which showed that patients who received cognitive-behavioral forms of therapy did even better, compared to controls, than patients who received psychodynamic or humanistic forms of therapy. To examine this issue further, Smith et al. computed measures of effect size (see the lecture supplement on Methods and Statistics) for each of the studies included in their analysis. When Smith et al. calculated the average effect size for different types of therapies, all forms of therapy were shown to have at least moderate-sized effects, consistent with the Dodo Bird Verdict. However, the effect sizes associated with the cognitive and behavioral therapies were much larger than those associated with the psychodynamic and humanistic forms.  Lecture 41

24.  The stigma of mental illness differs from the stigma of physical illness or disability in that:

A.  mental illness is more “deeply discrediting”.

B.  physical illness is more disruptive of everyday life.

C.  physical illness is more concealable.

D.  people with mental illness are more vulnerable to the “moral model”. **

34%, .05.  A bad item.  According to Siegler and Osmond, the history of psychology can be traced in terms of three major models of psychopathology. The supernatural model prevailed before the 18th century Enlightenment. It assumes that psychology reflects the possession of the individual by demons; by implication, the proper response to psychopathology is exorcism. The moral model, which prevailed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, assumes that psychopathology -- or, more precisely, abnormal behavior -- is deliberately adopted by the individual, much in the manner of criminal behavior; by implication, the proper response to psychopathology is confinement and other forms of punishment. The medical model, which began to emerge in the 19th century, assumes only that psychopathology is the product of natural causes that can be identified by the techniques of empirical science. By implication, the proper response to psychopathology is diagnosis according to a scientifically validated system, and attempts at cure or rehabilitation by means of scientifically proven methods. Contrary to the popular view, the medical model does not assert that psychopathology is the product of an abnormal biological condition, or that it should be treated only with drugs or surgery. Rather, the medical model is centered on particular rules regulating two primary social roles: the doctor and the patient. To illustrate the differences between these models, consider the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association, to "de-list" homosexuality as a mental illness. As Charles Silverstein (2011) has noted -- he was one of the psychologists who persuaded the psychiatrists to change their position -- at the time, "homosexuality was considered a crime, a sin, and a mental pathology". So, in that case, homosexuality fell under both the supernatural model (it was considered to be a sin, the work of the Devil), the moral model (it was considered to be a crime, a willful antisocial act), and it was considered to be an illness (a sexual pathology).  Lecture 42

 

25.  The “paradox” of evolution is that:

A.  evolution enables cognitive, emotional, and motivational systems to interact..

B.  evolution has shaped mind as well as body.

C.  biological evolution created the possibility of cultural evolution. **

D.  intelligence, consciousness, and language makes our evolutionary heritage irrelevant to our behavior.

24%, .17.  A bad item.  Biological evolution is outpaced by cultural evolution, mediated by social learning, but some evolutionary psychologists have gone so far as to claim that learning itself is a biological adaptation -- that learning itself is a product of natural selection.  In this way, they try to have it all.  But they can't, for the simple reason that, by claiming learning for biological evolution, they've distorted the meaning of both evolution and learning. Yes, there's a sense in which learning occurs via something that looks like natural selection: according to Skinner, for example, behaviors that are reinforced are maintained, while those that are not reinforced disappear.  But this is nothing more than an analogy.  Darwinian theory, and the evolutionary psychology that is based on it, assumes genetic variation, which is operated on by the environment.  But learning doesn't depend on genetic variation. It depends on cognitive variation -- that is, variation in the thoughts, and behaviors, in the individual organism. This is not within the scope of the Darwinian paradigm.  Learning is, in fact, more Lamarckian, as it involves the inheritance of acquired characteristics -- but not through genetic inheritance.  The inheritance that occurs in learning is cognitive and cultural inheritance, passed through social learning, not through genetic mechanisms.  Lecture 43

 

 

Cumulative Portion

 

26.  Brain researchers would probably be most comfortable with which of the following statements?

A. The mind controls thought and the brain controls behavior.

B. Mental activity causes brain activity.

C. Brain activity and mental activity are completely independent.

D. Brain activity and mental activity are the same things. **

56%, .33.  Monism is the view that conscious experience is inseparable from the physical brain. That is, mental activity is brain activity. Consciousness can’t exist without brain activity, and it is presumably also true that certain kinds of brain activity can’t exist without consciousness.   Chapter 3

 

27.  Drugs that affect behavior—including both medical drugs such as Ritalin and illegal drugs such as cocaine—exert their effects mainly by altering the

A. pattern of blood flow to the brain.

B. velocity and amplitude of action potentials.

C. birth and death of neurons.

D. activity at synapses. **

89%, .40.  The arrival of a neural impulse at the terminal fiber of the presynaptic neuron induces the discharge of a chemical known as a neurotransmitter substance. Neurotransmitter flows into the synapse, and is taken up by the dendrites of the postsynaptic neuron. If a sufficient quantity is taken up, the postsynaptic neuron is depolarized. Another substance clears used neurotransmitter out of the synaptic cleft, permitting the cycle to start all over again. In this way, neural impulses travel from the peripheral sensory receptors to the spinal cord, up the spinal cord to the brain, from one brain structure to another, back down the spinal cord from the brain, and out from the spinal cord to the muscles and glands. Neurotransmitters are differentiated according to function. Excitatory neurotransmitters depolarize a postsynaptic neuron, while inhibitory neurotransmitters hyperpolarize it, making it more difficult to discharge. Some neurotransmitters have both excitatory and inhibitory effects, depending on the presence of other transmitters. There are also excitatory and inhibitory synapses -- presumably because they release excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters; but the point is that there's a difference between the synapse and the neurotransmitter.   Chapter 3

 

28.  What does the autonomic nervous system do?

A. It controls all the muscles of the body.

B. It conveys information from the skin receptors to the spinal cord and the brain.

C. It is responsible for people’s sense of the time of day.

D. It controls the heart, stomach, and other organs. **

67%, .48.  The autonomic nervous system (ANS), consisting of the nerves running to and from the glands and other internal organs. The ANS, in turn, also contains two branches, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS again, just to create confusion with the somatic nervous system), and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The sympathetic nervous system mobilizes the body to meet emergencies by responses characterized by either "flight or fight" (so named by Walter B. Cannon). In the flight or fight response, the secretion of the hormone adrenalin (epinephrine) leads to emotional arousal, while the secretion of noradrenalin (norepinephrine) releases stored sugar into the bloodstream, providing more energy to the muscles. At the same time, blood is re-channeled from the surface of the body to the muscles: this promotes physical activity (sugar gets to the muscles faster), and lessens bleeding in the case of an injury. The parasympathetic nervous system normally mediates vegetative functions such as digestion, elimination, and reproduction.   Chapter 3

 

29.  Under which of these circumstances would heritability of some trait probably INCREASE?

A. if everyone lived in an equally good environment **

B. if everyone had the same genes

C. if some people had substantially better opportunities than others did

D. if behavioral measurements were inaccurate

33%, .01.  A bad item.  If our society changed so that it provided an equally good environment for all children, would the heritability of behaviors increase or decrease? If all children had equally supportive environments, the total amount of variation in behavior would decrease, but whatever variation remained would have to depend largely on heredity (because differences in the environment have been minimized). Therefore, heritability would increase.   Chapter 3

 

30.  Compared to the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic branch:

A. acts on the muscles rather than the internal organs.

B. acts as a unit. **

C. has a slow onset and offset.

D. conserves and restored bodily resources like blood sugar.

29%, .43.  There are important differences in function between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the ANS are in an antagonistic relationship with each other. Sympathetic activation depletes the body's resources, while parasympathetic activation restores resources depleted by sympathetic activation. The SNS tends to act as a unit, mobilizing the entire body to meet the stressor, while the PNS tends to act on one organ at a time, depending on where it is needed most. While autonomic arousal decreases when the stressor is removed, SNS activity is terminated immediately, while PNS activity diminishes more slowly, in order to finish the job of restoring depleted resources.  Lecture 2

 

31.  Destruction of the reticular formation is likely to cause:

A.  coma **

B.  the “locked-in” syndrome.

C.  hyperphagia

D.  aphagia

47%, .45.  The midbrain, comprising the middle portion of the brainstem, includes the reticular formation (from the Latin word reticulum, meaning "net").The reticular formation also is important in regulating cortical arousal. Cats who have suffered surgical destruction of the reticular formation lapse into a constant state of sleep, and can be awakened only by loud noises or other intense stimulation, if at all. Cats whose reticular formation is continually stimulated by implanted microelectrodes remain constantly awake; when the current is turned off, they return to their regular sleep-wake cycle.  Lecture 3

 

32.  Difficulties in self-regulation are likely to be associated with damage to the:

A.  primary motor cortex.

B.  premotor cortex

C.  anterior cingulate gyrus **

D.  temporoparietal junction

29%, .43.  A part of the limbic lobe known as the anterior cingulate gyrus, or anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), appears to play an important role in self-regulation. The precise function of ACC is still subject to debate. According to one theory, it detects errors in responding, so that they can be corrected; according to another, it monitors conflict between responses, so that the conflict can be resolved. In either case, ACC is involved in executive functions generally associated with controlled, deliberate (as opposed to automatic) processing. Lecture 4

 

33.  Lashley’s “Law of Mass Action” states that:

A.  brain damage is forever.

B.  contralateral projection is more important than ipsilateral projection.

C.  memory impairment depends on the extent of cortical damage. **

D.  loss of function depends on the amount of brain damage, not its location.

46%, -.07.  a bad item.  Lashley's Law of Mass Action states that any specific memory is part of an extensive organization of other memories. Therefore, individual memories are represented by neurons that are distributed widely across the cortex. It is not possible to isolate particular memories in particular bundles of neurons, so it is not possible to destroy memories by specific lesions.  Lecture 5

 

34.  One of the main objections raised against ESP is that

A. the theory of ESP is falsifiable.

B. the experiments that reportedly produced positive results have not been replicable. **

C. the claims for it are based entirely on anecdotes.

D. none of the experiments on ESP has produced statistically significant results.

45%, .23.  Another controversial modality raises the question of extrasensory perception (ESP) -- the acquisition of information without mediation by the sensory system(s). ESP is thought to be manifested by telepathy (thought transference), clairvoyance (perception of objects that are not influencing sensory receptors), and precognition (perception of future events). It also covers action without mediation by effector systems, as manifested by psychokinesis (PK; manipulating an object without touching it). These phenomena are often associated with the occult, and reflect beliefs in supernatural powers. But they are also of interest to scientists. (1) Research may reveal previously unrecognized sensory modalities. (2) Even if not, the experience of telepathy, clairvoyance, etc. is psychologically interesting, even if claims of ESP are not valid. In fact, there is very little compelling evidence for either ESP or PK. Most ostensible psychics are in fact professional magicians or illusionists, and the trickery involved in their demonstrations can be detected by their professional peers. Moreover, most laboratory studies of ESP and PK in ordinary people don't effectively prohibit cheating (by either experimenter or subject), and are poorly controlled in other respects. Even the best ESP/PK research poses numerous empirical problems. There are numerous cases of cheating and trickery, or at least the opportunity for same. The size of the alleged effect decreases with increases in the rigor of the experimental test. There are huge individual differences in ESP/PK ability: only a very few people appear to be "sensitive". There is a tremendous lack of consistency even in the performance of "sensitive" subjects. The phenomena claimed by proponents of ESP/PK violate fundamental physical laws. The evidence is not all in, and it is best to keep an open mind, but when one removes outright fraud, poor methodologies, and capitalization on chance, there is very little phenomenon left to explain.  Chapter 2

 

35.  Which of the following could be an operational definition of "curiosity"?

A. the mental activity experienced by a child in the presence of brightly colored objects

B. the number of unassigned books that someone reads during a month **

C. discomfort provoked by recognizing that one does not understand something

D. a desire to gain knowledge for its own sake

32%, .41.  Operational definitions, a definition that specifies the operations (or procedures) used to produce or measure something, ordinarily a way to give it a numerical value. An operational definition is not like a dictionary definition. You might object that “frowns per minute” is not what anger really is. Of course not, but the reading on a thermometer is also not what temperature really is. An operational definition just says how to measure something. It lets us get on with research.  Chapter 2

 

36.  Professor Lewis gave a study guide to the students in the first two rows of class. Later, these students got better grades than the other students. What is wrong with this experiment?

A. lack of an independent variable

B. confusion of experimentation with correlation

C. lack of random assignment to groups **

D. lack of a dependent variable

61%, .40.  A key procedure for any experiment is random assignment of participants to groups: The experimenter uses a chance procedure, such as drawing names out of a hat, to make sure that every participant has the same probability as any other participant of being assigned to a given group.  Chapter 2

 

37.  What would be the best representation of the central tendency of the highly skewed distribution?

A. Mean

B. Median **

C. Mode

D. Standard error of the mean. 

40%, .33.  Most psychological measurements follow what is known as the normal distribution. If you plot the frequency with which various scores occur, you obtain a more-or-less bell-shaped curve that is more-or-less symmetrical around the mean, and in which the men, the median, and the mode are very similar. In a normal distribution, most scores fall very close to the mean, and the further you get from the mean, the fewer scores there are. If you have a perfectly normal distribution, the mean, the median, and the mode are identical, but we really don't see that too much in nature. The normal distribution follows from what is known as the central limit theorem in probability theory. That's all you have to know about this unless you take a course in probability and statistics. And, for this course, you don't even have to know that! But I have to say it. This asymmetry, when it occurs, is called skewness. In this case, neuroticism shows a marked positive skew (also called rightward skew), meaning that there are relatively few high scores in the distribution. In positive skewness, the mean is higher than the median. In negative skewness, the mean is lower than the median.  Lecture 6

 

 

38.  In Pavlov’s experiment on classically conditioning salivation to a sound, what procedure produces spontaneous recovery?

A. Repeatedly present the sound without food.

B. Repeatedly present the food without the sound.

C. Present the sound without food, and then wait a long time before testing again. **

D. Present a similar sound without food.

54%, .39.  Spontaneous recovery is the unreinforced revival of the conditioned response. If, after extinction has been completed, we allow the animal a period of inactivity, unreinforced presentation of the CS will evoke a CR. This CR will be smaller in magnitude that that observed at the end of the acquisition phase, but CR strength will increase with the length of the "rest" interval. If we continue with unreinforced presentations of the CS, the spontaneously recovered CR will diminish in strength -- it is extinction all over again.   Chapter 6

 

39.  What is one major difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning?

A. Classical conditioning occurs in nonhumans, and operant conditioning in humans.

B. Classical conditioning occurs rapidly, and operant conditioning slowly.

C. In classical conditioning, the events to be associated occur at the same time.

D. In operant conditioning, the response controls the presentation of a reinforcer. **

66%, .46.  The general principle of instrumental conditioning is that adaptive behavior is learned through the experience of success and failure. Instrumental learning is also sometimes called operant conditioning, because the organism "operates" on the environment, changing it in some way (for example, changing the cage from one whose door is closed to one whose door is open), and this behavior is "instrumental" in obtaining some desired state of affairs (like food or simply escape from confinement).  Chapter 6

 

40.  Many cancer patients lose their appetite by associating many foods with radiation-induced nausea. What is one good way to preserve their appetite?

A. Experience the radiation in a familiar location.

B. Choose a scapegoat food and always eat it before radiation. **

C. Add some spices to the foods to make the taste more distinctive.

D. Think about something other than food during the radiation.

72%, .16.  One important line of research challenged the arbitrariness assumption that organisms could learn to attach any response in their repertoire to any stimulus in the environment, by showing that some conditioned responses are easier to acquire than others. This research begins with work by the American psychologist John Garcia and his colleagues on a phenomenon known as taste-aversion learning (or bait shyness). Garcia grew up on a sheep ranch in the American southwest, where ranchers routinely used poison to control coyotes and other predators. Garcia knew from this experience that when animals eat poisoned food or drink poisoned liquids, and nonetheless survive, they will avoid that substance later (hence the term, "bait-shyness").   Chapter 6

 

41.  Evolution

A.  allows individuals to adapt to rapid environmental change.

B.  allows individuals to adapt to slow environmental change.

C.  allows species to adapt to rapid environmental change.

D.  allows species to adapt to slow environmental change.  **

80%, .19.  Among modern biological and social scientists, this point of view is expressed most strongly by the practitioners of sociobiology, especially E.O. Wilson, who argue that much human social behavior is instinctive, and part of our genetic endowment. More recently, similar ideas have been expressed by proponents of evolutionary psychology such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and David Buss. At their most strident, evolutionary psychologists claim that our patterns of experience, thought, and action evolved in an environment of early adaptation (EEA) -- roughly the African savanna of the Pleistocene epoch, where homo sapiens first emerged about 300,000 years ago -- and have changed little since then. Although this assertion is debatable, to say the least, the literature on instincts makes it clear that evolution shapes behavior as well as body morphology. Many species possess innate behavior patterns that were shaped by evolution, permitting them to adapt to a particular environmental niche. Given the basic principle of the continuity of species, it is a mistake to think that humans are entirely immune from such influences -- although humans have other characteristics that largely free us from evolutionary constraints.  Lecture 7

 

42.  Instrumental conditioning differs from classical conditioning in that:

A.  classical conditioning does not involve reinforcement..

B.  there is no unconditioned stimulus in instrumental conditioning. **

C.  classical conditioning does not involve partial reinforcement schedules.

D.  classically conditioned responses, once established, are more difficult to extinguish.

32%, .20.  In instrumental conditioning there is no discussion of unconditioned stimuli or unconditioned responses. This is because the behaviors in question are not reflexive in nature, as they are in classical conditioning. Rather, these behaviors are emitted spontaneously by the organism. They are what we ordinarily call voluntary, as opposed to the involuntary behaviors involved in classical conditioning -- except that radical behaviorists like Skinner didn't like to talk about "voluntary" responses, or anything else that smacked of "free will", because they felt that all behaviors were under control of environmental stimuli and reinforcements.  Lecture 9

 

43.  Observational learning

A.  is only possible in children who have language.

B.  is confined to humans and other primates.

C.  does not involve the direct experience of rewards and punishments. **

D.  plays no role in language acquisition. 

87%, .33.  The phenomenon of observational learning was first demonstrated convincingly in the laboratory by Susan Mineka, who was then at the University of Wisconsin (she is now at Northwestern University), in a study of snake fear in rhesus monkeys. Rhesus monkeys born and raised in the wild are universally afraid of snakes. This is quite adaptive: after all, the monkeys live in an environment where there are lots of deadly snakes, vipers as well as constrictors. Therefore, traditional theory has held that the fear of snakes in rhesus monkeys is innate, programmed by evolution in much the same way that instincts are. The only problem with the theory is that monkeys who are born and raised in laboratory conditions do not fear snakes. When exposed to a snake, they show no signs of fear. Therefore, it seems that snake-fear must be acquired through experience. But, if you think about it, it's not entirely clear how you learn from experience to fear a deadly snake. Because after the first encounter, you're dead (snakes are like that). Therefore, Mineka proposed that monkeys acquire their fear of snakes vicariously, from observing the reactions of other monkeys when they encounter snakes. Thus, snake fear is not innate, but a learned part of what might be thought of as "monkey-culture".  Lecture 10

 

44.  Which of the following most directly supports the opponent-process theory of color vision?

A. We can recognize all colors even while wearing tinted glasses.

B. Rods and cones contribute to vision in different ways.

C. We see negative afterimages after staring at a bright-colored image. **

D. It is possible to match any color of light by mixing three other colors.

75%, .36.  To cope with these problems, Leo Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson, at the University of Pennsylvania, have proposed the opponent-process theory of color vision (this is actually a more sophisticated version of a theory originally proposed by the 19th-century German physiologist Ewald Hering). The opponent-process theory holds that neural impulses arising from the rods and cones excite six neural processes (localized in the retina, optic nerve, and lateral geniculate nucleus) which are themselves arranged into three opposing pairs: The opponent-process theory of color vision, initially proposed by Hering and later later confirmed experimentally by Hurvich & Jameson, begins by accepting Helmholtz's idea that there are three color receptors (cone types) in the retina, along with one type of rod.  Chapter 4

 

 

45.  By what means do we perceive the pitch of an intermediate-frequency sound (such as 1000 Hz)?

A. A sound wave of 1000 Hz excites 1,000 hair cells to respond.

B. Each sound wave excites hair cells at a particular location on the basilar membrane.

C. Each hair cell sends one impulse for each sound wave.

D. Each sound wave excites a group, or volley, of hair cells. **

41%, .22.  According to the duplex theory, pitch perception is governed by two principles: place and frequency.  Above 500 cps, pitch is given by the point of maximal deflection of the basilar membrane, which stimulates particular hair cells.  This is the place principle.  Below 1,000 cps, pitch is given by the frequency with which the basilar membrane vibrates.  This is the frequency principle.  A variant on the frequency principle is the volley principle, which governs pitch perception at intermediate frequencies, between about 1,000 and 4,000 cps.  Within this range, the basilar membrane excites a whole group of cells, not just one cell, which fires off in a rapid train of impulses.  Note that, at this intermediate range, both principles are in operation -- which is why pitch perception is most acute in this range. Chapter 4

 

46.  What is a feature detector in the visual system?

A. a neuron that increases its activity when a certain pattern is shown to the retina **

B. a muscle that controls eye movements

C. a structure in the cornea that changes shape in the presence of bright light

D. a cell that carries information back and forth between rods and cones

71%, .20.  The next step in perception is pattern recognition. Pattern recognition processes take as their input the output from the feature detectors. Thus, while the feature detectors analyze stimulus input (the proximal stimulus) into a list of its constituent features and the spatial relations among them, the pattern recognizers synthesize a mental representation of the distal stimulus. Feature detectors are innate: they are part of the genetic endowment of the organism, a product of the evolution of the species. By contrast, pattern recognition processes are acquired: they are shaped by the organism's sensory environment, as the organism learns to recognize stimulus patterns which have meaning. Again, pattern recognition has been studied most extensively in the visual system. A good example is the orthography of written language. Remember that while spoken language is a product of biological evolution, written language is a cultural product. We have brains prewired for spoken language, but not for written language, which is why learning a written language can be so hard while learning a spoken language is so easy.  Chapter 4

 

 

47.  According to the revised Doctrine of Specific Nerve Energies, the modality of sensation is determined by:

A.  the nature of the proximal stimulus.

B.  the structure of the sensory receptor.

C.  the specific afferent pathway

D.  the projection area in cerebral cortex. **

30%, .43.  To repeat, in the abstract, each modality of sensation is characterized by four factors: the proximal stimulus (or type of physical energy falling on a receptor organ); the receptor organ which is stimulated (ordinarily, prepared to respond to a particular proximal stimulus); the sensory tract leading from the sensory surfaces to the brain, including the afferent tract of the spinal nerves and the afferent tract of the spinal cord, as well as certain cranial nerves; and the sensory projection area in the cortex, a particular area of the brain which is the final destination of afferent impulses arising from the sensory receptors and transmitted along the sensory tracts.  Lecture 12

 

 

48.  According to Fechner’s Law:

A.  absolute thresholds are higher than relative thresholds.

B.  sensation grows more slowly than stimulation. **

C.  every sensory receptor has its particular operating characteristic.

D.  expectations and motives can affect the observer’s sensitivity to a signal.

27%, .33.According to Fechner's Law: sensation changes more slowly than stimulation. As stimulation grows from 1 to 200 units, sensation grows only from 0 to 2.3 units). This follows from Weber's Law: 10 additional units of stimulation makes a big difference to sensation at the bottom end of the scale, but a progressively smaller difference as we move towards the top.  Lecture 13

 

49.  The cathedral in Orvieto, Italy, is constructed so that the aisles of the nave are not parallel, but rather converge as they approach the high altar.  This alters the _____ cues for the perception of depth or distance.

A.  ocular, binocular

B.  ocular, monocular

C.  optical, binocular

D.  optical, monocular **

15%, .34.  Optic flow also refers to the movement of images across the retina as the observer moves around the environment. If you're a pilot landing an airplane, objects appear to diverge outwards from a convergence point directly in front of you (this follows from the principles of linear perspective). Objects that are close by, like the near end of the runway, diverge very quickly, compared to distant objects, like the far end of the runway. If you're in the rear car of a train looking out the back window, objects appear to converge inwards toward the convergence point. And, again, nearby objects appear to go by quickly, while faraway objects don't appear to move much at all. So, in both cases, the relative velocity of images across the retina is a cue to the relative distance of the objects.  Lecture 14

 

50.  Which phenomenon is least problematic for the ecological view of perception?

A.  The Gestalt principles, like proximity, similarity, and closure.

B.  Pattern perception in written language.

C.  Perceptual constancies, such as size and shape. **

D.  Feature detectors in the visual cortex of frogs and cats.

39%, .18.  A bad item.  The contribution of the perceiver is also revealed by the perceptual constancies. In size constancy, the perceived size of an object is does not change as its distance from the observer changes. In some ways, this is surprising, because the perceived size of an object is a function of the size of its retinal image, and retinal size varies with the distance between the observer and the object of regard. Therefore, as an object moves closer its retinal image gets larger, and as it moves away, its retinal image gets smaller. However, under natural viewing conditions moving objects do not appear to change in size. In shape constancy, the perceived shape of an object is invariant over changes in the shape of its retinal image. The shape of a retinal image often changes when an object undergoes a spatial transformation: when a door opens, its retinal image changes from rectangular to trapezoidal to (almost) linear. But again, under natural viewing conditions, perceived shape remains invariant over spatial transformations. We see the door opening and closing, but we do not see it change shape. Lecture 15

 

51.  Visual illusions often result from:

A.  data-driven processing.

B.  bottom-up processing.

C.  changes in proximal stimulation.

D.  unconscious inferences. **

46%, .08.  A bad item.  The visual system is using information to make what Helmholtz called unconscious inferences about the scene. The perceptual system is performing certain calculations -- applying the size-distance rule, for example. But we are not aware of performing these calculations, and if we were asked we could not specify what they are. Still, the perceptual constancies indicate that we are making them nonetheless. These calculations are part of the cognitive contribution to perception. They indicate that not all the information for perception is available in the stimulus array. Some of it has to be calculated by the observer. These procedures, stored in memory, represent part of the cognitive contribution to perception.  Lecture 16

 

52.  What is special about the savings method of testing memory?

A. It requires special equipment to record brain activity.

B. It can demonstrate weak memories that other methods don’t detect. **

C. It demonstrates memories in childhood but not in adulthood.

D. It demonstrates episodic memories but not semantic memories.

50%, .30.  In relearning, the subject is asked to learn a second list of paired associates. Some of these are old, but forgotten, A-B pairs. Others are entirely new, and may be designated C-D pairs. It turns out that relearning of A-B pairs proceeds faster than of C-D pairs --a phenomenon known as savings (recall a related discussion, in the lectures on learning, of savings in relearning after extinction -- again, note the parallels between human memory and animal learning). In one experiment, Ebbinghaus memorized lists of 16 nonsense syllables, repeated from 8 to 64 times. Then, after a retention interval of 24 hours, he measured the time it took him to relearn each list to a criterion of one perfect repetition. His measure of memory was savings in relearning the list (in addition to the nonsense syllable, this measurement technique was invented by Ebbinghaus, long before it became part of the study of conditioning in animals). These savings were compared to the time required to learn such a list from scratch (in other words, "savings" in "relearning" a list that had received 0 prior repetitions). Ebbinghaus found that with more repetitions during the study (encoding) phase, the less time was needed to relearn the list at the test (retrieval) phase. Thus, he inferred that memory strength increases with rehearsal.  Chapter 7

 

53.  What is true of “flashbulb” memories of highly emotional events?

A. They are extremely detailed and accurate.

B. They are extremely detailed but not always accurate. **

C. They capture only the gist of the event but they are highly accurate.

D. They fade rapidly after the event.

59%, .35.  Many people report intense, detailed “flashbulb” memories of hearing highly emotional news, in which they remember who told them, where they were, what they were doing, and even the weather and other irrelevant details. When researchers have interviewed people both at the time and years later, they have found that most flashbulb memories remain consistent over time, but occasionally people’s later reports are confident and vivid but incorrect. Confident, vivid memories aren’t always correct. Chapter 7

 

54.  A client in therapy reports remembering sexual abuse from early childhood. What do psychological researchers recommend?

A. Trust the report and prosecute the accused person.

B. Disbelieve any such reports.

C. Withhold judgment unless other evidence supports the accusation. **

D. Show the client photographs of the accused from that era, to enhance memory.

67%, .30.  If someone reports remembering an event after many years of not remember it, the memory might be correct. Even psychologists who are skeptical of repression agree that someone might have an experience in childhood and then not think about it again until many years later. In many cases it is best to withhold judgment unless independent evidence supports the report. A further recommendation is to avoid using repeated suggestions, photographs, or other techniques that increase the probability of a false memory report.   Chapter 7

 

55.  “Early” and ‘Late” –selection theories of attention differ in terms of:

A.  their estimate of the capacity of working memory.

B.  the limits of preconscious processing. **

C.  their interpretation of the serial-position effect.

D.  the role of displacement in forgetting from short-term memory.

30%, .45.  The primary difference between early-and late-selection theories of attention is illustrated in this figure, adapted from Pashler (1998). The left side of the figure represents four stimulus events competing for attention. The early stages of information processing provide physical descriptions of these stimuli, followed by identification and, at late stages of information processing, semantic description, and finally some response. According to early-selection theories, depicted in Panel A, preattentive processing is limited to physical description; all available stimuli are processed at this stage, but identification, semantic description, and response are limited to the single stimulus selected on the basis of the physical descriptions composed at the early stages. According to late-selection theories, depicted in Panel B, all available stimuli are also identified and processed for meaning preattentively; attention and consciousness are required only for response. In some respects, identification is the crux of the difference between early- and late-selection theories: early-selection theories hold that conscious awareness precedes stimulus identification, while late-selection theories hold that identification precedes consciousness.  Lecture 17

 

56. George Washington crossed the Delaware River on Christmas Night”. This is an example of _____ memory.

A.  Episodic

B.  Semantic **

C.  Procedural

D.  Declarative

50%, .21.  Semantic memory, by contrast, is the mental lexicon, and concerns one's context-free, knowledge. Information stored in semantic memory makes no reference to the context in which it was acquired, and no reference self as agent or experiencer of events. Knowledge stored in semantic memory is categorical, including information about subset-superset relations, similarity relations, and category-attribute relations. Thus, some typical semantic memories might take the following form: I am tall. Happy people smile. Hippies have long hair. Touches can be good or bad. Debutantes wear long dresses. Parks have trees. Saturday follows Friday. Semantic memory is often portrayed as a network, with nodes representing individual concepts and links representing the semantic or conceptual relations between them. Thus, a node representing car would be linked to other nodes representing vehicle, road, and gasoline.  Lecture 18

 

57.  Drug-state-dependent memory occurs in free recall, but not in recognition. This illustrates the fact that:

A.  elaborative activity is more important than organizational activity.

B.  forgetting from long-term memory chiefly occurs by virtue of interference.

C.  encoding specificity is moderated or qualified by cue-dependency. **

D.  reconstructive processes are ineffective when retrieval cues are rich and informative.

66%, .34.  State-dependency was first observed in animals (by Overton, 1964), but it can also be observed in humans in verbal-learning experiments employing a "Noah's Ark", or "two-by-two", design. In the first phase, a word list is studied while one group of subjects is under the influence of some psychoactive drug, such as a barbiturate sedative. Then each of these groups is divided in half, and each of these subgroups is tested either under the influence of the same drug or not. All psychoactive drugs alter the physiology of the nervous system -- and, in fact, with certain exceptions, they impair cognitive functions such as encoding and retrieval. For that reason, memory is best if there are no drugs involved at all. Overall, however, memory is best when encoding and retrieval take place in the same physiological state. This is the phenomenon of "state-dependent" memory. State-dependency was observed in a study of the effects of the drug Ritalin on learning and memory in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Although Ritalin is an amphetamine derivative, and thus a central nervous stimulant, it has the paradoxical effect of enabling some ADHD patients to better focus their attention, thus improving learning and memory (Ritalin, like all psychoactive drugs, impairs learning and memory in individuals who do not suffer from ADHD). Anyway, the children were engaged in a "zoo location" task in which they studied a list of paired associates consisting of an animal name and a city name, such as TIGER-TORONTO (the investigators were both working in Canada at the time). For the memory test, the children were supplied with the animal name, and asked to supply the corresponding city name. Half the children were on Ritalin at the time of study, and half the children were on Ritalin at the time of test. Memory was measured in terms of the number of errors the children made, so the fewer the errors the better. Children who studied under the influence of the drug made fewer errors when they were also tested under the influence of the drug, and children who studied off the drug made fewer errors when they were also tested off the drug. In other words, memory depended on congruence between drug states at encoding and retrieval. Similar effects have been obtained in studies employing a wide variety of psychoactive drugs. In general, state-dependency is strongest with central nervous system depressants such as the barbiturates, alcohol, and benzodiazepines (such as Librium), though nicotine also produces relatively strong effects (another good reason not to smoke!). Moderately strong effects have been observed with narcotics and marijuana. Fortunately for many college students, no state dependency has been observed with caffeine -- though this may have been because the subjects' systems were so heavily loaded with caffeine that their physiological states didn't really change between study and test! Aspirin and lithium (a drug sometimes used in the treatment of bipolar affective disorder, or so-called "manic-depressive" illness) do not seem to produce state-dependency.  Lecture 19

 

58.  Why do cognitive psychologists usually rely on reaction times, etc., instead of asking people to describe their thought processes?

A. Measurements of reaction time are quicker and less expensive.

B. People don’t always know their own thought processes. **

C. Laws about privacy prevent researchers from asking about thoughts.

D. Reaction times provide a wider variety of results.

77%, .37.  These and other effects show that the principles of cognitive functioning cannot simply be inferred from abstract logical considerations; rather, they must be inferred from empirical data showing how people actually perform. Research shows that people commonly depart from the principles of normative rationality, but a further question is what we should make of these departures. Although Aristotle defined humans as rational animals, one possible conclusion from empirical studies is that people are fundamentally irrational: that human judgment, reasoning, choice, and problem-solving is overwhelmed by a large number of fallacies, illusions, biases, and other shortcomings. At best, according to this argument, most people are "cognitive misers" who use as little information, and as little cognitive effort, as possible in their lives; at worst, people are just plain stupid -- incapable, without extensive instruction (and perhaps not even then), of conforming themselves to the principles of logic and rationality. There is also a growing literature on the emotional effects of other cognitive processes, such as perception and judgment. Signal-detection theory has already demonstrated that goals and motives can percolate "down" to affect the most elementary psychological functions. Common metaphors speak of happy people viewing the world through rose-colored glasses, and that things look dark when we're unhappy, and in fact mood and emotion do seem to serve as filters on perception, just as they do on memory. Similarly, emotions have a considerable effect on judgment and decision-making. Prospect theory, proposed by Kahneman and Tversky as an alternative to rational choice, holds that decisions are affected by the way that choices are framed, and emotions and motives form an important element in these frames. Happy people are more likely to take risks than unhappy ones. Even if feelings and desires prove to be largely independent of knowledge and belief, the interest of cognitive psychologists in our emotional and motivational lives gives eloquent testimony to the breadth of the field as it approaches its second half-century.  Chapter 8

 

59.  Which of the following tends to be true of satisficers more than maximizers?

A. more likely to be pleased with the choices they make **

B. more likely to make the best possible choice

C. more likely to take a long time making a decision

D. more likely to regret a decision and wonder “what if?”

72%. .02.  Researchers find that high maximizers usually make better choices, according to objective criteria. They get jobs with higher starting pay than do satisficers, in spite of being no better in their college grades. However, they have more difficulty making a choice, and they are usually less satisfied with their choices. Satisficers look for something “good enough” and find it. Maximizers look for “the best” and continue to wonder whether they were right. Chapter 8

 

60.  Which of the following words has exactly one morpheme?

A. games

B. gagging

C. gather **

D. graceful

38%, .20.  At the lowest level, the phoneme is the smallest unit of speech. Similarly, written language has an elementary graphemic level consisting of the letters of the alphabet. At the next level, the morpheme is the smallest unit of speech that carries meaning. In English, there are about 50,000 of these: roots, stems, prefixes, and suffixes. There are two classes of morphemes: open-class morphemes consist of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (so called because new members can be added to the class just by inventing new words, like "radar" and "snarf"); closed-class morphemes consist of articles, connectives, prepositions, prefixes, and suffixes. Phonemes are combined into morphemes by phonological rules that specify which combinations are "legal" in a particular language. At the next level, the word consists of one or more morphemes -- a root or stem, plus (perhaps) a prefix or suffix. In English, there are about 200,000 of these. Morphemes are combined into words according to the same phonological rules. Knowledge of the meanings of individual words is stored in the mental lexicon.  Chapter 8

 

61.  What evidence did Spearman have for his proposed g factor in intelligence?

A. Most people’s performance on tests is stable over long periods of time.

B. Coaching can improve people’s test performance.

C. Most people who do well on one type of test also do well on other tests. **

D. Monozygotic twins resemble each other more than dizygotic twins do.

59%, .39.  One of the earliest research programs in psychology was Charles Spearman’s psychometric approach to intelligence, based on the measurement of individual differences in performance. Spearman measured how well many people performed tasks such as following directions, judging musical pitch, matching colors and doing arithmetic. He found that performance on any of his tasks correlated positively with performance on any of the others. Spearman therefore inferred that all the tasks have something in common. To perform well on any test of mental ability, Spearman argued, people need a ‘general’ ability, which he called g.   Chapter 9

 

62.  What does it mean to say that a test is biased against members of a particular group?

A. Members of that group get low scores on the test.

B. The test scores underestimate the performance of that group on other tasks. **

C. The authors of the test intended it to be used unfairly against that group.

D. Members of that group object to the test.

29%, .15.  A bad item.  In addition to being reliable and valid, a test should also be unbiased. That is, equally fair and accurate for all groups. A biased test overstates or understates the true performance of one or more groups. If one group does better than another on a test, that difference by itself does not necessarily indicate bias. Chapter 9

 

63.  A problem with the “prototype” view of categories is that:

A.  sometimes people cannot specify the defining features of a category.

B.  subordinate categories are sometimes not well nested within superordinate categories.

C.  experts often classify new objects with respect to specific exemplars. **

D.  category exemplars are often linked by a pattern of family resemblance.

17%, -.07.  A bad item.  According to the classical view handed down by Aristotle, concepts are represented by a list of features which are singly necessary and jointly sufficient to define the category in question. For example, in geometry, all triangles are closed two-dimensional figures with three sides and three angles; and a sharp boundary divides all triangles from all quadrilaterals. However, in the 1970s it became clear that however satisfying such a definition might be philosophically, it did not reflect how concepts are represented in human minds. When perceivers judge equilateral and right triangles to be "better" triangles than isosceles triangles, they are referring to something other than a list of defining features. According to the classical view, all members of a category are equally good representatives of that category. For this and other reasons, the classical view of concepts as proper sets has been replaced with a revisionist probabilistic view of concepts as fuzzy sets. According to the fuzzy set view, features are only imperfectly correlated with category membership, and concepts themselves are represented by prototypes (real or imagined) which possess many features that are characteristic of category members. The probabilistic view permits some instances (e.g., robin) of a category (bird) to be "better" than others (e.g., emu), even though all possess the same set of defining features. Moreover, it permits the boundaries between categories to be somewhat blurred (is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?). Both the classical and the probabilistic view regard concepts as summary descriptions of category members. However, an alternative exemplar view holds that concepts are represented as collections of instances rather than as summary descriptions. Thus, when we seek to determine whether an object is a bird, we compare it to other birds we know, rather than to some abstract notion of what a bird is. Just as there is empirical evidence allowing us to firmly reject the classical view of conceptual structure as inadequate, so there are studies showing that objects are slotted into categories if they resemble particular instances of the category in question, even if they do not resemble the category prototype. Perhaps novices in a domain categorize with respect to abstract prototypes, while experts categorize with respect to specific exemplars. Regardless of whether concepts are represented by prototypes or exemplars, categorization is a special case of similarity judgment: the perceiver assigns an object to a category by matching its features to those of his or her category representation, prototype or exemplar. There is no absolute threshold for similarity, however: categorization, like signal detection, is always a matter of judgment.  Lecture 21

 

64.  Immediately after a shopping mall is shot up by a gunman with a history of mental illness, people estimate that the correlation between mental illness and violent behavior is higher than it actually is.  This judgment error most likely reflects the use of the _____ heuristic.

A.  representativeness

B.  availability **

C.  simulation

D.  anchoring and adjustment

39%, .32.  While appropriate algorithms are guaranteed to deliver the correct solution to whatever problem is at hand, use of heuristics incurs some risk of making an error in reasoning or judgment. Analysis of common judgment errors, such as the "gambler's fallacy", by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others has documented a number of other commonly used judgment heuristics. Representativeness permits judgments of category membership, similarity, probability, and causality to be based on the degree to which an event resembles the population of events from which it has been drawn. Availability permits judgments of frequency and probability to be based on the ease with which relevant examples can be brought to mind, while simulation bases judgments on the ease with which plausible scenarios can be constructed. In anchoring and adjustment, initial estimates are taken as reasonable approximations to the final result of some calculation.   Lecture 22

 

65.  Framing effects, as illustrated by the “disease problem”, seem to violate which assumption of normative rationality?

A.  choices are based on current assets.

B.  choices are made on the basis of self-interest.

C.  choices are made so as to maximize gains and minimize losses.

D.  choices are based on abstract representations of the problem. **

34%, .28.  As Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated, most people avoid taking a risk to gain something (e.g., saving lives), because we know that even a small gain will feel good. However, we willingly take a risk to avoid loss (e.g., not letting people die), because any loss will feel bad. The tendency to answer a question differently when it is framed differently is called the framing effect. Lecture 23

 

66.  The best conclusion we can draw about the relationship between language and thought is:

A.  thought is impossible in the absence of language.

B.  language shapes the way we think.

C.  language shapes our attention to features of the world.

D.  each language provides a cognitive “toolkit”, that shapes perceiving, categorizing, and meaning. **

67%, .15.  Boroditsky and other proponents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have collected many examples like this, and they conclude that Sapir and Whorf had it right.  The diversity of environments in which humans live has created the diversity of language, and this diversity of language has in turn created diversity of thought.  "Each [language] provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture.  Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing, and making meaning in the world…".  Lecture 24

 

67.   People with pure autonomic failure lose nervous system control over their heart rate, breathing, sweating, etc. What, if anything, happens to their emotions?

A. The feeling aspect of their emotions becomes weaker. **

B. The feeling aspect of their emotions becomes stronger.

C. They have trouble recognizing other people's facial expressions of emotion.

D. They report no changes.

45%, .16.  a bad item.  According to the James-Lange theory, people with weak physiological responses still identify emotional situations cognitively, but they should have little emotional feeling. People with paralyzed muscles because of spinal cord injuries report normal or nearly normal emotions. However, people with weakened autonomic responses report weaker emotional feelings. In people with pure autonomic failure, the autonomic nervous system stops regulating the organs. Chapter 12

 

68.  Given some adult person, chosen at random, which of the following is the best predictor of how happy that person will be a few years from now?

A. how much wealth the person has

B. how happy the person is now **

C. how well educated the person is

D. whether the person lives in a warm climate

76%, .26.  Another set of effects is known as mood-congruent memory (MCM), which has to do with the match between the emotional valence of the material (positive or negative) and the subject's mood (positive or negative). And, at least there are two kinds of MCM: MCM might be a special case of mood-dependent memory, based on the assumption that positive events induce positive moods, and negative events induce negative moods. For this reason, while studies of MCM must employ affectively valenced material (because the material has to be congruent or incongruent with the subject's mood state), the best studies of MDM use affectively neutral material. MDM is interesting on clinical grounds, because it may reinforce low mood in depressed individuals. If being depressed makes it more likely that you'll encode unhappy events, then there will be more negative events available in memory. And if being depressed makes it more likely that you'll retrieve unhappy events from a memory store that is already biased toward unhappiness, you'll get even more depressed than you already are! And if being depressed makes it less likely that you'll remember the happy times, then it will be more difficult to snap yourself out of it. Throw MDM on top of MCM, and depressed individual will be more likely to remember events encoded during previous episodes of depression, precipitating a vicious spiral downward in mood. So, even if it turns out that clinical depression is purely biological in origin, the effects of mood on memory are likely to make things even worse.  Chapter 12

 

69.  Prolonged stress produces some of the same effects as what?

A. digestion

B. sleep

C. illness **

D. swimming

92%, .17.  Short-term, moderate increases in cortisol enhance memory and increase immune responses. (For example, many college students have increased immune system activity during the stressful time of taking final examples.) Prolonged cortisol damages the hippocampus, impairs memory, and exhausts the immune system. Chapter 12

 

 70.  Which of the following facts conflicts with the drive theory of motivation?

A. Someone who just completed a meal will rest before doing anything else.

B. Hormones alter the activity of certain parts of the brain.

C. People sometimes seek excitement and new experiences. **

D. If one activity doesn’t satisfy a goal, people will try something else.

29%, .33.  Drive theories, like Hull's, posit that motivation is based on needs, or "irritations", that we try to reduce.  Homeostatic theories, similarly, posit that behavior is motivated by the need to restore bodily states to optimum levels.  Hunger and thirst can be thought of as "irritations" in that sense.  While hunger and thirst emphasize the role of homeostatic regulation, perhaps in parallel with other processes (like hedonic eating) other motives do not seem to involve homeostasis at all. For example, aggressive behavior is stimulated by the presence of external threats, and by high levels of testosterone in the bloodstream. But the goal of aggression is not to reduce testosterone levels: it's to defend one's territory against competition.  Chapter 11

 

71.  Which of these is a likely explanation for why more people are overweight today?

A. Portion sizes are larger than in the past. **

B. More people are eating alone.

C. Genes that promote overweight have become more common in the population.

D. Clothing styles have changed.

68%, .35.  The portion size also influences our eating. If someone serves you a large meal, do you feel obligated to eat most of it? If you dine at an all-you-can-eat buffet (sometimes called an “all-night buffet”), do you try to get your money’s worth? In one study, people at a convention of nutrition experts (who you might think would know better) were asked to serve themselves ice cream. Those who were given a large bowl gave themselves almost one-third more ice cream than those given a smaller bowl. Chapter 11

 

 72.  What evidence supports the belief that sexual orientation depends partly on genetic differences?

A. Most gay men have a gay father.

B. Most lesbian women have a lesbian mother.

C. Monozygotic twins overlap in sexual orientation more often than dizygotic twins do. **

D. Three genes controlling orientation have been found, all on the Y chromosome.

89%, .34.  Why are some people heterosexual and others homosexual? The available research suggests that genetic factors contribute to sexual orientation for both men and women. Note that homosexuality is more prevalent in their monozygotic (identical) twins than in their dizygotic (fraternal) twins.  Chapter 11

 

73. The James-Lange theory of emotion is troubled by the fact that:

A.  quadriplegic patients still give emotional responses to stimuli. **

B.  there are differential patterns of autonomic response for each basic emotion.

C.  each basic emotion is accompanied by a different facial expression.

D. manipulation of facial expressions, but not autonomic responses, has no effect on emotion.

53%, .38.  Despite the vaunted position of William James in the status hierarchy of American psychologists (and world-wide, too, for that matter), Cannon's critique was widely considered to be devastating to the James-Lange position. Cannon noted, first, that paraplegics can still experience emotion, even though their spinal cord has been severed from their brains -- thereby effectively preventing them from getting feedback from their skeletal musculature and viscera. And, as a matter of empirical fact, different emotions, such as fear and anger, do not seem to be associated with different patterns of bodily reaction. Along the same lines, our perception of our visceral responses to stimulation are very diffuse and nonspecific. Moreover, autonomic responses, at least, recruit more slowly than do emotional responses -- thus making it difficult for autonomic responses to cause emotional states. Finally, experimental manipulation of autonomic responses -- speeding up or slowing down the heart rate, for example - -didn't seem to alter subjects' emotions.  Lecture 26.

 

74.  Rewards that are perceived as _____ have the effect of _____ intrinsic motivation.

A.  controlling; enhancing

B.  task-contingent; undermining

C.  informative; enhancing **

D.  unexpected; undermining

44%, .28.  It turns out that these various aspects of reward make a big difference to the effects of rewarding behavior. This was clearly demonstrated in a study of college students who were brought into the laboratory to do something that was intrinsically motivating for them -- playing pinball; as a reward, they received movie passes for achieving a meaningful but reasonable-sounding standard of performance (scoring above the 50th or 80th percentile); and rigging the machine to make sure that every one of the students met this standard. At the end of the experiment, all subjects were given an opportunity to continue playing the game during some free time, and the experimenters measured how long they continued playing. Then, the subjects were given an opportunity to continue playing the game during some free time. In their first experiment, a promised reward undermined intrinsic motivation, compared to a standard control group that got performance feedback (i.e., they saw their score) but no evaluation and no reward. condition. But a third group that was surprised with the reward showed an enhancement of intrinsic motivation. This essentially replicates Lepper's original experiment, but with college students rather than nursery-school pupils. The promised reward could be perceived as controlling behavior, and probably was; and the subjects' anticipation of external evaluation probably induced performance anxiety. On the other hand, the unexpected reward was purely informational. The outcome suggests that controlling rewards undermine intrinsic motivation while purely informational rewards sustain, and may even enhance it. The upshot of this study is that rewards have at least two functions: they control performance, and they provide information about performance. Rewards that are perceived as controlling do undermine intrinsic motivation; but rewards that manage to provide information, without being perceived as controlling, do not undermine IM, and may even enhance it.  Lecture 27

 

 

75.  What do psychologists mean by the term “pluralistic ignorance”?

A. the condition of being uninformed on a wide variety of topics

B. the tendency for the least intelligent candidate to win an election

C. the tendency for ill-informed people to change their opinions frequently

D. assuming that other people in a group have a better informed opinion **

51%, .53.  Pluralistic Ignorance. Another factor is that many emergency situations are inherently ambiguous -- that is, it's not entirely clear that they are emergencies. Two people fighting in a park might be roughhousing; they might even be rehearsing for a play, or making a movie. When a situation is ambiguous, there is a tendency in all of us to refrain from acting until the ambiguity is resolved -- until we determine whether the situation really is an emergency, and whether our help is really needed. We wait for the situation to be clarified -- and that clarification usually comes from other people. As Asch demonstrated in his experiments on conformity, we tend to look to others for cues as to what to think and do -- especially when the situation is ambiguous. The problem comes when everybody does this. If I am trying to decide whether to help, and everybody else is doing the same thing, then nobody is helping -- and this lack of action effectively defines the situation as either too dangerous (in which I really shouldn't try to help) or not an emergency (in which my help really isn't needed). This state, in which everybody looks elsewhere for cues as to what to believe, is known as pluralistic ignorance. It is a prime example of how the behavior that takes place in a situation -- in this case, doing nothing -- creates a situation in which nothing can or need be done.  Chapter 13

 

76.  People are most likely to attribute a behavior to internal causes if the person's behavior is:

A. the same thing the observer would have done.

B. highly variable from one situation to another.

C. highly variable from one time to another

D. unusual or surprising. **

54%, .24.  People are likely to make internal attributions for other people’s behavior and more likely to make external attributions for their own. This tendency is called the actor-observer effect. You are an actor when you try to explain the causes of your own behavior and an observer when you try to explain someone else’s behavior. We can account for this tendency in terms of the three influences. First, consensus: when you see someone angry with a sales clerk, would you be as angry as the complainer in that situation? You don’t know, because you don’t know the situation. But usually you are polite to salespeople, so maybe there is something unusual about that other person. Second, consistency: is that other person angry all the time? Could be, so far as you know. But you know you get angry only on rare occasions. Third, distinctiveness: is that other person aggressive in many situations? Could be, so far as you know. Are you aggressive in many situations? You know that you aren’t. Chapter 13

 

77.  Research on cognitive dissonance suggests that in many cases

A. you can change people's attitudes by first changing their behavior. **

B. people with major differences in personality find each other attractive.

C. a group that discusses some issue moves toward a more extreme opinion.

D. prejudiced people fail to recognize their own prejudices.

45%, .46.  If you want to change people’s behavior, do you have to change their attitudes first? The results of cognitive dissonance experiments say quite the opposite: If you change people’s behavior first, their attitudes will change, too.  Chapter 13

 

78.  A face with average features (average size nose, average distance between eyes, etc.) is generally perceived as __________, presumably because the face indicates __________.

A. unattractive...low creativity

B. average in attractiveness...similarity to other people

C. highly attractive...good health **

D. highly attractive...sexual availability

55%, .29.  Why is normal attractive? First, normal implies healthy. Presumably, the genes for an average face spread in the population because of their link to success. Any face far different from the average might indicate an undesirable mutation. Second, we like anything that is familiar. If you have recently seen many faces that are thinner than usual, fatter than usual, or in some other way distorted, your judgment of attractive is shifted slightly in the direction of the faces you have just seen. Chapter 13

 

79.  If a group is composed mostly of people who lean in one direction on some controversial issue, then after the group has discussed the issue, the majority of those people will probably

A. shift their opinions even further in the same direction. **

B. shift to a position nearly opposite to the one they started with.

C. shift their opinions toward a more moderate position.

D. stick to just about the same position they started with.

78%, .35.  There are more such experiments in the social-psychological literature than you can shake a stick at. The vast bulk of social-psychological research, especially in the 1950s through the 1970s, concerned social influence in some way. Many of these experiments are variants on the Asch conformity paradigm, examining the influence of real or imagined social pressure on the individual subject's expression of belief. Asch himself distinguished between two levels of conformity: Conformity at the level of behavior -- that is, the subject's verbal or nonverbal expression of agreement with the majority. Conformity at the level of judgment -- that is, not just a change in the subjects verbal report or other behavior, but an actual change in the subject's perceptual experience, opinion, belief, etc.  Asch thought that the conformity he observed might go to the level of judgment -- he was, after all, heavily influenced by the Gestalt movement in perception -- but he admitted he only had evidence for conformity at the level of behavior. Other variants on the Asch experiment have explored other areas of social influence: Obedience, where there is an unequal power relationship between influencer and influence. Compliance, or responses to explicit requests. Social influence is a primary topic in what might be called "the 4 As" of social psychology: attitudes (particularly stereotyping and prejudice) aggression (e.g., the work of Leonard Berkowitz); attraction (e.g., the work of Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid) altruism (e.g., the work of Darley and Latane).  In each case, a large body of research shows the influence of the social situation on people's behavior. There is also a fairly large body of research, much of it also conducted by social psychologists, on the influence of the physical environment -- density of people, noise levels, etc. -- on behavior. Traditional social psychology is, to a very great degree, the study of environmental influence, with an emphasis on the social environment.  Chapter 13

 

 

80.  Suppose someone who is distressed by his own aggressive tendencies describes other people as extremely aggressive. Which of the following terms best describes this person's behavior?

A. displacement

B. reaction formation

C. projection **

D. sublimation

76%, .40.  Attributing one’s own undesirable characteristics to other people is known as projection. If someone tells you to stop being angry, you night reply, I am not angry! You are the one who’s angry! Suggesting that other people have your faults might make the faults seem less threatening. Chapter 14

 

81.  On average, what benefit arises from programs to raise people’s self-esteem?

A. decreased aggressive behavior

B. better performance in school

C. improved coping with stress **

D. greater job productivity

59%, .32.  Self-esteem, the evaluation of one’s own abilities, performance, and worth. Psychologists generally expect that high self-esteem should lead to increased productivity and other good outcomes. However, programs to raise people’s self-esteem have often had disappointing results. On the plus side, people who increase their self-esteem are better able to cope with stress. Chapter 14

 

 

82.  What is an important criticism of the Rorschach Inkblot Technique?

A. It penalizes less intelligent or less vocal people for not giving many answers.

B. It rarely gives us information we could not easily find in other ways. **

C. Almost any answer to any item is typically regarded as normal.

D. Many people are unable to follow the precise and complicated instructions.

30%, .36.  Psychologists often believe the Rorschach gave them an insight, when in fact it just confirmed an opinion they already had. Critics of the Rorschach stop short of calling it completely invalid. Their point is that it is not valid enough to make important decisions about an individual, such as which parent should get custody of a child or which prisoners should get parole. Chapter 14

 

83.  An experiment measures anxiety in two different situations.  Jerry scores a 3 out of 10 when in the presence of large animals, but 7 out of 10 when he has to speak before a group.  Elaine scores 8 out of 10 when in the presence of large animals, but 2 out of 10 when she has to speak before a group.  This pattern seems to illustrate:

A.  a main effect of both persons and situations.

B.  a main effect of situations and a person-by-situation interaction. **

C.  a main effect of persons and a person-by-situation interaction.

D.  reciprocal determinism.

53%, .02.  Pretty close to  a bad item.  And I warned you that I love questions like this!  From an interactionist perspective, different kinds of people show different patterns of response across different situations. If P and E interact: The effect of the personality variable depends on the situation the person is in; and the effect of the situation depends on the kind of person who is in it. Thus, for example, friendly people might smile more than unfriendly people, but this difference would be bigger when they encounter a stranger than when they encounter a friend. Or, put another way, friendly people might discriminate less between the two situations that unfriendly people would. Such a situation is known statistically as the person-by-situation interaction. The person-by-situation interaction takes a number of forms. In the crossover interaction, there is no main effect of either person or situation (again, compute the means), but the difference between the two groups (or situations) reverses from one situation (or group) to the other. In the fan effect, there is no difference between the two groups in one situation, but a big difference between them in the other.  Lecture 28

 

84.  Behavior:

A.  is most stable across long intervals of time.

B.  is most stable at the level of habitual and specific actions.

C.  is most consistent across similar situations. **

D.  is most consistent across habitual and specific actions.

47%, .26.  Again within each level of the hierarchy, the Doctrine of Traits assumes that behaviors and traits are relatively consistently displayed across a wide variety of different situations. The whole point of a trait, given the strong view, is to generate consistent responses in a variety of situations, and to render various situations "functionally equivalent" in terms of the behavior that occurs within them. There is even less evidence for consistency: human experience, thought, and action is remarkably flexible and finely tuned to the specific situation in which it occurs. Consistency is greatest across situations that are highly similar.  Lecture 29

 

85.  According to Walter Mischel, the typical correlation between a questionnaire measurement of personality and actual trait-related behavior in some specific situation amounts to a _____ effect size.

A.  small **

B.  medium

C.  large

D.  It depends on the situation.

42%, .21.  There's a pattern emerging here. For the most part, the correlations between general traits and specific behaviors seem to reach a plateau in the .20s and .30. Walter Mischel (1968), reviewing the literature up to that time, suggested that there was a ceiling, or upper limit, on the extent to which an individual's behavior in some specific situation could be predicted from knowledge of his or her generalized personality traits. Mischel called this ceiling, corresponding to a modest correlation of r = .30, the personality coefficient. A correlation of .30 means that the two variables have about 10% of their variance in common -- actually, .30² = .09 or 9%.That means that only about 10% of the variance in actual behavior can be accounted for by the personality trait in question. The vast bulk of behavioral variation is left unaccounted for by personality traits. Mischel's claims were controversial, to say the least -- and they were especially challenged by proponents of traditional personality research, based as it was on the Doctrine of Traits. His review was written relatively early in this debate, and drew on a relatively small body of empirical evidence. Still, he seems to have had it right: there is a ceiling, roughly corresponding to a correlation coefficient of r = .30, on our ability to predict specific behaviors on the basis of our knowledge of generalized personality traits.  Lecture 30

 

86.  The presence of other people _____ helping behavior (altruism).

A.  inhibits

B.  facilitates

C.  It depends on the size of the group.

D.  It depends on what the other people are doing. **

39%, .29.  Interestingly, this point is effectively illustrated by Darley and Latane's research on altruism. They showed clearly that features of the situation influence helping behavior, but the big question is why? Diffusion of Responsibility. Sometimes, individuals don't help because they are afraid, or they don't believe that they have the required skills. But sometimes, they don't help because they believe that someone else has also done so. In some cases, this is quite reasonable. Kitty Genovese's neighbors might well have believed that someone had already called the police (though 911 didn't exist then), and didn't want to clog the phone lines or otherwise complicate the situation. This diffusion of responsibility might account for some of the behavior of Darley and Latane's subjects as well. For all they knew, someone else had already noticed the smoke, or heard the experimenter's cry for help, and done something. Pluralistic Ignorance. Another factor is that many emergency situations are inherently ambiguous -- that is, it's not entirely clear that they are emergencies. Two people fighting in a park might be roughhousing; they might even be rehearsing for a play, or making a movie. When a situation is ambiguous, there is a tendency in all of us to refrain from acting until the ambiguity is resolved -- until we determine whether the situation really is an emergency, and whether our help is really needed. We wait for the situation to be clarified -- and that clarification usually comes from other people. As Asch demonstrated in his experiments on conformity, we tend to look to others for cues as to what to think and do -- especially when the situation is ambiguous. The problem comes when everybody does this. If I am trying to decide whether to help, and everybody else is doing the same thing, then nobody is helping -- and this lack of action effectively defines the situation as either too dangerous (in which I really shouldn't try to help) or not an emergency (in which my help really isn't needed). This state, in which everybody looks elsewhere for cues as to what to believe, is known as pluralistic ignorance. It is a prime example of how the behavior that takes place in a situation -- in this case, doing nothing -- creates a situation in which nothing can or need be done. Other people's lack of action defines the situation as a non-emergency for the subject. The subject's lack of action defines the situation as a non-emergency for others.  Of course, if the (inaction) of others shapes the situation, so does their action. In fact, when people observe others helping, they themselves are more inclined to help. Evidently, the behavior of other people defines the situation as one in which helping is needed, possible, and safe.  Lecture 31

 

87.  According to Piaget, how can we determine whether a child understands object permanence?

A. Watch the child's eye movements when the object moves.

B. Place a toy behind a barrier and see whether the child retrieves it. **

C. Squash some clay and see whether the child thinks it still is the same amount.

D. See whether the child consistently prefers one toy to another.

82%, .43.  One of the major accomplishments of the sensory-motor period is the development of object permanence. The newborn's behavior is tied to what comes through its senses, which are processed by sensory-motor schemata. Out of sight is out of mind. Eventually, however, the child comes to behave as if they have internal representations of objects that are not actually present in their sensory environment. Early on, if a toy is hidden they will turn their attention to something else. Later, if a toy is hidden they will search for it. This searching behavior shows that the child has an idea of the object that persists despite its physical disappearance -- at this point, the child has acquired the capacity for forming internal, mental representations --memories -- of the outside world.  Chapter 5

 

88.  What was a key point of Erik Erikson’s stage of development?

A. Emotional difficulties in one stage will impair development in the next. **

B. Genetic differences influence the development of social behaviors.

C. The speed of progression through stages of development varies among cultures.

D. Those who go through the stages more slowly are better off in the long run.

56%, .24.  You might describe the main concerns of certain ages differently from what Erikson said. Nevertheless, two of his general points seem valid: Each stage has its own special difficulties, and an unsatisfactory resolution to the problems one age produces extra difficulty in later life.  Chapter 5

 

89.  When chromosomally XX fetuses are exposed to somewhat elevated testosterone levels during prenatal development, what is an effect on their later development?

A. These boys are less likely than average to get high grades in math courses.

B. These boys are more likely than average to pay close attention to facial expressions.

C. These girls are more likely than average to enjoy typical boys’ toys. **

D. These girls are more likely than average to be right-handed.

84%, .43.  Chromosomal XX Individuals. If a genetic female somehow experiences an environment to which androgen has been added, she will be born with female internal genitalia, but most likely an enlarged clitoris and fused vaginal labia; rarely, such a girl will be born with a normal penis and scrotum (of course, the scrotum will be empty, because there are no testes to descend into it). This occurs in two principal ways. In the female adrenogenital syndrome, there is a natural failure of the adrenal glands to function properly, resulting in the circulation of androgen to a fetus that is genetically female. There are no effects on the internal reproductive anatomy, but the external genitalia are masculinized. These children receive surgical correction of the external genitalia. At puberty (because they have malfunctioning adrenal glands) they also receive cortisone therapy to counter the adrenal failure. As a result of this therapy, the girl develops a characteristically feminine physique, menstruates, and can conceive and bear children. In progestin-induced pseudohermaphroditism, a pregnant woman (with a personal or family history of difficult pregnancy) receives synthetic hormones to prevent miscarriage. In some cases, the hormone treatment results in a masculinization of the external genitalia, which is corrected surgically. Because there is no problem with the endogenous hormones, there is no need for cortisone therapy to feminize the physique or induce menarche. In both cases, the children are raised as girls.  Chapter 5

 

90.  Considering the “Big Five” personality traits:

A.  all five have approximately the same contributions of genetic and environmental factors. **

B.  neuroticism and extraversion, the “Big Two” have stronger genetic components than the remaining three.

C.  conscientiousness has a stronger shared-environment component than openness to experience.

D.  the nonshared environment is a stronger determinant of openness than any of the other four.

52%, .11.  Considering all five traits examined in Loehlin's (1992) study of The Big Five, the results of actual twin studies of personality reveal that genetic factors account for approximately 40% of the variance on the Big Five traits; the nonshared environment accounts for approximately 50% of variance; and the shared environment accounts for less than 10% of variance. Apparently the family environment is not decisive for adult personality, and the nonshared environment is far more important. To summarize, for each of The Big Five dimensions of personality, there is: a substantial genetic component to variance; the contribution of the nonshared environment is even greater than that of the genes; the contribution of the shared environment is relatively trivial.  Lecture 33

 

91.  For a long time, the effects of birth order (family constellation) were held to be:

A.  stronger for personality traits than for temperamental traits.

B.  stronger for temperament than for intelligence.

C.  mostly an artifact of demographic factors such as family size and socio-economic status. **

D.  stronger for before the turn of the 20^th century, when the traditional family structure began to break down.  .

32%, .25.  Among the most controversial family-context effects involve birth order -- that is, systematic differences in personality between first-born and latter-born siblings in a family. Because there are no systematic genetic differences between first-borns and latter-borns (all brothers and sisters share a random 50% of their genes in common), any systematic differences between them must be due to their position in the family constellation. But are there any such systematic differences owing to family constellation? Until recently, most researchers held that birth-order effects were weak or inconsistent (Schooler, 1966; Ernst & Young, 1983). To be sure, there were occasional studies that demonstrated personality differences between first-borns and latter-borns, but there were lots of confounding variables that made the studies difficult to interpret: By definition, first-borns are older than latter-borns, so any differences between them might be a product of age, not family constellation. Also by definition, birth order is correlated with family size. You can't be a latter-born unless there are at least two children in the family, and you can't be the fifth-born unless there are at least five. Family size, in turn, is correlated with parents' education, occupation, and socioeconomic status. As a general rule, in Western countries at any rate, highly educated, wealthy, professional people have fewer children than poorly educated, poorer, working-class people. There are exceptions, of course: for example, members of the Mormon religion (Latter-Day Saints) are encouraged to have as many children as they can afford. But the fact that family size tends to be negatively correlated with socioeconomic status means that, in most populations, subjects who are first-borns will be from wealthier families, on average, than subjects who are latter-borns (it takes a little while to get your head around this, but you can do it). For that reason, differences between early-borns and latter-borns may be an artifact of differences in socioeconomic status.  Lecture 34

 

92.  The “theory” of cognitive development shares with Piaget the view that

A.  the child is a naive scientist. **

B.  performance develops before competence.

C.  development can be characterized as the acquisition of expertise.

D.  the acquisition of abstract schemata is guided more by deductive than by inductive processes.

35%, .41.  The hallmark of formal operations is scientific thinking, which is what lies behind Piaget's notion of the child as a naive scientist. This is marked by four different qualities: (1) hypothetico-deductive reasoning, in which we can hypothesize about a certain state of affairs, and then reason deductively from that hypothesis (that is, we can assume that something is true without requiring that it actually be true); (2) inductive reasoning, in which the person generalizes from specific observations to general principles; (3) reflective abstraction, in which the child is able to reflect on their own thoughts to arrive a novel ideas; and (4) propositional logic, in which the child can reason about two or more abstract entities represented by statements such as "If there is a P, then there is a Q". Children who have developed the capacity for formal operations are able to deal with several abstract variables at the same time.  Lecture 36

 

93.  One criticism of DSM is that it incorrectly

A. implies that only extreme disorders qualify for psychological help.

B. recommends the same kind of treatment for all disorders.

C. overstates the genetic basis of almost all disorders.

D. treats certain normal reactions as if they were disorders. **

57%, .39.  One criticism is that DSM labels too many conditions as “mental illnesses”. If you seek help to increase your enjoyment of sex, you have hypoactive sexual desire disorder. A woman with premenstrual distress gets a diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder. A child who hates school because of bullying gets a diagnosis of school phobia, implying a problem in the child instead of the situation.  Chapter 15

 

94.  Suppose you have been injured by something. Which of the following has the greatest influence on whether you develop a phobia of it?

A. Were you older than age 12 when you had the injury?

B. Do you know anyone else who has been injured by it?

C. Have you had many safe experiences with it? **

D. Is the object smaller than your hand?

60%, .31.  Phobias. In experimental psychopathology, phobias are a classical example of psychopathology acquired through learning -- particularly, fear conditioning. As such, phobias would seem to be a case of all stress and no diathesis: the stress is the anxiety that accompanies exposure to the feared object. So, if a person has a negative encounter with a snake, he or she will come to fear snakes. In this conditioning theory of phobia, the snake is a CS that predicts unpleasant consequences. This is a fine theory, so far as it goes, but it has two problems. One problem is that people with phobias don't always, or even usually, have histories of negative experiences with the objects of their fears. Readers who have phobias concerning snakes, for example, might ask themselves what snakes have ever done to them. Once in a while a snake phobic has been bitten by a snake, but not too often. Instead of resulting from direct experience with the phobic object, it is more likely that the snake phobia has been acquired through social learning or vicarious conditioning. That is, people become afraid of snakes because they know other people who are afraid of snakes. We learn to fear what other people fear, without having frightening experiences ourselves. The second problem is that people don't always acquire phobias following association of an object with negative consequences. To use an example from Seligman (the same theorist who proposed the learned helplessness model of depression), when we have a bout of food poisoning we don't become afraid of the crockery and cutlery; we become afraid of the food. And not just any food we may have eaten; we tend to become afraid of thinks like Lima beans and cream sauces. In fact, clinical phobias are largely limited to a relatively small number of situations: open spaces, high places, the gaze of other people, and wriggly, slimy things. According to Seligman, we are prepared by evolution to easily and quickly acquire conditioned fear responses to these sorts of objects and situations. In this view, the diathesis in phobia is a set of "prepared" associations, a part of the organism's evolutionary heritage, which predispose the individual to acquire intense fears even with minimal exposure. And the stress is a negative event. The stressful event can result in phobic levels of fear, but only by virtue of these prepared associations.  Chapter 15

 

95.  Why is methadone given in pill form instead of as an injection?

A. so that vitamins and minerals can be given along with it

B. so that it will enter the blood and the brain more gradually **

C. so that the user will remember to take it with breakfast every day

D. so that it will be easy to take exactly the same dose every time

81%, .38.  The drug methadone is sometimes offered as a less dangerous substitute for opiates. Methadone, chemically similar to morphine and heroin, can itself be addictive. When methadone is taken as a pill, however, it enters the bloodstream gradually and departs gradually. Thus, methadone does not produce the rush associated with injected opiates. It satisfies the craving without producing a strong high and blocks heroin or morphine from reaching the same receptors. Chapter 15

 

96.  One distinctive feature of behavior therapy that sets it apart from psychoanalysis and person-centered (humanistic) therapy is that behavior therapists

A. emphasize the importance of unconscious thoughts.

B. expect therapy to continue indefinitely, sometimes even for a lifetime.

C. set definite goals for their clients. **

D. rely mostly on tranquilizers and other drugs.

63%, .52.  Behavior Therapy began in the 1950s as a behavioristic reaction to the "mentalism" of psychoanalysis. Rather than resolving the unconscious conflicts that supposedly underlay the patient's symptoms, behavior therapists like Joseph Wolpe sought to modify the symptoms themselves, directly, by means of techniques derived from learning theory. From their point of view, symptoms were not caused by disease; rather, the symptoms were the disease. In some cases, such as phobias and obsessive-compulsive behaviors, the assumption was that the symptoms were learned behaviors that could be unlearned; even if the symptoms were not acquired through learning, however, it was assumed that they could be modified by learning (some forms of behavior therapy were called behavior modification). Cognitive Therapy: Later, in the aftermath of the "cognitive revolution" in psychology, which supplanted behaviorism, behavior therapy was supplanted by a cognitive therapy which attempted to alter the patient's behaviors, whether overt or covert), by changing the patient's cognitions; early proponents of cognitive therapy were Aaron (Tim) Beck, known for his cognitive theory of depression, and Albert Ellis who practiced what he called rational-emotive psychotherapy. In 2006, Beck received the prestigious Lasker Award for clinical research -- the first ever given to a psychiatrist for research on treatment. The chairman of the award jury noted that cognitive therapy "is one of the most important advances -- if not the most important advance -- in the treatment of mental diseases in the last 50 years" (New York Times, 09/17/06). Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Even with the new "mentalism" of cognitive psychology, the goal of cognitive therapy was to change the patient's behavior, so the hybrid term cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) became popular. Whereas psychodynamic therapy focuses on the patient's past, especially his childhood, CBT focuses on the "here and now" of the patient's life. Humanistic Psychotherapy emerged as a reaction to both psychoanalysis and behavior therapy. In both kinds of therapy, the therapist was extremely directive; but -- either keeping the patient focused on unconscious conflicts, or Both , which were perceived as much too directive. Carl Rogers introduced aclient-centered therapy in which the patient set the therapeutic agenda, and the therapist helped create an environment of unconditional positive regard in which the patient could achieve self-actualization (a term introduced by another humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow). Rogers' language is very revealing here: "patients" are passive recipients of the action of "agents"; but "clients" hire people, like lawyers, to work for them.  Chapter 15

 

97.  The primary symptoms of the “neuroses” involve:

A.  gross impairments in reality-testing

B.  anxiety **

C.  disruptions in consciousness.

D.  long-established, deeply ingrained patterns of behavior.

44%, .47.  Neuroses, a set of syndromes that share primary symptoms of anxiety in common. These are also "functional" in nature, but in contrast to the psychoses there is less question of organic involvement; rather, they are commonly attributed to the patient's experiential history of social learning. A variety of phobic disorders, entailing excessive, unwarranted, and irrational fears of specific objects or situations, such as snakes and spiders, heights, open spaces, or public places. In contrast, anxiety disorder is characterized by a free-floating state of apprehension and worry, unattached to any object. Sudden, unexpected waves of anxiety are characteristic of panic disorder. Lecture 38.

 

98.  In studies of “gene by environment” interactions:

A.  specific genotypes increase an individual’s vulnerability to specific life events. **

B.  specific genotypes increase an individual’s vulnerability to mental illness.

C.  genetic predispositions are important for psychoses, but not personality disorders.

D.  specific environments increase an individual’s vulnerability to mental illness.

26%, -.11.  A bad item.  So, as is generally the case, the origins of mental illness are not to be found in the genotype alone.  Rather, they will have to be found in gene-by-environment interactions (GxE). Still, once researchers have established a significant level of heritability for a mental illness, it makes sense to start searching for the genes responsible (for a review, see Duncan et al., 2014).  Before the 21st century, this was not really possible.  We didn't know enough about the human genome, and we didn't have the technology. And even with the mapping of the human genome, and the availability of (relatively) inexpensive technology, the task is daunting: There are some 20-25,000 candidate genes -- not to mention all that "intergenic" and "intronic" regions in the genome that are not, technically, genes. To obtain reliable results, researchers typically need huge sample sizes. Until recently, researchers had to propose, on the basis of some theory, what genes to look for.  So, for example, if they were interested in schizophrenia, they might look at genes that are involved in the production and metabolism of the neurotransmitter dopamine; for depression, they might look for genes involved with the production and metabolism of the neurotransmiters norepinephrine or serotonin.  This is known as the candidate gene strategy.  However, advances in technology have permitted researchers to go on "fishing expeditions" in which they cast their nets more widely, over thousands or millions of candidate genes and their variants, in what are known as genome-wide association studies (GWAS).  These studies have begun to yield results -- and, interestingly, they have been turning up evidence of genes involved in mental illness other than those "candidates" hypothesized by various biochemical theories of mental illness!  Lecture 40

 

99.  The most common drug treatments for depression:

A.  impede the release of dopamine and norepinephrine by presynaptic neurons.

B.  deactivate dopamine and serotonin after uptake by the postsynaptic neuron.

C.  stimulate the reuptake of norepinephrine and serotonin from the synapse.

D.  increase norepinephrine and serotonin levels at the synapse.  **

55%, .45.  A major revolution in the treatment of depression came with the introduction of antidepressant drugs. The tricyclic antidepressants, drugs like Elavil, Tofranil, and Sinequan, increase levels of norepinephrine and serotonin (just as we would expect based on the monoamine hypothesis of depression). Another group of antidepressants, known as the MAO inhibitors -- Nardil and Parnate are examples -- inhibit monoamine oxidase, a substance which, in turn, deactivates norepinephrine and serotonin. Both the tricyclics and the MAO inhibitors act by increasing the release of norepinephrine and serotonin into the synapse. Recently, these earlier generations of drugs have begun to be replaced by a newer generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors(SSRIs) such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, and Lexapro. As their name implies, these drugs act selectively on serotonin, and have little or no effect on norepinephrine; and rather than increasing the release of serotonin, they act to prevent its reuptake by the presynaptic neuron -- thus, effectively, increasing the levels of serotonin available at the synapse. There is also a class of drugs called selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, or SNRIs, such as Cymbalta, which act on both serotonin and norepinephrine -- thus accomplishing the same effect as the MAO inhibitors, but through a different mechanism. And, of course, there are now selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, also known as an NRIs, including Strattera.  Lecture 41

 

100.  Compared to individual psychotherapy, group therapy:

A.  is generally more effective.

B.  may be more cost-effective. **

C.  increases the risk of setbacks, if the patient is embarrassed by other group members.

D.  increases the likelihood of relapse in schizophrenia.

40%, .52.  Many patients are treated in groups in addition to, or instead of, individual therapy sessions. Group therapy has obvious economic advantages and psychological advantages as well. Patients can learn that other people have problems like theirs, and learn how others deal with them. Individual patients can find social support and encouragement for their own efforts to get better, and models for improvement. Some patients' problems are best observed in a group context. And the group provides a "safe place" where patients can try out new ideas, feelings, and behaviors. Lecture 42.