Assess Your Knowledge Chapters 1-4

Question 1

psychology involves studying the mind at one specific level of explanation

Answer 1

FALSE

Question 2

psychological influences are rarely independent of one another

Answer 2

TRUE

Question 3

single-variable explanations of behaviour are rarely found in popular psychology

Answer 3

FALSE

Question 4

an investigator studying a culture from the perspective of the inside would be using an emic approach

Answer 4

TRUE

Question 5

that we mutually influence each other’s behaviour is known as multiple determination

Answer 5

FALSE

Question 6

behaviourism focuses on uncovering the general laws of learning in animals, but not humans

Answer 6

FALSE

Question 7

cognitive psychologists argue that we need to understand how organisms interpret rewards and punishments

Answer 7

TRUE

Question 8

experimental psychologists do all their work in psychological laboratories

Answer 8

FALSE

Question 9

increasingly, modern psychologists believe that human behaviour is mostly attributable to our genes

Answer 9

FALSE

Question 10

advocates of determinism believe that free will is an illusion

Answer 10

TRUE

Question 11

theories typically explain one specific event

Answer 11

FALSE

Question 12

science is a body of knowledge consisting of all of the findings that scientists have discovered

Answer 12

FALSE

Question 13

scientific theories are general explanations and hypotheses are specific predictions derived from these explanations

Answer 13

TRUE

Question 14

good scientists are confident they’re right, so they don’t need to protect themselves against confirmation bias

Answer 14

FALSE

Question 15

metaphysical claims are not testable

Answer 15

TRUE

Question 16

most self-help books and psychotherapies have been tested

Answer 16

FALSE

Question 17

humans’ tendency to see patterns in random data is entirely maladaptive

Answer 17

FALSE

Question 18

according to terror management theory, our fears of death are an important reason for pseudoscientific beliefs

Answer 18

TRUE

Question 19

the fact that many people believe in a claim is a good indicator of its validity

Answer 19

FALSE

Question 20

pseudoscientific treatments can cause both direct and indirect harm

Answer 20

TRUE

Question 21

scientific skepticism requires a willingness to keep an open mind to all claims

Answer 21

TRUE

Question 22

when evaluating a psychological claim, we should consider other plausible explanations for it

Answer 22

TRUE

Question 23

the fact that two things are related doesn’t mean t hat one directly influences the other

Answer 23

TRUE

Question 24

falsifiability means that a theory must be false to be meaningful

Answer 24

FALSE

Question 25

when psychological findings are replicated, it’s especially important that the replications be conducted by the same team of investigators

Answer 25

FALSE

Question 26

psychological research suggests that we’re all capable of being fooled

Answer 26

TRUE

Question 27

analytical thinking tends to be rapid and intuitive

Answer 27

FALSE

Question 28

the psychological processes that give rise to heuristics are generally maladaptive

Answer 28

FALSE

Question 29

research methods help us get around some of the problems produced by uncritical use of intuitive thinking

Answer 29

TRUE

Question 30

case studies can sometimes provide existence proofs of psychological phenomena

Answer 30

TRUE

Question 31

rating data can be biased because some respondents allow their ratings of one positive characteristic to spill over to other positive characteristics

Answer 31

TRUE

Question 32

a correlation of -0.8 is just as large in magnitude as a correlation of +0.8

Answer 32

TRUE

Question 33

experiments are characterized by two, and only two, features

Answer 33

TRUE

Question 34

to control for experimenter expectancy effects, only participants need to be blind to who’s in the experimental and control groups

Answer 34

FALSE

Question 35

the tuskegee study violated the priciples of informed consent

Answer 35

TRUE

Question 36

milgram’s study would be considered unethical today because the shock could have caused injury or death

Answer 36

FALSE

Question 37

in debriefing, the researcher informs participants of what wil happen in the procedure before asking them to participate

Answer 37

FALSE

Question 38

before conductiing invasive research on animals, investigators should weigh carefully the potential scientific benefits of this research against the cost of animal death and suffering

Answer 38

TRUE

Question 39

the mean is not always the best measure of central tendency

Answer 39

TRUE

Question 40

the mode and standard deviation are both measures of dispersion

Answer 40

FALSE

Question 41

all statistically significant findings are important and large in size

Answer 41

FALSE

Question 42

researchers can easily manipulate statistics to make it appear that their hypotheses are confirmed

Answer 42

TRUE

Question 43

few psychological journals use a peer review process

Answer 43

FALSE

Question 44

when evaluating the quality of a study, we must be on the lookout for potential confounds, expectancy effects, and nonrandom assignment to experimental and control groups

Answer 44

TRUE

Question 45

most newspaper reporters who write stories about psychology have advanced degrees in psychology

Answer 45

FALSE

Question 46

“balanced” coverage of a psychology story is sometimes inaccurate

Answer 46

TRUE

Question 47

belief in ESP can be partly explained by our tendency to underestimate the probability of conincidence

Answer 47

TRUE

Question 48

dendrites are the sending portions of neurons

Answer 48

FALSE

Question 49

positive particles flowing into the neuron inhibit its action

Answer 49

FALSE

Question 50

neurotransmitters send messages between neurons

Answer 50

TRUE

Question 51

some antidepressants block the reuptake of serotonin from the synapse

Answer 51

TRUE

Question 52

neurogenesis is the same thing as pruning

Answer 52

FALSE

Question 53

the cortex is divided into the frontal, parietal, temporal and hippocampal lobes

Answer 53

FALSE

Question 54

the basal ganglia control sensation

Answer 54

FALSE

Question 55

the amygdala plays a key role in fear

Answer 55

TRUE

Question 56

the cerebellum regulates only our sense of balance

Answer 56

FALSE

Question 57

there are two divisions of the autonomic nervous system

Answer 57

TRUE

Question 58

hormones are more rapid in their actions than neurotransmittors

Answer 58

FALSE

Question 59

adrenalin ssometimes allow people to perform amazing physical feats

Answer 59

TRUE

Question 60

cortisol tends to increase in response to stressors

Answer 60

TRUE

Question 61

women have no testosterone

Answer 61

FALSE

Question 62

PET scans detect changes in cerebral blood flow that tend to accompany neural activity

Answer 62

FALSE

Question 63

most people use only about 10 perent of their brains

Answer 63

FALSE

Question 64

psychological functions are strictly localized to specific areas of the cerebral cortex

Answer 64

FALSE

Question 65

split brain subjects are impaired at integrating information from both visual fields

Answer 65

TRUE

Question 66

brain evolution is responsible for humans’ advanced abilities

Answer 66

TRUE

Question 67

the fact that the human brain is smaller than an elephant’s shows that brain size is unrelated to intelligence

Answer 67

FALSE

Question 68

heritability values can’t change over time within a population

Answer 68

FALSE

Question 69

identical twins have similar phenotypes (observable traits) but may have different genotypes (sets of genes)

Answer 69

FALSE

Question 70

adoption studies are useful for distinguishing nature influences from nurture influences

Answer 70

TRUE

Question 71

perception is an exact translation of our sensory experience into neural activity

Answer 71

FALSE

Question 72

in signal detection theory, false positives and false negatives help us measure how much someone is paying attention

Answer 72

FALSE

Question 73

cross-modal activation produces different perceptual experience than either modality provides by itself

Answer 73

TRUE

Question 74

the rubber hand illusion shows how our sense of smell and touch interact to create a false perceptual experience

Answer 74

FALSE

Question 75

selective attention allows us to pay attention to important stimuli and ignore others

Answer 75

TRUE

Question 76

the visible spectrum of light differs across species and can differ across individuals

Answer 76

TRUE

Question 77

the lens of the eye changes shape depending on the perceived distance of objects

Answer 77

TRUE

Question 78

red-green colour blindness results when rods are missiong but cones are intact

Answer 78

FALSE

Question 79

only nonhuman animals, like bats, engage in echolocation

Answer 79

FALSE

Question 80

people with visual agnosia have problems naming objects

Answer 80

TRUE

Question 81

the amplitude of the sound wave corresponds to loudness

Answer 81

TRUE

Question 82

sound waves are converted to neural impulses by creating vibrations of fluid inside the cocklea

Answer 82

TRUE

Question 83

place theory states that each hair cell in the inner ear has a particular pitch or frequency to which it’s most responsive

Answer 83

TRUE

Question 84

volley theory is a variation of frequency theory

Answer 84

TRUE

Question 85

as we age, we tend to lose hearing for low-pitchef sounds more than high-pitched sounds

Answer 85

FALSE

Question 86

the most critical function of our chemical snese is to sample our food before we swallow it

Answer 86

TRUE

Question 87

humans can detect only a small number of odours but thousands of tastes

Answer 87

FALSE

Question 88

there’s good evidence for a “tongue taste map” with specific taste receptors located on specific parts of the tongue

Answer 88

FALSE

Question 89

the limbic system plays a key role in smell and taste reception

Answer 89

TRUE

Question 90

the vomernasal organ helps to detect pheromones in many mannals but doesn’t develop in humans

Answer 90

TRUE