Exam 1: Section 3: Introduction and Research Methods

Positron emission tomography (PET) is an invasive imaging technique that provides color-coded images of brain activity by tracking the brain's use of a radioactively tagged glucose, oxygen, or other substances.

Students who are enrolled in a psychology class can be forced to participate in experiments and other types of research as part of the course requirements.

John Watson and B. F. Skinner were two important American psychologists associated with the school of behaviorism.

William James played a key role in establishing psychology in the United States.

Cognitive psychology developed as a reaction against the use of computers in science and industry.

Psychologists who take the evolutionary perspective apply the principles of evolution, including natural selection, to explain psychological processes and phenomena.

Comparative psychology is the branch of psychology that studies the behavior of nonhuman animal.

A psychologist who studies the relationship between work and people is most likely an industrial/organizational psychologist.

Francis C. Sumner was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology.

Many of the issues that are central to contemporary psychology have been debated for hundreds of years.

Dr. Bremmer investigates mental processes, including reasoning and thinking, problem solving, memory, perception, mental imagery, and language. Dr. Bremmer is a cognitive psychologist.

It is a universal cultural norm that infants and toddlers are not routinely supposed to sleep in the same bed as their parents.

Wilhelm Wundt defined psychology as the study of consciousness and emphasized the use of experimental methods to study and measure consciousness.

The purpose of the double-blind technique is to ensure that the researcher becomes an extraneous or confounding variable in the study.

Random assignment means that all participants in the study have an equal chance of being assigned to any of the groups or conditions in an experiment.

In striving to identify and understand consistent patterns of behavior, psychologists are skeptical. That is, they are willing to consider new or alternative explanations of behavior and mental processes.

An operational definition defines a variable in very specific terms of how it will be measured, manipulated, or changed.

The double-blind technique is used to guard against the possibility that a researcher will display subtle cues or signals that communicate what is expected from the participants.

In a double-blind study, neither the participant nor the researcher interacting with the participant is aware of the group or condition to which the participant is assigned.

Researchers using naturalistic observation try not to be detected by their subjects since the behavior patterns that exist naturally might not be apparent if the subjects knew they were being watched.