Exam 2: Psychology as a Science

Martha administered a survey about child abuse to 2000 anonymous new parents and found no reports of a parent exhibiting this type of behaviour.Knowing the number of incidences of child abuse reported each year,Martha suspected that some type of bias attributed to the erroneous results.Which type of bias most likely affected this study?

Prior to the 19?? century,the field of psychology was based mainly on philosophy.What field is responsible for shifting psychology toward a science?

The direction of the relationship between two variables is given by a correlation coefficient's ___; the strength of the relationship is given by the coefficient's ___.

Describe the difference between a negative and positive correlation.

Which of the following alternatives correctly identifies BOTH an advantage AND a disadvantage of naturalistic observation?

Immediately after the title of a journal article in psychology,a brief overview of the research always appears before the introduction begins.This overview is called a(n)___.

Involuntary sterilizations were performed in Alberta between 1927 and 1972 on persons who were deemed unfit to reproduce.This is an example of

Dr.Nalling conducted a survey asking participants about their hygienic habits.She was very surprised to find that most of her participants reported exemplary hygienic habits.Which bias might account for this finding?

Recall your text's discussion of the behaviourist perspective in Chapter 1.According to your text,"Skinner argued [that] empirical - observable - information should be gathered first,and then theories … could be formulated from that." Skinner is endorsing ___ reasoning,promoted early on by ___.

A research ethics board would be concerned with all of the following EXCEPT

Why do many psychologists find current advances in brain imaging especially exciting,considering your text's discussion of the goals of psychology at the beginning of Chapter 2?

"I'm so pleased! I got a correlation between scores on my socio-sexual activity measure and scores on the anxious attachment scale,just like I predicted," enthuses Ahmed.Based on your text's discussion regarding correlations between complex behaviours and thoughts,the absolute value of Ahmed's coefficient should be

Protecting the identity and information collected from individual respondents in a research study refers to maintaining ___.

Dr.Katawa just learned that his research proposal did not get approval by the ethics review board.He wanted to study the effects of a new relaxation technique on risk-taking behaviour,and he proposed to tell the participants all the details of the study at the outset.Furthermore,he was going to compensate each participant with $1000 for only one hour of their time.What reason do you think the ethics review board rejected Dr.Katawa's proposal?

Which of the following examples shows how psychologists take care to protect the confidentiality of their participants?

What is a theory?

Why is experimental replication necessary?

Which of the following adjectives would a scientist use most readily in describing the universe?

What function does replication serve?

The natural law of ___ suggests that when something is set in motion,it influences other things.