Question 1

Congratulations! You have been hired to teach psychology at the university. During the first week of classes, a student stops by your office and tells you, "I'm thinking of becoming a psychology major, but I don't think I want to be a therapist. What else can I do with a psychology degree?" Briefly summarize four of the many options available.

Accepted Answer

The answer of Congratulations! You have been hired to teach...

Question 2

Participants may be exposed to risk or discomfort during research

Accepted Answer

Participants may be exposed to minimal risk and discomfort if the potential benefits to knowledge and human welfare justify it, following ethical guidelines.

Question 3

During a thesis meeting, Dr. Voldemort suggests that Anwen consider using inferential statistics in her upcoming research project. After the meeting, Anwen meets her friend Jack and confesses she doesn't know what Dr. Voldemort was talking about. Jack explains that inferential statistics

Accepted Answer

Inferential statistics are used to make inferences or draw conclusions about a population based on a sample of data.

Question 4

A researcher might test the influence of environment on cognitive development by taking newborn children away from their parents and assigning half of them to a rich cognitive environment and half to a deprived cognitive environment. What is wrong with this experiment?

Accepted Answer

The experiment violates ethical standards as it involves taking newborns away from their parents and exposing them to potentially harmful environments without consent.

Question 5

An experimenter is studying the facial expression of the emotion terror. He plans to point a loaded gun at participants as they enter the room and photograph them at the same instant. Such an experiment would be ethically

Accepted Answer

Pointing a loaded gun at participants poses significant psychological harm and distress, which outweighs any potential benefits, making the experiment ethically unacceptable.

Question 6

Mike's research has shown a positive correlation between the number of books in families' homes and the grade-point averages of the children in those families. Mike's results indicate

Accepted Answer

A positive correlation indicates that as the number of books in the home increases, the grade-point averages of the children also tend to increase, suggesting a tendency for children in such environments to perform well academically.

Question 7

Alexis is very excited because the data that she has gathered to support her Master's thesis have just been determined to be statistically significant. To have results that are statistically significant means

Accepted Answer

Statistical significance indicates that the results are unlikely to have occurred by chance, suggesting a low probability that random variables caused the observed effect.

Question 8

Ellen wants to see if the level of lighting in a room will affect the performance of individuals on an IQ test. She lets one group in her study have very bright lights and a second group have more normal lighting. She finds that the individuals in the bright light group have better scores on the test than do the individuals in the normal light group. The difference between the two groups' scores is statistically significant, which means

Accepted Answer

A statistically significant difference suggests that the observed difference in scores is likely not due to random chance, implying a real effect of lighting on performance.

Question 9

As the number of hours a student studies for an exam increases, the likelihood of his doing poorly on the exam decreases. Therefore, how many hours students study for an exam __________ the likelihood of their doing poorly on the exam.

Accepted Answer

The statement describes a negative correlation: as study hours increase, the likelihood of doing poorly decreases.

Question 10

Pick two countries with different cultures, one an individualist and the other a collectivist. Compare and contrast these cultures on at least three variables.

Accepted Answer

The answer of Pick two countries with different cultures, one...

Question 11

What does it mean to say that the results of a study are not statistically significant? The results

Accepted Answer

When results are not statistically significant, it means that they could reasonably be expected to have occurred by chance, indicating that there is not enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis.

Question 12

A researcher wants to know what conclusions she can reasonably draw from the data that she collected in her experiment. The researcher should use __________ statistics to understand what her data mean.

Accepted Answer

Inferential statistics are used to make conclusions or inferences about a population based on a sample of data collected from that population.

Question 13

You tell your parents that you've decided to study psychology and hope to be a psychologist someday. They smile and tell you, "that is a great thing to be, but what is there to study? Everyone knows that psychology began and ended with the work of Freud!" If you wanted to teach your parents about some of the other early schools of thought in psychology, what information would you share?

Accepted Answer

The answer of You tell your parents that you've decided...

Question 14

A psychologist proposed an experiment in which he would tell participants that their performance on an intelligence test was extremely low (regardless of actual performance)and then measure their self-esteem. What might an Institutional Review Board ethics committee say about such a proposal?

Accepted Answer

The Institutional Review Board may allow deception if it is revealed afterward and the emotional distress is short-lived, ensuring that participants are debriefed and any potential harm is minimized.

Question 15

Dr. Guavita asked fifty smokers a series of questions about their childhoods and then collected blood samples from them. He found a high correlation between levels of the stress hormone cortisol and amount of reported childhood trauma. Dr. Guavita's research shows that childhood trauma

Accepted Answer

The research shows a correlation, not causation, between childhood trauma and cortisol levels, suggesting a possible relationship with stress levels in adults.

Question 16

If you are reading about an experiment, what feature is necessary to give you confidence that there is a cause-effect relationship between the independent and dependent variables?

Accepted Answer

The answer of If you are reading about an experiment,...

Question 17

A researcher collects data on the amount of time children spend watching violent cartoons. He compares the behavior of a group of children who watch a lot of violent cartoons (Group 1)with a group of children who do not (Group 2). He finds that children in Group 1 are more aggressive on the playground than the children in Group 2. What can the researcher conclude?

Accepted Answer

The researcher can conclude that there is a relationship between watching violent cartoons and aggressive behavior, but causation cannot be determined from this study alone.

Question 18

Animals in psychological research typically experience

Accepted Answer

Animals in psychological research are typically provided ethical treatment, following strict guidelines to ensure their welfare and minimize harm.

Question 19

As you go south from Maine to Florida, your latitude decreases, but the average daily temperature goes up. This illustrates a

Accepted Answer

As latitude decreases (going south), the average daily temperature increases, indicating a negative correlation between latitude and temperature.

Question 20

Imagine you are watching the news with four psychologists, each of whom takes a different approach to psychology (biological, behavioral, psychodynamic, cognitive). After the lead story ends, you ask, "What would make someone do something horrible and violent like that?" How would each psychologist respond to your question?

Accepted Answer

The answer of Imagine you are watching the news with...

Quiz 1: Introduction to the Science of Psychology