MCAT Psychology 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A patient with damage to the right parietal lobe fails to eat food on the left side of their plate and shaves only the right side of their face. This is best described as:
- Prosopagnosia
- Hemispatial neglect (Correct answer)
- Anosognosia
- Visual field cut (hemianopia)
Correct answer: Hemispatial neglect
Hemispatial neglect, most commonly following right parietal damage, causes the patient to ignore the contralateral (left) side of space.
Question 2: According to Kohlberg's theory of moral development, a person who follows laws because they recognize they were created by mutual agreement to maintain social order is operating at which level?
- Preconventional — Stage 2 (Instrumental purpose)
- Conventional — Stage 4 (Social system and conscience) (Correct answer)
- Postconventional — Stage 5 (Social contract)
- Conventional — Stage 3 (Mutual interpersonal expectations)
Correct answer: Conventional — Stage 4 (Social system and conscience)
Stage 4 (conventional morality) involves upholding laws and social order as ends in themselves, because society functions better when rules are followed.
Question 3: The bystander effect occurs because as the number of witnesses to an emergency increases, each individual feels:
- More empowered to help due to group support
- Reduced personal responsibility and relies on others to act (Correct answer)
- Greater emotional arousal motivating intervention
- More aware of the victim's distress
Correct answer: Reduced personal responsibility and relies on others to act
Diffusion of responsibility in larger groups leads each bystander to assume someone else will help, reducing individual likelihood of intervention.
Question 4: A researcher finds that children who watch aggressive TV shows become more aggressive. A critic argues that aggressive children simply prefer aggressive shows. This critique raises concerns about:
- External validity
- Construct validity
- Directionality (reverse causation) in correlational research (Correct answer)
- Demand characteristics
Correct answer: Directionality (reverse causation) in correlational research
The directionality problem in correlational studies means we cannot determine from the association alone whether TV causes aggression or aggression causes TV preference.
Question 5: Which of the following best describes the concept of 'priming' in cognitive psychology?
- Rehearsing information repeatedly to move it into long-term memory
- Exposure to one stimulus increasing the speed or accuracy of response to a related stimulus (Correct answer)
- Organizing information into meaningful chunks to enhance recall
- Retrieving memories by recreating the original encoding context
Correct answer: Exposure to one stimulus increasing the speed or accuracy of response to a related stimulus
Priming is an implicit memory effect where prior exposure to a stimulus (prime) facilitates faster or more accurate processing of a related target stimulus.
Question 6: According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which need must typically be satisfied before someone is strongly motivated to pursue self-esteem needs?
- Cognitive needs
- Self-actualization
- Love and belonging (Correct answer)
- Transcendence
Correct answer: Love and belonging
Maslow's hierarchy places love/belonging (social) needs below esteem needs; social connection must be adequately met before esteem-seeking becomes a primary motivator.
Question 7: A therapist uses systematic desensitization to treat a patient's spider phobia. The core mechanism of therapeutic change in this technique is:
- Flooding the patient with fear to exhaust the anxiety response
- Pairing relaxation with graduated exposure to extinguish the conditioned fear response (Correct answer)
- Cognitive restructuring of irrational beliefs about spiders
- Operant reinforcement for approach behavior toward spiders
Correct answer: Pairing relaxation with graduated exposure to extinguish the conditioned fear response
Systematic desensitization uses counter-conditioning by pairing a relaxation response with progressively more feared stimuli to extinguish the conditioned anxiety.
MCAT Psychology 4
A patient with damage to the right parietal lobe fails to eat food on the left side of their plate and shaves only the right side of their face.
This is best described as: