Introductory Psychology – Test 1
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THIS test. Be sure to record the form
number on the ScanTron.
1. You are interested
in figuring out what part of the brain is “in charge” of detecting sensation in
a rat’s tail. Which of the following
would be least invasive, least hurtful, and least painful for the rat, and be
most likely to tell you what you want to know?
a. lesion
the rat’s parietal lobe
b. lesion
the rat’s occipital lobe
c. drill a hole in the rat’s skull and use an
electrode to stimulate the parietal lobe
d. pinch the rat’s tail while doing an fMRI of the
rat and look at the rat’s parietal lobe
e. do an EEG of the rat, focusing on the frontal
lobe, while you pinch its tail
2. General
systems theory (GST) argues that all disciplines study “entities” in similar
ways. Which of the following questions
would NOT be raised if an investigator started to examine the neurotransmitter
serotonin?
a. Why are
we interested in it?
b. What is
it composed of?
c. How is
it related to other neurotransmitters like it?
d. How do
we deal with a divergent example, or one that’s different from the others?
e. How
does it change (or develop) over time?
3. Is
the mind the subjective experience of the brain? This question is at the core
of
a. the mind-body debate
b. the nature-nurture debate
c. the evolutionary debate
d. the social-personality debate
e. the Lincoln-Douglas debate
4. When a person tells a lie, there is a
corresponding increase in:
a. skin
conductance
b. body
movements
c. occipital
lobe activity
d. shifting
eye motions
e. voice
volume
5. Cortisol
is directly related to all of the following EXCEPT:
a. release of glucose
b. fighting infection
c. levels of stress
d. immune
functioning
e. headaches
6. Why is it good that REM
sleep is typically associated with muscle paralysis?
a. Muscle
paralysis forces the body to relax so it can achieve a deeper sleep.
b. If the
body were not paralyzed during REM sleep, it would move as it does in dreams
and potentially dangerous movements would happen.
c. If the body
were not paralyzed during REM sleep, many people would have small epileptic
seizures, interrupting sleep cycles.
d. REM sleep causes the release of curare – a
powerful blocker of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (which is linked to
muscle activity); this explains why so many people die in their sleep.
e. Muscle
paralysis frees up energy so that the brain can produce beta waves, associated
with dreaming.
7. Which
is an example of observer bias?
a. when
researchers discriminate against others on the basis of gender, ethnicity, or
race
b. random
assignment to condition
c. when
researchers use median responses rather than mean responses in calculating the
effects of an experiment
d. choosing to
conduct a study using only male participants
e. a
researcher unconsciously “rewards” participants for answering questions in a
way that supports the researcher’s hypotheses
8. What is the best definition of cognitive
neuroscience?
a. the application of introspection to
neuroscience
b. the application of psychoanalysis to human
behavior
c. the merging of
cognitive psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience
d. the merging of
cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience
e. the merging of
applications of theology, cognitions, neurons, and science
9. Which
of the following best describes the "stream of consciousness"?
a. Thoughts
flow from the reticular formation, to the limbic system, to the cerebral
cortex.
b. Thoughts arrive as discreet parcels.
c. Thoughts arrive
continuously and are ever-changing.
d. Thoughts are
more complex than their elements.
e. Thoughts may be frozen in time and examined.
10. Natasha
and Alex were arguing over whose sleep disorder is worse. The dispute became surprisingly stressful for
both people. Natasha claimed her sleep
disorder is worse because she sometimes wakes up suffocating. Alex claimed his is worse because…Alex fell
asleep in the middle of the argument.
Which sleep disorder does each person have?
a. Natasha
has alexithymia; Alex has prosopagnosia.
b. Natasha has insomnia; Alex has sleep apnea.
c. Natasha has sleep apnea; Alex has
narcolepsy.
d. Natasha is a narc; Alex has sleep paralysis.
e. Natasha’s biorhythms are disturbed; Alex is an
insomniac.
11. Victor was
a participant in an experiment in a sleep laboratory. The researcher wanted to wake Victor up every
time he entered REM sleep. Which of the
following would be the best way for the researcher to know that Victor was in
REM sleep?
a. His brain would emit theta waves
because he was deep in sleep.
b. His muscle activity would increase because he
was having an active dream.
c. He would experience the myoclonic jerk because
that indicates the start of REM.
d. His brain would emit beta waves because it is
very active.
e. He will always enter REM sleep exactly
two hours after falling asleep.
12. What brain area is most involved in the
establishment of a phobia?
a. amygdala
b. adrenal
gland
c. hypothalamus
d. basal ganglia
e. Broca’s
area
13. Latrina is
an accountant for a large company.
Because people must turn their taxes in on April 15th every
year, she must work long hours from about March 10 until April 15. She has found that she starts to feel sick
every year around April 16. What is the
best explanation for this?
a. She
experiences an increase in worry because she fears that she may have made some
errors in the work she had done.
b. As soon as the stressful period is
over, her immune system breaks down and she starts to get sick.
c. Her immune system was not working well during
the period of high stress. As soon as the stress was over, her immune system
finally kicked in and her feeling sick is a sign of effective immune function.
d. Feeling sick after a stressor is a
normal psychosomatic process. Her
“illness” is all in her head.
e. The dopamine neurotransmitters in her parietal
lobe are fatigued causing a minor breakdown of her amygdala.
14. You step on a tack and it sticks into the big
toe on your left foot. How are you able
to feel the pain? Choose the best answer from below.
a. Nerves
in the big toe on your left foot fire; nothing else is needed.
b. Nerves in the big toe of your left foot
fire, sending messages to the big toe in your right foot.
c. Nerves in the big toe of your left foot fire,
setting off a relay of messages that travels through your spinal cord to your
parietal lobe.
d. Nerves in the big toe of your left foot fire,
setting off a relay of messages that travels through your spinal cord to your
frontal lobe.
e. Nerves in the big toe of your left foot fire,
setting off a relay of messages that travels straight to your adrenal glands.
The adrenal glands release cortisol, which causes your toe to swell and alerts
your parietal lobe to the injury.
15. Neurologist
Paul MacLean proposed that our skull holds not one brain, but three. These three brains, which he named the
“triune brain”, are called the reptilian brain, old mammalian brain, and new
mammalian brain. What supports this
idea?
a. The brain has three separate lobes on
each side, and the three lobes each have different specializations but are
interconnected.
b. Surveying the “three brains” is like an
archeological dig through evolutionary history, with each new brain adding new
and more complex abilities.
c. The brain has three physically separate
areas, all joined together by the corpus collosum.
d. Freud
also discussed the three brains – the id, ego, and superego – which correspond to
MacLean’s three brains.
e. The
theory of the triune brain explains the common occurrence of prosopagnosia.
16. What
material allows action potentials to move so quickly?
a. copper ions
b. lipids
c. intracellular
fluid
d. nodes of Ranvier
e. myelin
sheath
17. What function do dendrites perform?
a. They detect
electrical signals from enzymes.
b. They detect
chemical signals from other neurons.
c. They
transmit electrical signals to the peripheral nervous system.
d. They
integrate liquid signals from surrounding water reserves to create a safe
method of storing information.
e. They
were a famous Hip Hop group in the 1990s that played as a warm-up act for
Brittany Spears.
18. Your friend likes to make bets on horse races. Recently, he fell off his horse and injured
his prefrontal cortex. Since his fall, he has lost more bets than he used
to. Why might this be? Choose the best answer from the options
below.
a. The injury to his prefrontal cortex damaged
the interaction between his emotions and logic.
Because he no longer experiences anxiety, he can’t decide which are
risky (or scary) bets and which ones are not.
b. The injury to his prefrontal cortex
interferes with the two sides of his brain – the emotional side and the logical
side – talking to each other. He no
longer experiences anxiety that gets in the way of his making big bets.
c. The injury to his prefrontal cortex
damaged his pleasure center, and now he makes a lot more bets because it just feels
good.
d. The injury to his prefrontal cortex damaged
the interaction between his amygdala and his logic centers. He no longer
experiences fear that gets in the way of his making big bets.
e. The injury to his prefrontal cortex interferes
with his ability to count money and do basic math, so he bets larger amounts.
19. When researchers assess participants'
generalized intelligence at the beginning of the term and again at the end of
the term, what element of statistical analysis may they be testing?
a. reliability
b. validity
c. accuracy
d. statistics
e. intellectual
analysis optimistic retuning (IAOT)
20. What aspect of sleep appears to be most
important for consolidation of learning?
a. REM
b. increased
activation of the prefrontal cortex
c. delta
waves
c. sleep
spindles
d. bi-directional
snoring
21. The reticular formation is influential in
a. going from a
walk to a jog.
b. nodding
off during class.
c. sexual
arousal.
d. feeling
hunger pangs.
e. gravitational
pull and neuron firing
22. What system is responsible for pupils
dilating, stopping of food digestion, and increased heart rate?
a. parasympathetic
nervous system
b. endocrine
system
c. somatic
nervous system
d. sympathetic
nervous system
e. the
hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis
23. Which of the following is a “split-brain”
patient?
a. Someone
diagnosed with multiple personality disorder
b. Someone
who has had his or her corpus callosum severed
c. Someone
who has schizophrenia
d. Someone
who experiences epileptic seizures
e. Someone
who can’t make up their mind when given two similar choices
24. Is the field of evolutionary psychology based
on structuralism?
a. Yes, in
that nonconscious experience can be broken down into separate elements
b. No,
structuralism is based on intelligent design whereby structure could not
possibly evolve
c. Yes,
because organisms can build increasingly complex structures as they grow older
d. No,
structuralism focuses on how individuals understand conscious experience
whereas evolutionary psychology deals with behavioral adaptations to
environmental challenges
e. Yes, both
schools of thought were founded by Charles Darwin
25. Last night Trevor dreamed about being stuck at
the bus stop for 2 hours. He couldn’t
get to class, and he missed an exam.
Which of the following is NOT a plausible psychological explanation for
the cause of his dream:
a. Trevor has been stressed about his
upcoming exam, and the dream was a way to organize these fears.
b. Information from the temporal lobe and
frontal cortex was sending signals to the amygdala which is responsible for
emotional dreams.
c. There were random nerve impulses firing
in Trevor’s brain during the night, and he was trying to make sense of them.
d. Because he took a powerful sleeping
pill, he didn’t experience any REM sleep – which caused his dream to be far
more vivid than usual.
e. Trevor had a long wait at the bus stop earlier
in the day, and his brain was still processing this experience.
26. As students
walked into their Psychology 301 exam, they were asked how much sleep they had
gotten the night before. Later, the
teacher correlated the hours of sleep with the students’ grades on the
exam. The correlation (r) between hours
sleep and exam performance was most likely:
a. +0.80 –
a strong relationship suggesting that the more sleep, the better the
grades. The strength of the relationship
indicates that sleep quality affects grade performance.
b. -1.73 – a very strong negative
relationship suggesting that the less sleep that people got, the better their
grades. This is probably because people
who studied harder during the night knew more information
c. +0.32 – a modest link suggesting that
people who sleep longer tend to make better grades or, conversely, people who
are more prepared for the exam tend to sleep better the night before.
d. -0.51 – a modest link suggesting some
kind of negative emotional relationship between sleeping and test taking. This statistic suggests that people with
negative attitudes towards the exam may also have problems with sleeping.
e. -0.03 – an almost perfect link between
sleeping and grade performance. The 3%
of people who sleep the most are the ones with the lowest exams.
27. One of
the overarching differences between the activation-synthesis theory (AST) and
the evolved threat-rehearsal theory (TRT) of dreams is that
a. the
former emphasizes the emotional strength of dreams, whereas the TRT thinks of
dreams as meaningless images.
b. the
former thinks of dreams as a side effect of other processes, whereas the latter
focuses on the function of dreams.
c. the
AST emphasizes the social nature of dreams, whereas the TRT emphasizes the
cognitive aspects of dreams.
d. AST
deals only with dreams where people are making things (e.g., houses, cookies),
whereas the TRT deals with dreams where people are dealing with the destruction
of objects.
e. AST and TRT are exactly the same theory
but were proposed by different researchers at the same time.
28. Research on the subliminal effect of words on
later free associations shows that
a. people
generally know the things that affect their decisions.
b. people
are often not aware of the things that affect their decisions, but they create
reasons why they decided on the choice they did.
c. subliminal
effects simply don’t exist, unlike what was proposed by Freud
d. people
usually only remember words about which they have conscious awareness; they
tend to forget words linked to unconsciousness
e. the
hippocampus is directly connected to the parietal lobe
29. A neurotransmitter is a brain chemical that:
a. communicates
messages between hormones
b. communicates
messages between nerve cells
c. transmits
neurons from the cell body to the axon
d. transmits
signals via low voltage electrical signals
e. mixes
neuron transporters using potassium and sodium
30. Dr. Stinger
was interested in researching how far worker honey bees would fly from the hive
in search of food. What type of research
method would be best for this type of research?
a. Time-distance bi-directional study
b. Case study
c. Naturalistic observation
d. True experiment
e. Participant observation
31. Jorge has a
vivid memory of meeting Santa Claus at the mall when he was five years
old. In which part of the brain is this
memory likely stored?
a. The left hemisphere
b. The
frontal lobe
c. Wernicke’s area
d. The parietal lobe
e. In many different brain areas
32. Drinking alcohol has a calming effect because
it affects what type of receptor?
a. dopamine
b. epinephrine
c. glutamate
d. in
football, the tight end (one of the guys who catches passes)
e. GABA
33. When an area of the brain is damaged, what
happens to the surrounding gray matter?
a. It too dies
off.
b. It often
takes over the function of the injured area.
c. Connections
to the area it serves are strengthened.
d. It
changes cellular type to better accommodate the injured brain.
e. Through
enzyme action, it can change the DNA to help manufacture the damaged brain.
34. Dr. Lance
wants to study the effects of exercise on health. Of the following, which is the best operational
definition of health?
a. Someone who feels good
b. Trying to eat organic food products
c. Decrease in resting heart rate in beats
per minute
d. Someone who doesn’t need a therapist
e. Number of trips to
35. Which of the following is most closely
associated with the concept of causality?
a. manipulating
variables
b. recording
data
c. analyzing
data
d. observing
behavior
e. correlation
coefficients
36. The primary purpose of an Institutional
Review Board (IRB) is to ensure that researchers:
a. have
received proper research licenses
b. conduct
experiments that are likely to be published
c. perform
ethical experiments
d. follow
accounting practices that meet state and federal guidelines
e. are
reviewed each year to satisfy the institution’s guidelines
37.
a. Occipital lobe; Broca’s area
b. Temporal lobe; Broca’s area
c. Occipital lobe; Wernicke’s area
d. Temporal lobe; Wernicke’s area
e. Parochial lobe; Pennebaker’s area
38. What
controls most endocrine activity?
a. pancreas
b. liver
c. endocranium
nerves
d. hypothalamus
e. gonads
39. What pair of words best matches genotype and
phenotype, respectively?
a. underlying
and observed
b. observed
and dominant
c. risky and
recessive
d. phenomenal
and genius
e. functionalism
and Gestalt
40. Rachel was
driving down Mopac and saw a bird in her left visual field. How is the bird likely to be seen and
processed by the brain?
a. The bird is only picked up in the right
eye because the right part of the brain controls the left part of the body.
b. The bird is only picked up in the left
eye because the bird was closer to the left eye.
c. The right side of both eyes because the
left visual field will be processed in the right brain.
d. Both eyes see the bird, but only the
left side of the brain will ever have knowledge of it.
e. Neither eye because both are focused on
driving, and it is difficult for the brain to process two things at once.
Answer key:
1. d
2. a
3. a
4. a
5. e
6. b
7. e
8. c
9. c
10. c
11. d
12. a
13. c
14. c
15. b
16. e
17. b
18. a
19. a
20. a
21. b
22. d
23. b
24. d
25. d
26. c
27. b
28. b
29. b
30. c
31. e
32. e
33. b
34. c
35. a
36. c
37. c
38. d
39. a
40. c