Chapter 2

Question 1

prefrontal lobotomy

Answer 1

surgical procedure that severs fibers connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus

Question 2

heuristic

Answer 2

mental shortcut or rule of thumb that helps us to streamline our thinking and make sense of our world

Question 3

naturalistic observation

Answer 3

watching behavior in real-world settings without trying to manipulate the situation

Question 4

external validity

Answer 4

extend to which we can generalize findings to real-world settings

Question 5

internal validity

Answer 5

extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect interferences from a study

Question 6

case study

Answer 6

research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, often over an extended period of time

Question 7

existence proof

Answer 7

demonstration that a given psychological phenomenon can occur

Question 8

random selection

Answer 8

procedure that ensures every person in a populations has an equal chance of being chosen to participate

Question 9

reliability

Answer 9

consistency of measurement

Question 10

validity

Answer 10

extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure

Question 11

response set

Answer 11

tendency of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items

Question 12

malingering

Answer 12

the tendency to make ourselves appear psychologically disturbed to achieve some goal

Question 13

halo effect

Answer 13

the tendency of ratings of one positive characteristic to influence the ratings of other positive characteristics

Question 14

horns effect

Answer 14

opposite of halo effect

Question 15

correlational design

Answer 15

research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated

Question 16

correlation coefficients

Answer 16

the statistics that psychologists use to measure correlations ranging from -1.0 to 1.0

Question 17

scatterplot

Answer 17

grouping of points on a two dimensional graph in which each dot represents a single persons data

Question 18

illusory correlation

Answer 18

perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists

Question 19

experiment

Answer 19

research design characterized by random assignment of participants to conditions and manipulation of an independent variable

Question 20

random assignment

Answer 20

randomly sorting participants into two groups

Question 21

experimental group

Answer 21

in an experiment, the group of participants that receives the manipulation

Question 22

control group

Answer 22

in an experiment, the group of participants that does not receive the manipulation

Question 23

independent variable

Answer 23

variable that an experimenter manipulates

Question 24

dependent variable

Answer 24

variable that an experimenter measures to see whether the manipulation produces an effect

Question 25

operational definition

Answer 25

a working definition of what a researcher is measuring

Question 26

placebo effect

Answer 26

improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement

Question 27

blind

Answer 27

unaware of whether one is in the experimental or control group

Question 28

nocebo effect

Answer 28

harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm

Question 29

experimenter expectancy effect

Answer 29

phenomenon in which researchers hypothesis lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study

Question 30

double-blind

Answer 30

when neither researchers nor participants are aware of who’s in the experimental or control group

Question 31

demand characteristics

Answer 31

cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researcher’s hypothesis

Question 32

informed consent

Answer 32

informing research participants of what’s involved in a study before asking them to participate

Question 33

statistics

Answer 33

application of mathematics to describing and analyzing data

Question 34

descriptive statistics

Answer 34

numerical characterizations that describe data

Question 35

central tendency

Answer 35

measure of the central scores in a data set, or where the group tends to cluster

Question 36

mean

Answer 36

average; a measure of central tendency

Question 37

median

Answer 37

middle score in a data set; a measure of central tendency

Question 38

mode

Answer 38

most frequent score in a data set; a measure of central tendency

Question 39

variability

Answer 39

measure of how loosely or tightly bunched scores are

Question 40

range

Answer 40

measure of variability that consists of the difference between the highest and lowest scores

Question 41

standard deviation

Answer 41

measure of variability that takes into account how far each data point is from the mean

Question 42

inferential statistics

Answer 42

mathematical methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population