Exam 1: Introduction and Research Methods

Compare and contrast the naturalistic observation method and the case study method.

When Susan learned that infants in Mayan families in Guatemala often sleep in their mother's bed until the child is two or three years old, she expressed her surprise that the Mayan culture was so "backward" compared with American culture. Susan's views are a good example of _____ in action.

In evaluating psychological research presented in the mass media, it is important to remember that the words correlation and causality mean the same thing.

After attending a series of lectures by Freud at Clark University in 1909, _____ described Freud as "a man obsessed with fixed ideas."

Mary Whiton Calkins was the first woman president of the American Psychological Association and the author of a comprehensive textbook on psychology.

Psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of early childhood experience and unconscious conflicts in the development of personality.

The development of techniques such as PET, MRI, and fMRI scans to study the structure and function of the brain has enhanced the work of psychologists in the _____ perspective of psychology.

Compared to a correlation of -.60, a correlation of +.60 represents a relationship between two factors that is twice as strong.

Humanistic psychology emphasized:

Which of the following statements best characterizes the principle of natural selection?

In a double-blind study:

Discovering the fundamental laws of learning through studying observable behavior is a focus of the _____ perspective of psychology.

Educational psychology is a specialty area in psychology that studies how people of all ages learn. It is also concerned with developing instructional methods and materials used to train people.

The factors in a hypothesis that can vary or change are called:

A single-blind technique is one in which neither the participants nor the researcher interacting with the participants is aware of the group or condition to which each participant has been assigned.

The specialty area in psychology that applies psychological principles and techniques to legal issues, such as the assessment and treatment of offenders, mental competency to stand trial, child custody, jury selection, and eyewitness testimony is called _____ psychology.

Correlational research:

Ethnocentrism is the use of our own culture as the standard for judging other cultures.

The emergence of the cognitive perspective in psychology in the 1960s represented a return to psychology's historical roots by focusing on how mental processes influence behavior.

One criticism of Crum and Langer's hotel experiment was that members of the informed group might have engaged in more exercise, eaten healthier foods, and so on after being told about the benefits of exercise even though they reported no changes in their behavior.