Cross Sectional Study
Development
1. What is habituation? How is it used to study infant abilities? 2. At birth, babies have the abilities to 1) recognize patterns, 2) respond to their mother’s voices, 3) learn. We saw three videos illustrating the research behind these claims. What was the evidence that babies can learn events? 3. What is a cross-sectional study? What is a longitudinal study? What is a cohort? 4. What emotions are found in babies at birth? What emotions appear between 2-4 months? 5. What is the effect of deprivation on development? Define teratogen. Identify some common teratogens. Identify the causes and symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). 6. The lecturer provided two examples of how enrichment can enhance development: …show more content…
the visual cliff and the “sticky mitten” intervention. What does each of these suggest about innate abilities and the impact of experience on development? Is enrichment always a good idea? 7. What is the “great debate” in developmental psychology? Who is Jean Piaget? What was his theory of development (stages or continuous?) 8. Describe the cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation. What is a schema and what is it used for? 9. What are Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development? What are the characteristics of each stage, that is, what are object permanence, representational thought, conservation, egocentrism, mental operations, concrete thinking, abstract thinking? How do researchers define when one has moved from one stage to the next? Describe the changes in cognitive functioning revealed by the classic conservation tests (pouring colored water into different size containers; lining up pennies.) 10. Developmental researchers have been testing Piaget’s theory and improving it. What do researchers mean by object concepts, number concepts and person concepts? Describe Rene Baillargeon’s research on object permanence. What can we conclude about Piaget’s model based on her findings? What are the conclusions of research on person concepts and number concepts. 11. What is the Theory of Mind? What is the False Belief Test (FBT) and how does it test egocentrism? What cognitive changes occur between age 3 & 4? At what age does a child gain the cognitive ability to take another person’s point of view? At what age do children begin to deliberately deceive others? What are some explanations of these findings? What are different explanations for limits in a child’s ability to deliberately deceive? 12.
Dr. Koenig observed that the False Belief Test measured transient changes. She sought evidence of more stable and lasting knowledge differences. Her research has found that children could identify and mistrust an unreliable informant at what ages? How do her findings expand the findings from the Theory of Mind research? 13. What changes occur in language development? What are the stages of speech production from birth to adult fluency? (this was also covered on Cognitive.) 14. What is universal adaptability? By what age does it seem to go away? What was Janet Werker’s method? When researchers looked at whether or not the loss of universal adaptability could be reversed, what did they find? What is the role of social interaction in language learning? 15. What drives specialization of language, maturation or experience? What is the evidence? That is, are language capacities innate or are they learned? What is the evidence for resilience? 16. According to Dr Koenig, what cognitive and social capacities are shared with other species? What sets humans apart from other species? What is symbolic representation? When does it …show more content…
emerge? 17. What are Kohlberg’s three levels of moral reasoning and what kind of reasoning is associated with each? 18. What does research say about different parenting styles? Which is most effective for promoting healthy development? What are Baumrind’s three major parenting styles: permissive, authoritarian, authoritative. 19. What is gender identity? What is gender role?
Emotion & Motivation
1. What were the key components of Dr Gewirtz’s definition of emotion? Emotional responses have three aspects: “feelings,” autonomic responses, and somatic responses. What does each of these refer to? 2. What is the evolutionary view of emotion as originally proposed by Darwin? What is the adaptive value of emotion? What evidence suggests that these emotions are innate? 3. What are Ekman’s six (or seven) basic emotions? How was this research done? 4. How can researchers study emotion in rats? What is the fear-potentiated startle response? How is the fear-potentiated startle acquired by rats? 5. What is the International Affective Picture system (IAPS)? How is research done with the IAPS? In this model, emotion has two dimensions, valence (pleasant and unpleasant) and arousal. What kinds of images are associated with these dimensions? 6. What are the three primary motive systems, based on this research? What is meant by a primary motive system? 7. What is a phobia? Compared to most people, how do individuals with phobia respond to startle while viewing pleasant, high arousal images? While viewing neutral, low arousal images? When viewing unpleasant, high arousal images? When shown the object of their phobia? 8. What is a psychopath? Compared to most people, how do psychopaths respond to startle while viewing pleasant, high arousal images? While viewing neutral, low arousal images? When viewing unpleasant, high arousal images? 9. What is the role of the amygdala in emotion? What behavioral symptoms of anxiety are associated with the amygdala? What happens to fear when the amygdala is lesioned? 10. What is Exposure therapy? How can exposure therapy be used for the treatment of PTSD or fear of flying? What does extinction of a fear response involve--is the memory erased or a new response learned? How can DCS (D-cycloserine) be used to speed up extinction? Why? 11. What is a flashbulb memory? How can beta-blockers be used to treat PTSD? 12. What are rewards? What are typical rewards for humans? What rewards are primary? What rewards are secondary? What neurotransmitter is associated with rewards? What is the nucleus accumbens? Why is it associated with the reward pathway? 13. What is drug addiction and how does addiction happen? What are the three mechanisms of addiction described in lecture? 14. What is the two-factor theory of Emotion? What were the findings of the Dutton & Aron bridge study? How were these findings consistent with the two-factor theory of emotion? What are the other theories of emotion, James-Lange theory of emotion and Cannon-Bard? 15. What is the Mere Exposure effect? What is the Facial-feedback hypothesis? 16. What is Drive Reduction theory (formulated by Clark Hull, Donald Hebb and others)? What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law? What does it predict as the optimal conditions for performance? What are approach-approach conflicts? Approach-Avoidance conflicts? Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts? 17. What are the major principles that guide attraction and relationship formation? What physical characteristics do humans find attractive?
Personality: Theory, research and assessment
1. Dr. Simpson defines personality as “distinctive, characteristic patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that uniquely define an individual.” What is meant by distinctive and characteristic (that is, consistent) in this definition? 2. What is the Person-Situation debate? Why is this important? Who is Walter Mischel? 3. What is a self-report measure? A projective test? What assumptions underlie each? What are the MMPI, the CPI, the Berkley Personality Profile? What is the Thematic Apperception Test (the TAT)? The Rorschach? What are the strengths and limitations of each of these approaches? 4. What is meant by an idiographic approach to personality? What is a nomothetic approach? 5. Gordon Allport proposed a three-level idiographic approach to personality with cardinal traits, central disposition and secondary dispositions. What kinds of characteristics are associated with each level? 6. What is the lexical hypothesis? If a factor is represented by many more words in one culture/language than another, what inference can you make about that culture, given the Lexical Hypothesis? 7. What is meant by factor analysis? When is factor analysis useful? 8. What is a personality trait? What is the Five Factor Model? What are the five traits and what behaviors are characteristic of high or low scores on each trait? (Imagine exam items in which someone is described to you and you have to correctly identify whether this person is high or low on a given trait.) 9. Who is Sigmund Freud? What are three assumptions that set Freudian theory apart from other theories of personality? What are each of the following components of personality: Id, Ego, Superego? What is the reality principle? 10. How do defense mechanisms work? What are repression, denial, regression, reaction-formation, projection, displacement, rationalization, sublimation and identification with the aggressor?
Attachment Theory:
1. What does attachment refer to? What are the three stages of separation distress? 2. What is meant by the functions of attachment: proximity, safe haven, secure base? 3. What is the strange situation test? What parenting styles are associated with the different kinds of attachment that emerge between an infant and its mother? What kinds of behavior are typical of children with each kind of attachment. 4. Describe Harry Harlow’s research with monkeys. Describe key findings of Harlow’s research. What theories was Harlow comparing? What is contact comfort? 5. Describe the long-term consequences of the secure attachment style especially in love relationships. What were the patterns of support found by Dr. Simpson in his research on couple behavior in stressful situations. What are the internal working models of the different kinds of attachment? When are working models activated?
Please note that the textbook and the lecturer use slightly different names for the different kinds of attachment. Hopefully this will help:
|SIMPSON |TEXT |
|Secure |Secure |
|Avoidant |Insecure-Avoidant |
|Anxious-ambivalent |Insecure-Anxious |
| |Disorganized |
Evolutionary Psychology
1. What are the basic assumptions of evolutionary psychology? 2. What is Natural selection? Selective breeding? 3. What are some things that the human brain is specialized to do? 4. What is the evidence for sexual selection? What is sexual dimorphism and when is it found? 5. What is Parental Investment theory? Why are women pickier about potential mates? Females have evolved to detect males with what characteristics? Males have evolved to detect what characteristics of females? 6. What tradeoffs do researchers find for females? for males? 7.
What is meant by inclusive fitness? What is the reasoning for the evidence that step-parents are more likely to be abusive than biological parents?
Intelligence, Behavior Genetics and Individual differences
1. What is the study of individual differences (also known as differential psychology) and what kinds of questions does it study? What is the Nature versus Nurture controversy? Why is differential psychology prone to controversy? What was the eugenics movement? 2. What is the basic logic of a behavior genetics study? How can this method tease apart nature versus nurture questions? What role does the shared environment play in making people more alike? What is the role of the unshared environment? 3. Who was Francis Galton? Alfred Binet? What were their contributions to intelligence research? 4. How is intelligence defined? What does it mean to say that “intelligence” is a theoretical construct? 5. What are things that correlate with intelligence? 6. Is intelligence one thing or multifaceted? What is the evidence that intelligence is one thing? What is “g”? What is the evidence that intelligence is multifaceted? What is Gardner’s theory, and what are criticisms of it? What are crystallized and fluid
intelligence? 7. What is an IQ and how does one calculate it? What does mental age mean? 8. What is validity? Reliability? How does one evaluate how good a test is? 9. How stable is IQ over time? 10. What is the Flynn effect? What hypotheses are offered to explain the Flynn effect? 11. What are some IQ differences between men and women? How would a socialization theory explain those differences? What is a biological explanation for those differences? 12. What is the evidence for “smart brains” in terms of efficiency, reaction time, size, development, location of activity in brain? 13. Describe the approach measured by the following commonly used IQ tests: the WAIS, the Ravens, the WISC. Why would you choose to use one or the other? 14. In terms of environmental effects on IQ, what evidence suggests that school affects IQ? What evidence suggests that socioeconomic deprivation and nutrition affect IQ? 15. What is an environmental explanation for differences between males and females? What is a genetic explanation?
1. What is habituation? How is it used to study infant abilities? 2. At birth, babies have the abilities to 1) recognize patterns, 2) respond to their mother’s voices, 3) learn. We saw three videos illustrating the research behind these claims. What was the evidence that babies can learn events? 3. What is a cross-sectional study? What is a longitudinal study? What is a cohort? 4. What emotions are found in babies at birth? What emotions appear between 2-4 months? 5. What is the effect of deprivation on development? Define teratogen. Identify some common teratogens. Identify the causes and symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). 6. The lecturer provided two examples of how enrichment can enhance development: …show more content…
the visual cliff and the “sticky mitten” intervention. What does each of these suggest about innate abilities and the impact of experience on development? Is enrichment always a good idea? 7. What is the “great debate” in developmental psychology? Who is Jean Piaget? What was his theory of development (stages or continuous?) 8. Describe the cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation. What is a schema and what is it used for? 9. What are Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development? What are the characteristics of each stage, that is, what are object permanence, representational thought, conservation, egocentrism, mental operations, concrete thinking, abstract thinking? How do researchers define when one has moved from one stage to the next? Describe the changes in cognitive functioning revealed by the classic conservation tests (pouring colored water into different size containers; lining up pennies.) 10. Developmental researchers have been testing Piaget’s theory and improving it. What do researchers mean by object concepts, number concepts and person concepts? Describe Rene Baillargeon’s research on object permanence. What can we conclude about Piaget’s model based on her findings? What are the conclusions of research on person concepts and number concepts. 11. What is the Theory of Mind? What is the False Belief Test (FBT) and how does it test egocentrism? What cognitive changes occur between age 3 & 4? At what age does a child gain the cognitive ability to take another person’s point of view? At what age do children begin to deliberately deceive others? What are some explanations of these findings? What are different explanations for limits in a child’s ability to deliberately deceive? 12.
Dr. Koenig observed that the False Belief Test measured transient changes. She sought evidence of more stable and lasting knowledge differences. Her research has found that children could identify and mistrust an unreliable informant at what ages? How do her findings expand the findings from the Theory of Mind research? 13. What changes occur in language development? What are the stages of speech production from birth to adult fluency? (this was also covered on Cognitive.) 14. What is universal adaptability? By what age does it seem to go away? What was Janet Werker’s method? When researchers looked at whether or not the loss of universal adaptability could be reversed, what did they find? What is the role of social interaction in language learning? 15. What drives specialization of language, maturation or experience? What is the evidence? That is, are language capacities innate or are they learned? What is the evidence for resilience? 16. According to Dr Koenig, what cognitive and social capacities are shared with other species? What sets humans apart from other species? What is symbolic representation? When does it …show more content…
emerge? 17. What are Kohlberg’s three levels of moral reasoning and what kind of reasoning is associated with each? 18. What does research say about different parenting styles? Which is most effective for promoting healthy development? What are Baumrind’s three major parenting styles: permissive, authoritarian, authoritative. 19. What is gender identity? What is gender role?
Emotion & Motivation
1. What were the key components of Dr Gewirtz’s definition of emotion? Emotional responses have three aspects: “feelings,” autonomic responses, and somatic responses. What does each of these refer to? 2. What is the evolutionary view of emotion as originally proposed by Darwin? What is the adaptive value of emotion? What evidence suggests that these emotions are innate? 3. What are Ekman’s six (or seven) basic emotions? How was this research done? 4. How can researchers study emotion in rats? What is the fear-potentiated startle response? How is the fear-potentiated startle acquired by rats? 5. What is the International Affective Picture system (IAPS)? How is research done with the IAPS? In this model, emotion has two dimensions, valence (pleasant and unpleasant) and arousal. What kinds of images are associated with these dimensions? 6. What are the three primary motive systems, based on this research? What is meant by a primary motive system? 7. What is a phobia? Compared to most people, how do individuals with phobia respond to startle while viewing pleasant, high arousal images? While viewing neutral, low arousal images? When viewing unpleasant, high arousal images? When shown the object of their phobia? 8. What is a psychopath? Compared to most people, how do psychopaths respond to startle while viewing pleasant, high arousal images? While viewing neutral, low arousal images? When viewing unpleasant, high arousal images? 9. What is the role of the amygdala in emotion? What behavioral symptoms of anxiety are associated with the amygdala? What happens to fear when the amygdala is lesioned? 10. What is Exposure therapy? How can exposure therapy be used for the treatment of PTSD or fear of flying? What does extinction of a fear response involve--is the memory erased or a new response learned? How can DCS (D-cycloserine) be used to speed up extinction? Why? 11. What is a flashbulb memory? How can beta-blockers be used to treat PTSD? 12. What are rewards? What are typical rewards for humans? What rewards are primary? What rewards are secondary? What neurotransmitter is associated with rewards? What is the nucleus accumbens? Why is it associated with the reward pathway? 13. What is drug addiction and how does addiction happen? What are the three mechanisms of addiction described in lecture? 14. What is the two-factor theory of Emotion? What were the findings of the Dutton & Aron bridge study? How were these findings consistent with the two-factor theory of emotion? What are the other theories of emotion, James-Lange theory of emotion and Cannon-Bard? 15. What is the Mere Exposure effect? What is the Facial-feedback hypothesis? 16. What is Drive Reduction theory (formulated by Clark Hull, Donald Hebb and others)? What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law? What does it predict as the optimal conditions for performance? What are approach-approach conflicts? Approach-Avoidance conflicts? Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts? 17. What are the major principles that guide attraction and relationship formation? What physical characteristics do humans find attractive?
Personality: Theory, research and assessment
1. Dr. Simpson defines personality as “distinctive, characteristic patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that uniquely define an individual.” What is meant by distinctive and characteristic (that is, consistent) in this definition? 2. What is the Person-Situation debate? Why is this important? Who is Walter Mischel? 3. What is a self-report measure? A projective test? What assumptions underlie each? What are the MMPI, the CPI, the Berkley Personality Profile? What is the Thematic Apperception Test (the TAT)? The Rorschach? What are the strengths and limitations of each of these approaches? 4. What is meant by an idiographic approach to personality? What is a nomothetic approach? 5. Gordon Allport proposed a three-level idiographic approach to personality with cardinal traits, central disposition and secondary dispositions. What kinds of characteristics are associated with each level? 6. What is the lexical hypothesis? If a factor is represented by many more words in one culture/language than another, what inference can you make about that culture, given the Lexical Hypothesis? 7. What is meant by factor analysis? When is factor analysis useful? 8. What is a personality trait? What is the Five Factor Model? What are the five traits and what behaviors are characteristic of high or low scores on each trait? (Imagine exam items in which someone is described to you and you have to correctly identify whether this person is high or low on a given trait.) 9. Who is Sigmund Freud? What are three assumptions that set Freudian theory apart from other theories of personality? What are each of the following components of personality: Id, Ego, Superego? What is the reality principle? 10. How do defense mechanisms work? What are repression, denial, regression, reaction-formation, projection, displacement, rationalization, sublimation and identification with the aggressor?
Attachment Theory:
1. What does attachment refer to? What are the three stages of separation distress? 2. What is meant by the functions of attachment: proximity, safe haven, secure base? 3. What is the strange situation test? What parenting styles are associated with the different kinds of attachment that emerge between an infant and its mother? What kinds of behavior are typical of children with each kind of attachment. 4. Describe Harry Harlow’s research with monkeys. Describe key findings of Harlow’s research. What theories was Harlow comparing? What is contact comfort? 5. Describe the long-term consequences of the secure attachment style especially in love relationships. What were the patterns of support found by Dr. Simpson in his research on couple behavior in stressful situations. What are the internal working models of the different kinds of attachment? When are working models activated?
Please note that the textbook and the lecturer use slightly different names for the different kinds of attachment. Hopefully this will help:
|SIMPSON |TEXT |
|Secure |Secure |
|Avoidant |Insecure-Avoidant |
|Anxious-ambivalent |Insecure-Anxious |
| |Disorganized |
Evolutionary Psychology
1. What are the basic assumptions of evolutionary psychology? 2. What is Natural selection? Selective breeding? 3. What are some things that the human brain is specialized to do? 4. What is the evidence for sexual selection? What is sexual dimorphism and when is it found? 5. What is Parental Investment theory? Why are women pickier about potential mates? Females have evolved to detect males with what characteristics? Males have evolved to detect what characteristics of females? 6. What tradeoffs do researchers find for females? for males? 7.
What is meant by inclusive fitness? What is the reasoning for the evidence that step-parents are more likely to be abusive than biological parents?
Intelligence, Behavior Genetics and Individual differences
1. What is the study of individual differences (also known as differential psychology) and what kinds of questions does it study? What is the Nature versus Nurture controversy? Why is differential psychology prone to controversy? What was the eugenics movement? 2. What is the basic logic of a behavior genetics study? How can this method tease apart nature versus nurture questions? What role does the shared environment play in making people more alike? What is the role of the unshared environment? 3. Who was Francis Galton? Alfred Binet? What were their contributions to intelligence research? 4. How is intelligence defined? What does it mean to say that “intelligence” is a theoretical construct? 5. What are things that correlate with intelligence? 6. Is intelligence one thing or multifaceted? What is the evidence that intelligence is one thing? What is “g”? What is the evidence that intelligence is multifaceted? What is Gardner’s theory, and what are criticisms of it? What are crystallized and fluid
intelligence? 7. What is an IQ and how does one calculate it? What does mental age mean? 8. What is validity? Reliability? How does one evaluate how good a test is? 9. How stable is IQ over time? 10. What is the Flynn effect? What hypotheses are offered to explain the Flynn effect? 11. What are some IQ differences between men and women? How would a socialization theory explain those differences? What is a biological explanation for those differences? 12. What is the evidence for “smart brains” in terms of efficiency, reaction time, size, development, location of activity in brain? 13. Describe the approach measured by the following commonly used IQ tests: the WAIS, the Ravens, the WISC. Why would you choose to use one or the other? 14. In terms of environmental effects on IQ, what evidence suggests that school affects IQ? What evidence suggests that socioeconomic deprivation and nutrition affect IQ? 15. What is an environmental explanation for differences between males and females? What is a genetic explanation?