Exam 1: Psychology, Critical Thinking, and Science

Two research studies are conducted on the effects of body piercing on self-esteem. One study found that body piercing increased self-esteem, while the other one found a decrease in self-esteem. If you are a critical thinker, you would

A psychologist uses systematic desensitization to assist a student in overcoming test anxiety. This illustrates the goal of

If you want to determine whether there is a causal relationship between using the rSQ4R study method and final grades in a psychology course, you should use

Brain mechanisms involved in hunger and thirst would most likely be studied by a

In an experiment to test whether teaching a new memory strategy will improve students' test scores, student characteristics, such as motivation, are controlled by

The four goals of psychology are to describe, predict, understand, and __________ behavior.

Sometimes observers in naturalistic observation see what they expect to see even when it isn't occurring. This problem is called

To be statistically significant, a difference must be large enough so that it would occur by chance in less than five experiments out of 100.

You discuss your feelings of loneliness with a psychologist, who responds by having you consider how your own behaviors contribute and reinforce your loneliness, how your early childhood relationship with your parents influences current relationships, and how your distorted self-image may inhibit you from seeking new relationships. This psychologist is most likely

A researcher wants to determine the effect of sleep loss on human problem-solving. Subjects in an appropriate control group for such an experiment would be described as having

Regarding placebos, which of the following statements is FALSE?

Which of the following perspectives in psychology takes an interactionist view of human nature and emphasizes that behavior is related to the environment within which a person is born, grows up, and lives from day to day?

When current knowledge about an individual and his or her environment can be used to accurately forecast behavior at another time or in another setting, which scientific goal has been achieved?

Dr. Malloy explains to his patient that a person's threatening thoughts are often repressed so that he or she will be unaware of them. However, these repressed thoughts might "surface" in dreams, expressed emotions, or "slips of the tongue." Dr. Malloy has just explained the ideas of which school of thought in psychology?

By the late 1950s, which of the following took form as the branch of scientific psychology that sought to explain how covert mental processes, such as thinking, feeling, problem solving, perception, and the use of language, influence our behavior?

A teacher asks the school psychologist to observe her class through the two-way mirror and determine why the class disruptions are occurring. Just as the psychologist is walking into the room off to the side of the classroom to observe, the teacher assistant tells the psychologist, "Pay close attention to Claire and Roberto over there by the maps. I think they are the real troublemakers in the class." After this encounter, the school psychologist will have to struggle with

Psychologists can determine clear cause-and-effect relationships regarding human behavior through a controlled research design called the __________ method.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" was the motto of the behaviorists.

An in-depth focus on the aspects of a single individual best describes the

Correlations allow us to