EPPP Cognitive-Affective Bases of Behavior 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which brain structure is most centrally involved in the formation of emotional memories, particularly fear?
- Hippocampus
- Prefrontal cortex
- Amygdala (Correct answer)
- Basal ganglia
Correct answer: Amygdala
The amygdala is critical for fear conditioning and the storage of emotionally charged memories.
Question 2: Self-efficacy, as defined by Bandura, refers to:
- One's global belief in personal worth
- One's belief in one's ability to execute behaviors needed to produce outcomes (Correct answer)
- Actual skill level in a domain
- Outcome expectancies for a given behavior
Correct answer: One's belief in one's ability to execute behaviors needed to produce outcomes
Self-efficacy is a person's confidence in their capacity to perform specific behaviors to achieve desired outcomes.
Question 3: The concept of 'depressive realism' suggests that mildly depressed individuals:
- Grossly overestimate negative outcomes
- Are sometimes more accurate in judging personal control than non-depressed individuals (Correct answer)
- Show stronger self-serving bias
- Have impaired memory across all domains
Correct answer: Are sometimes more accurate in judging personal control than non-depressed individuals
Depressive realism refers to findings suggesting that mildly depressed people can judge contingency and control more accurately than non-depressed people who show positive illusions.
Question 4: Mowrer's two-factor theory of anxiety disorders proposes that fears are acquired through _____ and maintained through _____.
- Operant conditioning; classical conditioning
- Classical conditioning; operant (negative reinforcement) conditioning (Correct answer)
- Observational learning; classical conditioning
- Classical conditioning; positive reinforcement
Correct answer: Classical conditioning; operant (negative reinforcement) conditioning
Mowrer proposed that fears are initially learned via classical conditioning and then maintained because avoidance is negatively reinforced by relief.
Question 5: Which attentional phenomenon explains why people tend to notice and remember emotionally threatening stimuli more than neutral ones?
- Inattentional blindness
- Attentional bias toward threat (Correct answer)
- Change blindness
- Divided attention deficit
Correct answer: Attentional bias toward threat
Attentional bias toward threat is the tendency to preferentially allocate attention to potentially dangerous or emotionally negative stimuli.
Question 6: Cognitive load theory predicts that learning is impaired when:
- Material is overly simple and creates boredom
- Intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load exceed working memory capacity (Correct answer)
- Long-term memory schemas are activated
- Distributed practice is used
Correct answer: Intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load exceed working memory capacity
When the combined demands of task complexity (intrinsic) and poor instructional design (extraneous) overwhelm working memory capacity, learning suffers.
Question 7: The concept of 'metacognition' in clinical psychology most directly refers to:
- Unconscious emotional processing
- Thinking about one's own thoughts and regulating cognitive processes (Correct answer)
- Implicit memory retrieval
- The speed of information processing
Correct answer: Thinking about one's own thoughts and regulating cognitive processes
Metacognition involves awareness and regulation of one's own cognitive processes, including beliefs about thinking itself (e.g., 'worry is uncontrollable').
EPPP Cognitive-Affective Bases of Behavior 5
Which brain structure is most centrally involved in the formation of emotional memories, particularly fear?