MCQs Flashcards
The approach to the study of personality aiming to identify variables or traits that
occur consistently across groups of people is called:
Idiographic Approach
Who introduced the idea of the inferiority complex, stressing the importance of
social context in the development of personality?
Adler (social context)
Eysenck mapped the personality traits of extrovert-introvert and neurotic-emotionally
stable onto a biological framework of the ascending reticular activating
system. This included
The Reticulo-cortical and Reticulo-limbic pathwayds
R-C = arousal to physical stimuli R-L = arousal to emotional stimuli
According to Gray’s BAS/BIS biological model of personality, individuals who have
a highly active behavioural approach system are:
Impulsive
Digman (1990) raised what concern about the lexical hypothesis:
There are not enough words in the dictionary to capture personality
Eysenck’s Big Five model of personality included which three personality traits?
OCEAN Openness (to experience) Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism
Cattell took the 4,500 words that Allport had identified as related to personality
and employed a multivariate ‘data reduction’ technique to identify correlations
between personality descriptors and identify clusters of personality attributes. What
statistical approach was used?
Factor Analysis
True Statements about Pavlovian Conditioning:
- Pavlovian conditioning still works when unsignalled delays of longer than a minute occur
between the CS and the US. - Pavlovian conditioning may occur following the presentation of a CS and a US
- Pavlovian conditioning is sometimes referred to as classical conditioning
- Some conditioned stimuli are more resistant to extinction when trained as predictors of phobic
stimuli - Pavlovian conditioning is often subject to cue competition effects
Morgan’s cannon stated that:
Behaviour should not be explained by complex, high level mental processes if it can be explained by a
simple one
Premack (1971) demonstrated that the value of a reward was variable,
depending on the current state by showing that;
- Water deprived rats would run on a wheel for water (i.e., drinking reinforces running)
- Water satiated rats would lick water to run on a wheel (i.e., running reinforces drinking)
If you work every day, but only receive a pay check
at the end of the month. This is an example of:
A fixed interval schedule
Colwill and Rescorla (1985) trained animals to learn that Response 1 -> US1, and
Response 2 -> US2, before they devalued US1 by pairing this with lithium chloride to
induce illness. In a test stage, animals were allowed to make either Response 1 or
Response 2. How did animals respond?
R2 > R1
Habituation has been shown to be stimulus specific. A good example of this is:
Children habituated to a cheeseburger will salivate to apple pie
Blocking occurs when the outcome paired with a new stimulus is not surprising
(i.e., A+, AB+, B?) What steps will produce un-blocking and allow learning with B?
- Changing the outcome that occurs when B is introduced, I.e., AB++
> (unblocking)
or
- Removing Initial training with A+
> this would form an association with B+ that was half as strong
The Rescorla-Wagner model of learning includes a summed error term, capturing
cue competition. Which of the following training designs would lead to the strongest
association forming between stimulus A and the paired outcome?
A+
Donald Hebb proposed a learning theory stating that:
When individual cells are activated at the same time they establish connecting synapses.
Schultz (2007) showed a neural response to training with a stimulus-outcome
association such that after training:
Midbrain dopamine neurons show phasic activation following the conditioned stimulus.
A drug addict habitually takes heroin, but only in a specific context. If they were to take their drug in a new context, for the first time, which of these would be predicted as a result of their previous learning?
The addict will be more likely to overdose in the new context
Koob and Le Moal (1997) describe the response to a drug, such that the
____(1)____ which has a _____(2)_____ hedonic effect, is always followed by a
____(3)____ with a ____(4)_____.
alpha response which has a positive hedonic effect will be followed by a beta response with a negative hedonic effect
In a demonstration of Peak Shift, pigeons trained with S+ of 550nm and S- of 560nm, will
respond at test most strongly to light of what wavelength?
540nm
The other race effect describes a tendency to:
Being able to recall the faces of one’s own race more accurately (due to experience)
Symonds and Hall (1995) studied perceptual learning, assessing ability to discriminate between a
saline and sucrose flavour. Which training schedule produced the best perceptual learning?
AX/BX AX/BX AX/BX AX/BX
Collins and Quillian (1969) tested verification of semantic knowledge and found
that participants were quicker to confirm:
that a canary is yellow, than a canary has skin
providing evidence for their theory of semantic processing, due to the more Superordinate terms being recalled faster
Rips, Shoben and Smith (1973) demonstrated a typicality gradient, finding that
participants are quicker to identify as true:
“An apple is a fruit” than “a fig is a fruit”
(providing evidence against Quillian’s semantic knowledge model, since these reaction times should be the same, since the ‘distance’ to travel superiorly up the network is the same for both
The properties of “having wings,” “having feathers” and “being able to fly,” broadly co-occur across all birds. This is referred to as:
Coherent Covariation
Depressive realism, was a term coined by Alloy & Abramson (1979), after
observing that when students completed a zero contingency task:
Depressed students gave lower judgements of control than non-depressed students
(idea that this was because they felt generally out of control of things in the world, which is fairly realistic)
When estimating the heritability of a genotype, which factors are usually
considered:
A. Additive genetic variation and non-additive genetic variation
B. Additive genetic variation, shared environment and residual effects
C. Shared and non-shared environment
D. Gene x Environment interactions and shared environment.
E. Gene X Environment interactions, measurement error and shared environment.
The behavioural genetics approach to estimating heritability faces problems
because:
A. Complex human behaviours are the result of many genes of small effect
B. Genetic variance may be dominant or epistatic, rather than simply additive
C. Genes change our environment.
D. Adoption agencies are more likely to place a child with a high SES family than a low SES family.
E. All of the above.
Brickman et al (1978) assessed the effect of winning the lottery on life happiness.
They found that:
Lottery winners were equally happy with their lives as the control group
(as they had become accustomed to the finer way of living)
(happiness can be measured as deviation from baseline)
