AP Practice Test Psychology
Milgram's famous shock experiment required participants' obedience and demonstrated the existence of what psychological phenomenon?
Correct answer: The power of authority
Despite the fact that many participants felt they were causing significant pain to the person they were shocking, they continued to use higher voltage simply because the test administrator instructed them to. This experiment demonstrated the influence that assumed authority has on people's actions and decisions.
Which of the following is an illustration of the fundamental attribution error?
Correct answer: Jensen is tripped in the hallway and believes the other person did it on purpose.
When judging an externally influenced behavior, people make a fundamental attribution error when they place too much emphasis on internal characteristics. Jensen committed the fundamental attribution error in the correct answer option because he automatically assumes the other person intended to trip him, but the other person could have tripped themselves or simply not been paying attention to their surroundings.
What exactly is a stereotype threat?
Correct answer: Fear of confirming negative stereotypes about one's race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation
The phenomenon of stereotype threat was discovered when researchers discovered that African-American students performed worse on a math test after being told that their racial group typically performs poorly on math tests. Students performed equally well regardless of race when a control group took the same test without this information.
What exactly is a morpheme?
Correct answer: The smallest unit of language capable of carrying meaning.
A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in the English language. A morpheme is not always a word, but it can be. It can also be used as part of a word. For example, the word "smaller" is composed of two morphemes.
1) small: this word's adjective and root
2) er: morpheme that converts a word into a relative adjective rather than a stand-alone adjective In language, a phenome is the smallest distinguishable unit of sound.
Which social psychology pioneer conducted a famous conformity experiment in which subjects were required to match lines?
Correct answer: Solomon Asch
This particular conformity experiment was carried out with 123 male participants under the guise of testing visual judgment. Participants were shown a series of cards of varying lengths. This experiment demonstrated that the majority of participants would conform to the responses of their "confederates" rather than trusting their own perceptual faculties.
Who is considered to be the father of cognitive therapy?
Correct answer: Aaron Beck
Aaron Beck is a psychiatrist who is credited with developing cognitive therapy for mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. His theories continue to have a significant impact on modern therapy. He also developed the Beck Depression Inventory, which is now one of the most widely used depression assessments.
Paul Ekman did not discover a universal facial expression for which of the following emotions?
Correct answer: Envy
Ekman discovered universal facial expressions for joy, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness through his studies of many diverse Western and Eastern cultures, including the isolated Fore tribes of Papua New Guinea, who could not possibly have learned these facial expressions from the media of another people.
A psychologist from which of the following schools of psychotherapy would most likely administer a Rorschach inkblot test?
Correct answer: Psychoanalysis
A Rorschach inkblot test shows a patient an ambiguous image and asks them to interpret what they see. This procedure would be most useful to a psychoanalyst, whose goal is to assist the patient in revealing their unconscious thoughts and desires.
What kinds of disorders have lithium salts been used to treat?
Correct answer: Bipolar disorders
Lithium is one of the most widely used and researched medications for bipolar disorder. They also play a role in the acute and long-term treatment of depression and mania. Lithium enters the central nervous system (CNS) after ingestion and can bind to a variety of receptors to inhibit norepinephrine production. It can also interact with neurotransmitters, causing the release of seratonin.
What is the abbreviation for CBT?
Correct answer: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
CBT is a structured, short-term therapeutic technique that aims to change a client's maladaptive cognitions and behaviors into more realistic and/or adaptive ones. CBT is commonly used to treat a variety of mood and anxiety disorders.
Which of the following has been most closely associated with an emphasis on the importance of humanistic psychology?
Correct answer: Positive self-concept
The way someone thinks about, evaluates, or perceives themselves is referred to as their self-concept. Humanistic psychology promotes positive self-concepts based on the belief that people are inherently good. This viewpoint also emphasizes the significance of personal agency in self-actualization.
What exactly is the act of reverting to childish behavior?
Correct answer: Regression
Regression, as defined by Freud, is the act of returning to an earlier stage of development in order to protect oneself.
Which personality theory emphasizes the value and significance of unconditional positive regard in relationships?
Correct answer: Humanistic
This is a fundamental principle of humanistic psychology.
What type of psychologist is most likely to describe depression as the result of an unconscious process in which anger is turned inward, most likely as a result of repression?
Correct answer: Psychoanalytic
Psychodynamic (or psychoanalytic) psychologists consider depression and other mental illnesses to be the result of unconscious mind activity.
Antisocial personality disorder is most commonly characterized by:
Correct answer: a lack of feelings of guilt.
The most common symptom of antisocial personality disorder is a lack of empathy, compassion, or feeling for other people. Those suffering from antisocial personality disorder have a long history of disregard for the feelings and well-being of others.
Emotional responses, according to the Schacter two-factor theory, are produced by
Correct answer: biology and cognition
Schacter's theory of emotional responses explains them in terms of the interaction of two factors: biology and cognition. Only after the biological and cognitive responses do we get an internal response.
According to which school of thought, individual development is influenced by both heredity and upbringing?
Correct answer: Interactionism
Interactionism holds that both "nature" and "nuture" contribute to human development. Maturationists believe that development is genetically programmed, whereas environmentalists believe that it is learned.
Which of the following processes is most directly responsible for withdrawal symptoms?
Correct answer: tolerance
With repeated use, most drugs cause tolerance — the need for increasing amounts of a drug to produce the same physiological effects. Tolerance gradually alters the levels of specific neurotransmitters in the brain, so when a person discontinues use, withdrawal symptoms occur as the body and brain readjust and compensate for altered levels of these neurotransmitters. Other concepts mentioned in the answers have nothing to do with the tolerance-withdrawal cause-effect cycle.
Using terminology from his cognitive development theory, how would Piaget describe the process of learning something new?
Correct answer: When we are unable to assimilate new information, we change our schemas by accommodating.
Piaget described schemas (the ways we think about the world) as going through an assimilation and accommodation process. When we encounter something new in the world, we first try to understand it using our existing schemas (assimilation). If that doesn't work, we may need to modify or expand our schemas to accommodate the new object, event, or idea (accommodation). As our schemas change and become more sophisticated, we learn through accommodation.
What conclusion would a psychometrician draw from a personality test that tells a person she is an extreme extrovert the first time she takes it and an extreme introvert the second time she takes it?
Correct answer: The results show that the test has poor test-retest reliability.
Test-retest reliability is a measure of a test's ability to produce consistent results when administered to the same person multiple times.
Which of the following would help you detect a gas leak in your car quickly?
Correct answer: olfactory receptors
The gas molecules would be detected by olfactory (smell) receptors in the nasal passages, which would send impulses directly to the brain for quick perception and response.
A population that is frequently studied in order to determine the relative effects of nature vs. nurture is
Correct answer: twins who are identical
Twins who are identical. Because they share the same genes, the differences between them are due to nurture. Because identical quadruplets are extremely rare, finding a large enough sample size for a study would be difficult.
Nursery school students exhibit more aggressive behavior after watching cartoons in which characters hit, punch, and kick other characters than after watching Barney. This observation most strongly supports
Correct answer: social learning theory
Albert Bandura's social learning theory of aggression, which was studied in the Bobo doll study, is supported by the children's more aggressive behavior after watching the more violent cartoon.
Nick's therapist tells him to relax, close his eyes, and breathe slowly whenever he feels fearful of being in an enclosed space. The therapist is employing a technique that is fundamental to
Correct answer: systematic desensitization
Systematic desensitization is a type of behavior therapy that is particularly effective in the treatment of phobias like claustrophobia in this case. Through classical conditioning, the patient learns to replace his or her fear with relaxation.
More than half of the human brain's volume is made up of
Correct answer: cerebral cortex
The cerebral cortex accounts for more than half of the volume of the brain. The cerebral cortex is the section of the brain thought to be responsible for higher thought processing, and it encompasses all of the brain's other structures.