PSYC 100 Final Exam (UMUC)

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1. Which of the following is most likely to be an assumption of psychological
researchers? (A) Human behavior is unpredictable and random. (B) Behavior
follows discoverable, predictable patterns. (C) All explanations of behavior are
to be found in the environment. (D) Human behavior is the result of predetermined forces acting upon the individual.
____2. Which of the following outcomes is most likely when you are relearning previously learned material? (A) You will need to study twice as long, because of
interference by all the things you learned between the original learning and the
relearning. (B) Your free recall ability will increase faster than any type of recognition memory. (C) You will relearn the material faster and more easily than
you did during the original learning. (D) Although the material can be relearned,
you will be more susceptible to the effects of context-dependencies (e.g., statespecific learning, mood congruence, encoding specificity).
____3. The most common way of assessing attachment in human infants is to: (A) have
the child track a picture of her mother with her eyes; (B) see if the child smiles at
a picture of her mother; (C) determine the predominant child-rearing style of the
parents; (D) see how the child responds when separated from and reunited with
her mother.
____4. Contemporary memory researchers: (A) are no longer conducting research on
short-term memory; (B) have turned to the study of memory for meaningful
materials; (C) have given up the goal of discovering the basic principles that

underlie human memory; (D) have concluded that there is no relationship between how well information is learned and the difficulty well have remembering it.
____5. Kathleen trains her dog by giving him a treat every time he obeys her and
scolding him whenever he disobeys. Her training method most closely resembles: (A) the law of effect; (B) the doctrine of specific nerve energies;
(C) Gestalt principles of organization; (D) functionalism.
____6. One important function of the sympathetic nervous system is to: (A) increase the
flow of blood to the digestive system at appropriate times; (B) increase the flow
of blood to the muscles at appropriate times; (C) activate functioning of the
kidneys and bowels; (D) stimulate the production of growth hormone.
____7. Maternal hormones: (A) have little effect on fetal development, since the fetus
is isolated from the mothers blood supply; (B) can have important effects on
such things as intellectual development and gender identity; (C) can affect physical development, such as the time a child will begin walking, but not mental
abilities, like IQ; (D) none of the above. PSYC 100 - Introductory Psychology University of
Maryland University College
Final Examination Fall, 2013
____8. Ebbinghaus observed that he needed fewer study-test trials to relearn a list that
he had already learned at an earlier time. He referred to this residual effect of
prior learning as: (A) priming; (B) savings; (C) partial report; (D) the serial
position effect.
____9. On what basis was intelligence compared to hard-core pornography in lecture?
(A) Both are inherited. (B) Both are easy to define but difficult to recognize.
(C) Both are difficult to define but easy to recognize. (D) Both are easily obtained in large cities.
____10. Whenever Aaron, who has been involved in his schools Theater department for

a few years, first gets a script, he practices alone, repeating his lines until they
sound realistic to him. He notices that his performance improves significantly
whenever he participates in dress rehearsals with the other actors. Which of the
following best explains his improved performance? (A) deindividuation; (B) bystander intervention; (C) social facilitation; (D) groupthink.
____11. If you want to increase your chances of successful recall, a general rule is that
your ability to remember will be greatest when: (A) there is a match between
the circumstances surrounding your encoding and your retrieval; (B) there is a
mismatch between the circumstances surrounding your encoding and your retrieval; (C) information from the outside world is prevented from entering your
short-term memory; (D) information from long-term memory is prevented from
entering your short-term memory.
____12. Two research strategies, twin studies and adoption studies, have enabled researchers to discern the relative contributions of nature and nurture to many
aspects of the human condition, including the development of cognitive abilities
and various types of psychopathology. These two research strategies are popular
because twin studies control for ______ and adoption studies control for ______.
(A) nature, nurture; (B) nurture, nature; (C) environmental effects, learning from
experience; (D) acquired habits, innate tendencies.
____13. Research on flashbulb memories indicates that: (A) decay does not occur for
these memories; (B) interference does not occur for these memories; (C) these
memories are largely susceptible to the same errors as other types of memory;
(D) these memories are immune to the kinds of errors that occur with other types
of memory.
____14. Which of the following conclusions was drawn from George Sperlings (1960)
studies comparing whole report and partial report of the contents of a brief
visual display? (A) Very short term sensory memory can hold more infor-

mation than was once thought possible. (B) Semantic encoding leads to the
deepest levels of processing. (C) Information that is unrehearsed will not be
transferred (i.e., consolidated) to long-term memory. (D) Memory reports
of eyewitnesses are unreliable. PSYC 100 - Introductory Psychology University of
Maryland University College
Final Examination Fall, 2013
____15. Betty, who has stopped menstruating, knows that she is grossly underweight.
Yet she claims to see fat on her when she looks in the mirror. Iris, who still
menstruates and is of normal weight, regularly engages in binge eating followed
by purging. Which of the following statements most accurately characterizes
their conditions? (A) Betty suffers from anorexia nervosa and Iris suffers from
bulimia nervosa. (B) Iris suffers from anorexia nervosa and Betty suffers from
bulimia nervosa. (C) They both suffer from bulimia nervosa. (D) They both
suffer from anorexia nervosa.
____16. Patients like H.M., who suffer from the classical amnesia syndrome: (A) can
never learn anything new; (B) cannot recall explicit memories formed before
brain damage; (C) have an implicit memory deficit; (D) have relatively normal
short-term memory.
____17. Hypnotized eyewitnesses: (A) never recall useful details; (B) have insights and
abilities they do not possess when not hypnotized; (C) can sometimes be induced
to remember false information; (D) always remember events accurately.
____18. Which of the following can be concluded from Posners studies of mental
coding? (A) Additional processing speeds up processing time. (B) Additional
processing leads to slower response times. (C) Faster response times mean
greater task difficulty. (D) Faster response times are always associated with
greater accuracy.
____19. The Gestalt group of psychologists well known for studying: (A) perceptual per-

formance in stressful conditions; (B) issues of free will and personal responsibility; (C) organizational processes in perception; (D) the physiology of the eye.
____20. Using the High Amplitude Sucking Procedure (HASP), what would you expect
to happen if an auditory stimulus presented to a one month-old human infant
remains the same? (A) The rate of sucking will remain constant. (B) The sucking rate will gradually increase. (C) The sucking rate will fluctuate. (D) The
sucking rate will decrease.
____21. Our ability to experience so many different flavors, despite the limited number
of basic taste sensations, demonstrates the interplay between our senses of taste
and: (A) smell; (B) touch; (C) vision; (D) hearing.
____22. You and your friends go out to dinner. The waiter is slow to greet you, confuses your drink orders, and forgets to bring your appetizers. Some of your
friends complain that the waiter is a jerk and that they dont intend to tip him.
You reply that youve waited tables in the and that the waiter is probably
just having a bad night. Your friends are making a(n) ______ attribution,
while you are making a(n) ______ attribution. (A) dispositional, situational;
(B) situational, dispositional; (C) groupthink, altruistic; (D) altruistic, groupthink. PSYC 100 - Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College
Final Examination Fall, 2013
____23. A food-deprived rats hypothalamus is electrically stimulated with a chronically
implanted electrode, and the rat immediately stops eating. The electrode is most
likely to be located in the rats: (A) stomach; (B) LGN, or lateral geniculate nucleus; (C) pituitary gland; (D) VMN, or ventromedial nucleus.
____24. The separation of figure from ground is: (A) an illusion; (B) inherent in the
visual stimulus; (C) a sensory process, accomplished by the receptors; (D) a
perceptual process, accomplished by the brain.
____25. Beth Loftus research on eyewitness memory has shown that: (A) eyewitness

testimony is very accurate, regardless of pretrial investigation; (B) retrieval cues

can bias eyewitness accounts; (C) eyewitness memory is highly resistant to leading questions; (D) women are generally more accurate eyewitnesses than men.
____26. The confidence expressed by a witness reporting his memory for the witnessed
event is: (A) a very good indicator of the accuracy of his memory; (B) a good
indicator of the accuracy of his memory, but should not be trusted because the
witness may be lying; (C) a very poor indicator of the accuracy of his memory;
(D) hardly ever taken into account by a jury.
____27. Sperlings (1960) procedure was called a partial report procedure because:
(A) only some of the subjects were asked to recall the displayed letters; (B) only
some of the letters of the alphabet were used; (C) some subjects were better at
recalling the displayed letters than others; (D) subjects were asked to report only
one row of the displayed letters.
____28. Cannon and Washburns (1912) theory of hunger has been disconfirmed by evidence showing that a person will still report experiencing hunger when his or her:
(A) hypothalamus is damaged; (B) stomach has been removed; (C) blood sugar
level is high; (D) ability to taste food has been lost.
____29. A 7-year-old has a much better chance of recovering from aphasia than a 50year-old with similar brain damage. What conclusion can be drawn about this
observation? (A) It suggests that young brains are less developed than older
brains. (B) It suggests that old brains take more time to recover from injuries
than young brains. (C) It is consistent with the critical period hypothesis of
language learning. (D) It refutes the critical period hypothesis of language
learning.
____30. Traditionally, the ______ effect is interpreted to mean that the first few items
in a list are more readily recalled, during a free recall test, because ______.
(A) recency, they have received more rehearsal and are more likely to have

been stored in long-term memory; (B) recency, they are still in short-term,
working memory; (C) primacy, they have received more rehearsal and are
more likely to have been stored in long-term memory; (D) primacy, they are
still in short-term, working memory. PSYC 100 - Introductory Psychology University of
Maryland University College
Final Examination Fall, 2013
____31. You and your spouse can best predict your newborn son or daughter's future intellectual aptitude by: (A) carefully assessing the infant's sensory and reflexive
responses; (B) noting the age at which your child first walks and talks; (C) observing your son or daughter's general level of emotional reactivity; (D) obtaining information about your own levels of intelligence.
____32. Psychological assessment is often referred to as the measurement of ________,
since the majority of assessments specify how an individual compares to others
on a given dimension. (A) psychological similarities; (B) simultaneous comparisons; (C) individual differences; (D) traits.
____33. Imagine that you and a friend have witnessed an accident. Afterwards, while
discussing what was seen, your friend introduces some inaccurate information
into his description of the events. If you are like many of the participants in
eyewitness memory research, when questioned at some future time: (A) both
you and your friend will have very little memory of the accident; (B) your memory is likely to be accurate and your friends will be inaccurate; (C) your memory is likely to be affected by your friends inaccurate observations; (D) your
friends memory is likely to be more accurate than your memory.
____34. What happens when congenitally deaf persons learn American Sign Language
(ASL) as a first language in adolescence? (A) They have difficulty in communicating in ASL, even after over 30 years of practice. (B) They have an easier
time learning to read English, compared to congenitally deaf people who learned

ASL earlier. (C) They fail to use function words consistently, even after over 30
years of practice. (D) all of the above.
____35. After studying a textbook chapter for a test, a student goes over the material
with his study group. He knows the material from the beginning and end of the
chapter very well, but he remembers very little from the middle of the chapter.
The students memory for the chapter illustrates what psychologists call the
______ effect. (A) primacy; (B) recency; (C) serial position; (D) levels of
processing.
____36. Studies involving familial relationships, including twin studies and adoption
studies, have demonstrated that: (A) the higher the percentage of shared genes
between people, the higher their IQ correlations will be; (B) the correlations
between the IQ scores of cousins reared together are very strong; (C) the correlations between the IQ scores of identical twins reared together are negative;
(D) siblings reared together and cousins reared together have similar IQ correlations.
____37. Your son has been getting into a lot of fights at school, and his teachers explain
this behavior by saying he has a strong aggressive instinct. Which error has
been committed? (A) the hindsight bias; (B) the either-or fallacy; (C) the Freud
problem; (D) the nominal fallacy. PSYC 100 - Introductory Psychology University of
Maryland University College
Final Examination Fall, 2013
____38. The fight-or-flight response is mobilized by the: (A) sympathetic nervous
system; (B) parasympathetic nervous system; (C) central nervous system;
(D) somatic nervous system.
____39. Ebbinghaus created nonsense syllables for his memory research because: (A) he
thought they would be easier to learn than words; (B) he thought they would be
more difficult to learn; (C) he was primarily interested in learning and memory

of foreign language vocabularies; (D) he wanted to use materials that were not
contaminated by previously acquired associations.
____40. Research on language acquisition in deaf persons indicates that: (A) no system
of functional communication can be developed in the absence of auditory stimuli; (B) sign language is unlike spoken language, because it has few morphemes
and lacks syntactical structure; (C) similar developmental stages exist for the
acquisition of sign language in deaf children and spoken language in hearing
children; (D) sign language only permits very primitive and basic communication between individuals.
____41. A youngster is taking a test in a large room. The person giving the test is very
careful that every child takes the test under the same conditions. Everyone
hears exactly the same instructions and is given the same amount of time. It
appears that the test this youngster is taking is: (A) reliable; (B) standardized;
(C) valid; (D) an intelligence test.
____42. In a crowded and noisy bar, your friend Sean is telling you about an argument
he
just had with his girlfriend. Despite the dozens of other conversations happening
around you, you have no difficulty attending to what Sean is saying. This situation is an example of: (A) instinctive drift; (B) shadowing; (C) inhibition
of return; (D) the cocktail party phenomenon.
____43. Reggie the rat is growing extremely obese. You suspect that Dr. Scalpel has
done some surgery on him. Because Reggie continues to eat great quantities
of food, you conclude that Dr. Scalpel may have lesioned the ______ region
of his hypothalamus. (A) dorsolateral; (B) orbitofrontal; (C) ventromedial;
(D) lateral.
____44. The appearance of facial expressions in blind and deaf children, such as smiling
when happy, supports which statement about emotional expressions? (A) Emo-

tional expressions are innate. (B) Emotional expressions are learned. (C) Certain expressions are unique to deaf and blind children. (D) Only a very limited
number of emotion expressions are utilized by blind and deaf children.
____45. According to the ethical principle of informed consent, before people agree to
participate in research, they should be informed about: (A) the studys purpose
and procedures; (B) the studys potential benefits; (C) potential risks to subjects;
(D) all of the above. PSYC 100 - Introductory Psychology University of Maryland
University College
Final Examination Fall, 2013
____46. Considering what youve been learning about the principles of critical thinking,
which of the following is probably the most problematic aspect of ESP research for scientists? (A) the people who conduct it are biased in favor of ESP;
(B) proponents of ESP make claims that are not falsifiable; (C) ESP psychics are
not scientists; (D) whether ESP works is not an empirical question.
____47. Which of the following would best predict a college seniors current IQ score?
(A) her IQ score from one year ago; (B) her IQ score from around her high
school graduation; (C) her IQ score taken upon entrance to high school;
(D) her IQ score from age six.
____48. If differences among people in their IQ scores are based largely on differences in
heredity, we should expect to find that: (A) the correlation of IQ scores should
be higher for fraternal twins than for identical twins; (B) the correlation of IQ
scores should be higher for identical twins than for fraternal twins; (C) children
reared by their own parents should have higher IQs than do children reared by
adoptive parents; (D) children reared by adoptive parents should have higher
IQs than do children reared by their own parents.
____49. If you doubt that the answer to the next question is C, because you have answered C for the last four or five questions, you are suffering from: (A) the

serial position effect; (B) an illusory correlation; (C) the gamblers fallacy;
(D) anterograde amnesia.
____50. John Garcias research on taste aversion conditioning demonstrated that: (A) a
more probable activity can be used to reinforce a less probable one; (B) complex
behaviors may be acquired by reinforcement of successive approximations;
(C) the associationist principles of learning are common to all species, including
humans; (D) organisms have an inborn bias to associate particular stimuli with
particular consequences.