Exam 2: Thinking Critically with Psychological Science

To investigate the impact of alcohol consumption on sexual arousal,researchers plan to give experimental participants either an alcoholic or a nonalcoholic drink just prior to their watching a sexually arousing movie.Describe the appropriate ethical guidelines that the researchers would need to meet in order to conduct this study.

Replication of a research study is most likely to be facilitated by

Which of the following is not an attribute of the scientific attitude?

Displaying data in a scatterplot can help us see the extent to which two variables are

In a psychological experiment,the factor that may be influenced by the manipulated experimental treatment is called the ________ variable.

Debriefing refers to

Research participants drank either caffeinated or decaffeinated beverages in a study of the effects of caffeine on anxiety levels.Those who received the caffeinated drinks were assigned to the ________ group.

An understanding of behavior and mental processes can be misused to manipulate people.That's why some worry about the potential dangers of

Psychologists occasionally deceive research participants about the true purpose of an experiment in order to prevent them from

Researchers control factors that might influence a dependent variable by means of

Colette received an unusually high grade of A on her first biology test and a B+ on the second,even though she studied equally for both tests.Which of the following best explains Colette's deteriorating pattern of performance?

The children in Mrs.Shashoua's neighborhood make fun of her limp.She concludes that today's kids are typically cruel and insensitive.Mrs.Shashoua ought to remind herself that reasonable generalizations depend on

In a published report of a research study on social anxiety,psychologists included a 30-item questionnaire,which they had used to assess levels of social anxiety.The psychologists have thus provided their readers with a(n)

Conducting a case study best illustrates

If someone were to flip a coin six times,which of the following sequences of heads (H)and tails (T)would be most likely?

Statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller commented,"But with a large enough sample,any outrageous thing is likely to happen." What were they referring to?

To help control for possible confounding variables,researchers use

Which research method would be most appropriate for investigating the relationship between the religious beliefs of Americans and their attitudes toward abortion?

Unusual ESP subjects who defy chance when first tested nearly always lose their "psychic powers" when retested.This decline is best explained in terms of

The ethics codes of the American Psychological Association and the British Psychological Society urge researchers to