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PSY 215 Exam 1 Flashcards

1
Q

What is the truth?

A

-Truth is not something that we currently possess but that we strive towards
-The truth has been influenced by outside factors such as our perceptions
-Current discoveries are only the current opinion and never the final one

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2
Q

What are scientific ways of knowing?

A

Scientific method

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3
Q

What are non-scientific ways of knowing?

A

Intuition, superstition, rational-inductive, and argument

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4
Q

What is superstition?

A

Violates known laws of nature, false association of causation
Ex: wishing, knocking on wood, good luck charms

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5
Q

When does superstition become a problem?

A

When superstitions start to impact peoples ability to function in society

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6
Q

Where do superstitions come from?

A

Subjective feelings, cultural/learned, personal experiences

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7
Q

Can superstitions change outcomes?

A

Yes, based on how an individual changes their behaviors

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8
Q

Do people know that their superstitions are irrational?

A

Yes

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9
Q

What is intuition based on?

A

Personal feelings (subjective), knowledge, emerges without reason

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10
Q

What is the difference between superstition and intuition?

A

-Intuition may come without the use of reason BUT may not be contrary to reason
-Superstition isn contrary to the laws of nature and physics
-Intuition CAN be true
-Few life decisions should be made using superstition but intuition can be useful

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11
Q

What is intuition?

A

Arises without conscious reasoning, may be difficult to state why you feel the way you do, suffers from confirmation bias

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12
Q

What is confirmation bias?

A

Remembering times intuition was right and minimizing the times it was wrong

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13
Q

When can intuition be useful?

A

Picking from a group of good choices, fast decisions

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14
Q

What is authority?

A

Information is derived from sources one dems to be trustworthy and credible

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15
Q

Who is deemed to be trustworthy?

A

Friends, relatives, specialist, teachers, newscasters

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16
Q

How do authority figures come by their information?

A

Experience, another authority, direct observation

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17
Q

What are rational-inductive arguments?

A

-Use of previous knowledge and experience, logic, and reasoning
-Can be objective but susceptible to subjectivity
-Used frequently in academic fields like literature, history, and philosophy
-Not all arguments have abundant research behind it
-Only as good as the information it’s based on

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18
Q

What is the scientific method?

A

Used in science to acquire knowledge, information collected in objective and systematic way, allows information collected to be unambiguous and reduces bias

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19
Q

What is a hypothesis?

A

Testable explanation for how or why a phenomenon occurs

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20
Q

What can we do to prove our hypothesis?

A

Data can support it, our data can also fail to support it

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21
Q

Does the use of the scientific method make it completely objective?

A

No, the systematic approach makes the data collection and testing of the hypothesis objective

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22
Q

Is the scientific method always best?

A

Some questions require a definitive choice without exploring all options or rapid response

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23
Q

What are confounds?

A

Flaws in the design of a research experiment that introduce alternative explanations of obtained results

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24
Q

What is the goal of the scientific method?

A

Narrow down list of possible explanations to a single explanation for your results

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25
What is the vehicle in an experiment?
Everything but the active ingredient of interest, given to individuals in the control group to count for the effects of administration as well as ingredients
26
What are the levels of the IV?
Different ways IV is altered
27
What are subject variables?
Measurable characteristic of the participant that CANNOT be manipulated by the researcher, can provide correlational not causal information
28
What are examples of a subject variable?
Substance use history, medical conditions, age/height/weight/gender identity, marital status, religion, income, and education level
29
What is causal information?
-Manipulation of a IV -Ability to say X caused Y -Some areas of science/methods lend themselves to higher levels of experimenter control
30
What is correlational information?
-No manipulation of IV -Often used when subject variables are of interest -CANNOT use causal language -Correlation/Association/Relationship between X and Y
31
What is the description of the scientific method?
Careful recording of the observation of some phenomena
32
What is the explanation of the scientific method?
Once the phenomena has been observed and described, we can dig deeper to try and determine an explanation for the phenomena
33
What purpose should research have?
Understanding and predicting behavior, improving efficiency, disease treatment, aging, basic function
34
What is law?
Specific scientific statements within theories, explained in mathematical terms, that have an over abundance of data to support them, accuracy is beyond reasonable doubt
35
What are theories?
Set of related statements that can explain and predict phenomena
36
What are principles?
Part of a theory that predict a phenomena with a certain level of predictability Ex: principle of positive reinforcement
37
What are beliefs?
Statements on personal feelings and subjective knowledge, are not scientifically testable, generally avoided in theories due to inability to be tested, theory of the id, superego, and ego, can still be beneficial to organize and conceptualize the mind
38
What is the mechanistic model?
Psychological processes can be understood the same as mechanical or physiological processes are understood Ex: man as machine, simple/reductionist, nurture, Skinner
39
What is an organismic model?
Development and motivation comes from within and is inherent, Holistic approach Ex: Piaget (searching for object of permanence), nature,
40
What is a dialectic model?
Mix of environment and self, nature and nurture, Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development
41
What is parsimony?
Simplicity, support, assumptions, statement then theories of possibility based on that theory
42
What elements should theories have?
Stated plainly with clearly defined terms, must be testable, be apparent and accurate
43
What are Boolean search terms?
And, or, not
44
What are review papers?
No new original studies, cover the scope of existing literature, good source for reference material, check primary sources
45
What is meta-analysis?
Systematic synthetization of existing studies, run statistical analyses using the results from all included studies, determine the overall EFFECT, check primary sources
46
What to avoid when writing?
Redundancy, ambiguity, long and complex sentences
47
What you should always do when writing?
Clear, concise, specific, simple
48
What is title?
Descriptive, concise, relevant
49
What is the abstract?
Short summary of paper, good way to check if the paper is relevant to project or not, DO NOT stop at abstract
50
What is the introduction?
Establishes topic importance, outlines previous literature, ends with authors’ hypotheses
51
What are the methods?
Participants/subjects, apparatus/task, procedure, drugs, imaging techniques, statistical tests
52
What are the results?
Output from statistical tests, graphs/figures/tables
53
What are figures?
Some kind of graph title, label and look at axes, need legend to define areas of figure
54
What are the types of figures?
Bar charts, histograms, line charts, scatterplots, box plots, tables
55
What is the discussion?
Interpretations, connection to previous literature, limitations, future directions
56
What are the references?
ONLY contain works cited within text, GREAT resource to find other sources, APA cited, Author-> title-> journal name—> volume of journal-> page number-> doi number
57
When to cite?
Summarizing/rephrasing others, direct quotation, no need to cite if common knowledge
58
What are scientific journals?
Can be published monthly, bimonthly, weekly, quality can be assessed by impact factor
59
What are impact factors?
Excellent >= 10 Good: 3-10 Acceptable: 1-2
60
What is a blind review?
Reviewers don’t know who wrote it and researchers don’t know who is reviewing it
61
What do researchers check for?
Experimental design, statistical methods, limitations, authors interpretations are reasonable and align with results
62
What is the business model of scientific journals?
Relies on subscriptions, no advertisements, reviewers are rarely paid, impact on dissemination of scientific information
63
Why do we have statistics?
We can’t study everyone in a population, generalization
64
What is selection bias?
Convenience, under-coverage, non-responses, self-selection, random assignment
65
What is random assignment?
Random group assignment once in the study
66
What is random selection?
Going into the study, randomly selecting members of the population
67
What is self-assignment?
Research participants choose not random assignment, no clue why subjects would choose what and a lot of confounding variable possibilities
68
What is probability?
Chance a given event will occur, coin, dice, cards
69
What is the mode?
Nominal data, score that occurs most frequently
70
What is describing the data?
Descriptive statistics, data averages, spread of data
71
What is the median?
Middle point in data, must be ordered before determining middle value, provides information about data spread
72
What is the mean?
Average of scores, most commonly used metric, easy to manipulate mathematically, add up all values and divide by samples in set, outliers
73
What is reliability?
Outcomes are consistent when repeatedly measured
74
What is validity?
Instrument used is measuring what you claim to be measuring
75
What is nominal scale?
Categorical, order is arbitrary, labels (eye color, education level, age groups)
76
What is the ordinal scale?
Order is important, distance between categories may not be equal
77
What is the interval scale?
= units of measurement across scale, order and relevant quantity of characteristic being measured, no true zero value (complete a sense of characteristic) and negative numbers possible
78
What is the ratio scale?
Order matters, = distance between units, true zero, allows there to be ratio comparisons of values, length/weight/time/temperature
79
What are the levels of measurement?
Nominal: named Ordinal: named, natural order Temperature: named, natural order, =interval between variables Ratio: named, natural order, =interval between variables, has a “true zero” between values can be calculated
80
What are outliers?
Values that are inordinately small or large given as much weight in determining mean as any other score, pulls the mean
81
What is standard deviation?
Measure of data dispersion, relative to the mean, how far score is from mean
82
What is variance?
How much spread in data
83
What is range?
Number of possible values for scores in data set, does NOT indicate how data is distributed (subtract HS from LS)
84
What are correlations?
Degree and direction of relationship between variables, r-value: -1 to +1, farther from 0
85
What is variance?
Difference between groups/difference in group = effect of IV+error variance/error variance
86
What are the different types of variance?
Effect: variance between groups Error Variance: within groups
87
What type of scale would substance use status be (have self-exposed to nicotine or have not self exposed)?
Nominal
88
If you randomly draw a card from a standard playing card deck, what is the probability of drawing an even numbered card?
20/52
89
Which of the following is NOT true regarding superstition?
While they form in the absent of reason, they do not contradict reason and MAY be true
90
Intuition suffers from conformation bias. What does that mean?
Individuals remember the times their intuition was right, while minimizing the times it was not correct
91
Your car starts making weird sounds and flashing lights on the dashboard. Which authority figure seems most trustworthy to get your car fixed?
A mechanic who takes the car’s history, does an initial inspection, and reports back 2-3 likely causes with a run-down of the options and the associated costs
92
Which of the following is a hypothesis?
I hypothesize that individuals with Parkinson’s will show better quality of life scores when treated with a mixed treatment approach (physical therapy and dopaminergic drug therapy) than those treated solely with dopaminergic drug therapy.
93
Why are confounds bad in your experimental design?
The make the results ambiguous as they provide alternative explanations for the effects found
94
Which theory best fulfills the requirements of parsimony?
I think Teri’s flat tire was caused from her driving on broken glass earlier that day
95
Wanda is interested in perception of an eye witness' occupation on trustworthiness. She writes a scenario of an ice cream theft at the beach with an eyewitness willing to give testimony which includes information about the witness' gender, age, and occupation. She make different versions of the scenario that give the eye witness a different occupations (unemployed, teacher, doctor, chef, computer engineer, and waiter). They send one of the scenarios to their participants with a survey that asked questions about the credibility and trustworthiness of the eyewitness. Identify the independent variable and the number of levels.
Occupation, 6
96
Marital status, education level, income, religion, age, substance use history, and medical conditions are all examples of________________
Subjective Variables
97
In some rare instances, a correlation is so strong (r ≥ 0.95) that causal language CAN be used.
False
98
Which of the following should be avoided when writing about science?
Ambiguity
99
True or False: We do not need to read primary sources that are cited in secondary sources (such as review papers and meta-analyses) and can trust the interpretations of these studies by the secondary source authors.
False
100
True or False: AND, OR, and NOT are examples of Boolean Search Terms
True
101
High quality journals typically have lower impact factor scores
False
102
A researcher is measuring blood alcohol levels. She runs each sample 3 times and take the average of the 3 as the reading. For sample 1, she gets 0.087, 0.080, and 0.095 for an average of .087. The dose of alcohol given to this participant should have resulted in a blood alcohol reading of 0.087. This instrument is________________
Valid but not reliable
103
Which is an example of random selection?
A name is drawn from a hat to determine the winner of a raffle, After a careful screening process, Sydney has identified 248 individuals who fit her study. She then assigns each person a number, 1-248, and uses a random number generator to pick 50 to participate in the study
104
Why is lack of random assignment a problem?
Lack of random assignment can inject confounds into the study
105
Identify likely concerns with the sample described below. Tanner wants to run a study looking to determine if someone’s birth state correlates to GPA. They ask their friends, who all attend the University of Kentucky for their birth state and their GPA.
More than one of the above is likely biasing the sample
106
How would you write an in-text citation for a paper written by two authors named Jane Doe & John Smith?
(Doe & Smith, 2023)
107
Which of the following statements would you NOT need to cite?
One limitation to our study is that there was no control group.

PSY 215 (4 decks)

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