Mid Term Flashcards
- In the dice game played in section, which of the following is NOT a good strategy to use based on the law of
large numbers?
A) guess your partner’s true happiness score within a larger range (ex. +/- 5) when given only one measurement.
B) guess your partner’s true happiness score within a smaller range (ex. +/-1) when given only one
measurement.
C) guess your partner’s true happiness score within a smaller range (ex. +/-1) when given 9 measurements.
D) All of the above are good strategies
B) guess your partner’s true happiness score within a smaller range (ex. +/-1) when given only one
measurement.
- Suppose you are testing a “split brain” patient. You have her fix her eyes on the center of a computer screen.
On the left you flash a picture of a sad face, and on the right you flash a smiley face. You instruct her to both
“tell me what you see” and then “draw what you see.” (She will be drawing with her right hand.) What would
you expect from her?
A) She will draw a smiley face but say she saw a sad face.
B) She will draw a sad face but say she saw a smiley face.
C) She will draw a smiley face and say she saw a smiley face.
D) She will draw a sad face and say she saw a sad face.
C) She will draw a smiley face and say she saw a smiley face.
- Which of the following manipulations most dramatically reduced the bias that Loewenstein and Babcock
observed in their investigation of negotiations (the studies in which participants took the role of defendant and
plaintiff?)
A) Teaching people about self-serving biases
B) Having the participants write an essay in which they make the best argument they can from the position
opposite to theirs (that is, from defendant’s position if they are plaintiff, and from the plaintiff’s position if they
are defendant)
C) Having participants write an essay in which they listed the weaknesses in their own case
D) Using a positive mood induction to get participants into a more positive mood prior to making judgments
C) Having participants write an essay in which they listed the weaknesses in their own case
4. Which of the following is the space between two neurons that communicate? A) Dendrite B) Axon C) Synapse D) Dopamine
C) Synapse
4. Which of the following is the space between two neurons that communicate? A) Dendrite B) Axon C) Synapse D) Dopamine
C) Synapse
- In a one shot prisoner’s dilemma, when is it rational for a self-interested player to cooperate?
A) When there is a greater than 50% chance the other player will cooperate
B) When there is a greater than 50% chance the other player will defect
C) When the pay-off for mutual cooperation is greater than the pay-off for mutual defection
D) Never
C) When the pay-off for mutual cooperation is greater than the pay-off for mutual defection
[Please read this paragraph carefully, and use it to answer the following three test items.] Anne is interested in
whether happiness causes people to be more talkative. All the students in her college class (60 in all) agree to
help her. She meets with each student individually, and does not tell the students the point of her study. She
asks all students to first indicate whether s/he is in a relatively happy mood, or a relatively sad mood. Then
Anne asks the student, “Please tell me what you did today.” She counts the number of words each person uses
when describing their day. She finds that those in a sad mood use, on average, 25 words in their responses.
Those in a happy mood use, on average, 200 words in their responses. She correctly performs a statistical
analysis that indicates that the difference between the groups is unlikely to be just chance (p
C) Correlational
- Which of the following is the most important problem with the title Anne gave her study?
A) The study was confirmatory
B) There is no reason to be confident that the study would generalize to other samples
C) This is too small a sample from which to make inferences
D) She did not use random assignment and so shouldn’t infer causality
D) She did not use random assignment and so shouldn’t infer causality
8. The studies “dependent variable” is: A) mood B) word count C) 60 D) correlational
B) word count
9.Think about your reading of Stumbling on Happiness. The author discusses methods for measuring happiness.
Although no measure is perfect, which below does he argue to be the best (“gold standard”) measure of
subjective experience?
A) Blink response of startled participants
B) Reported re-experiencing while under hypnosis
C) Real-time self-report from an attentive individual
D) Electromyography
C) Real-time self-report from an attentive individual
- Think about the discussion of gossip in your reading of Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis. Which is NOT
argued to be true?
A) Gossiping creates chaos within society.
B) Gossiping serves as a way to punish those who are selfish.
C) Gossiping elicit gossiping, which enables people to keep track of everyone’s reputation without having to
witness their good and bad deeds personally.
D) Most people have negative views of gossiping.
A) Gossiping creates chaos within society.
- Which statement about social dilemma do you agree with (think about the game we played in class where
you each chose between $25 for you or $.50 for all others)?
A) It is not only selfish, but also irrational to defect, because the individual does better if he or she cooperates
B) These dilemmas, in theory, can be solved through educating people about what the true pay-offs are for
defection and cooperation.
C) Individuals that defect get more money than individuals that cooperate.
D) Tit-for-tat can be used to get people to cooperate, if the game is repeated.
C) Individuals that defect get more money than individuals that cooperate.
- Think about the in class experiment in which we got an approximation of the speed a nerve impulse travels
using a stopwatch and a ring of students. Which was key for doing this?
A) Subtracting the time the procedure took when participants squeezed their neighbor’s shoulder from the time
it took when they squeezed their neighbor’s wrist.
B) Subtracting the time the procedure took when participants squeezed their neighbor’s wrist from the time it
took when they squeezed their neighbor’s shoulder.
C) Separating out the contribution of all dependent variables
D) Recognizing the limits of correlational approaches
A) Subtracting the time the procedure took when participants squeezed their neighbor’s shoulder from the time
it took when they squeezed their neighbor’s wrist.
- Which of the following is not a key ingredient in natural selection
A) There is variation in off-spring (progeny aren’t exactly like their ancestors)
B) Smarter and faster organisms survive better, and so are more likely to pass on their genes
C) Some variation leads to greater reproductive success (“Reproductive fitness”)
D) There is some degree of heritability of variation (children are somewhat like their parents)
B) Smarter and faster organisms survive better, and so are more likely to pass on their genes
- Our brains fill in missing information. Which of the following most clearly illustrates this?
A) Traumatic events, in which bad experiences replay in our minds
B) The Blind Spot, which is usually not noticed
C) Déjà vu, in which we think we remember things, but often are wrong
D) Conscience, which we experience even when absent
B) The Blind Spot, which is usually not noticed
- According to the research we discussed in class, if someone is asked how painful a tooth procedure was,
which of the following is most likely to contribute the LEAST to their answer?
A) How painful it was at the very end
B) How painful it was at the very worst
C) How long the pain lasted
D) The three above all contribute about the same amount
C) How long the pain lasted
- Which was true of the video “Golden Balls” that we watched in class
A) It was a clip from a James Bond movie that illustrated how male risk-taking can be adaptive by the standards
of inclusive fitness.
B) It was a clip of a game show that is centered on the prisoner’s dilemma.
C) It was a clip from a James Bond movie in which the climax of the movie involves a prisoner’s dilemma
between the two main characters.
D) It was a clip of a game show that illustrated how male risk-taking can be adaptive by the standards of
inclusive fitness.
B) It was a clip of a game show that is centered on the prisoner’s dilemma.
axon
the long threadlike part of a nerve cell along which impulses are conducted from the cell body to other cells.
dendrites
a short branched extension of a nerve cell, along which impulses received from other cells at synapses are transmitted to the cell body.
synaptic terminal
The synaptic terminal contains neurotransmitters and cell organelles including mitochondria. An electrical impulse in the sending neuron triggers the migration of vesicles containing neurotransmitters toward the membrane of the synaptic terminal.
Spatial summation
Sherrington also noticed that several small stimuli on a similar location produced a reflex when a single stimuli did not.
This led to the idea of spatial summation or that synaptic input from several locations can have a cumulative effect and trigger a nerve impulse.
Speed of reflex arc:
Sherrington observed a difference in the speed of conduction of the reflex arc from that of the speed of an action potential.
He believed the difference must be accounted for by the time it took for communication between neurons to occur.
Functional localization
Correspondence between brain location and functional role
How do you find out what a particular part of the brain does?
Perturbation and visualization
corpus callosum
a broad band of nerve fibers joining the two hemispheres of the brain.
Negative Affective priming
impeding of responses to a target stimulus following prime stimulus when valence differs (e.g. unpleasant-pleasant).
Negative Affective priming
impeding of responses to a target stimulus following prime stimulus when valence differs (e.g. unpleasant-pleasant).
Somatic Markers Hypothesis
The cortex establishes connections between stimuli and bodily sensations. These bodily sensations are the embodiment of emotions.
e.g., the pang in your stomach you might get when you break a rule
Altruism
A motive to increase another’s welfare without regard for one’s self-interest.
Inclusive fitness
The expansion of the concept of the evolutionary fitness of a gene/trait to include benefits to relatives since relatives share parts of their genomes.
Kin selection
the evolution of characteristics which favor the survival of relatives of the affected individual.
Dependent variable
a variable (often denoted by y ) whose value depends on that of another.
