Question 1

Which of the following jobs is LEAST likely to involve emotion?

Accepted Answer

Computer analyst is a job that is least likely to require emotion.
Key Takeaway: Emotion is a component of many jobs, the least likely of which the ones that do not involve people such as computer analyst. In jobs such as social work and speech pathologist, the professional must be able to manage emotions of anger, disappointment, and encouragement. Performing artists must also use emotion to communicate with their audiences.

Question 2

For the purposes of a criminal court, insanity is strictly a ____________________ conclusion.

Accepted Answer

For the purposes of a criminal court, insanity is strictly a legal conclusion.
Key Takeaway: Insanity in criminal court is a defense that is used when a person's lawyers claim that he or she is not responsible for their actions. Insanity is not a clinical determination, though. It is simply a legal recourse. A person seeking an insanity defense could have a number of underlying issues such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or any of the other personality and brain disorders. It is the court system's duty to determine whether this underlying disorder has actually led to the person not knowing right from wrong when they committed the crime.

Question 3

_____________ is the application of psychological principles and practices to solve crimes and ensure public safety.

Accepted Answer

Police psychology is the application of psychological principles and practices to solve crimes and ensure public safety.
Key Takeaway: Police psychology attempts to understand why people commit crimes and how those crimes could be reduced in the future. For example, police psychology is interested in finding out if repeated incidences of domestic abuse could lead to a serious crime of kidnapping or murder in the future. Police psychology uses research methods to study these kinds of trends in an effort to predict future behavior. A police psychologist may also be interested in how well license suspensions reduce the incidence of drinking and driving behaviors.

Question 4

Detective Benn is a criminal psychologist who is interested in juvenile precursors to adult murders. He is most likely interested in ______________________.

Accepted Answer

Detective Benn is a criminal psychologist who is interested in juvenile precursors to adult murders. He is most likely interested in sociopsychological determinants of homicidal behavior in adulthood.
Key Takeaway: Criminal psychologists are always interested in the childhood experiences of serious criminals. Research studies into the earlier lives of serial killers, for example, show that many of them have been exposed to severe physical, mental and sexual abuse as young children. These studies do not excuse their adult behavior but they shed light on the potentially long term damaging effects of childhood abuse. The implication of this research is that child abuse cases should be taken seriously in order to reduce the chance that these children will become serious adult offenders.

Question 5

More than _____________ of police officers undergo some kind of psychological testing.

Accepted Answer

More than 90% of police officers undergo some kind of psychological testing.
Key Takeaway: Psychological testing and evaluation is an important part of police officer recruitment and training. Psychological testing is designed to uncover previously undiagnosed clinical, personality and social disorders that the future police officer may have. For some benign issues such as depression, a police recruit may still be able to join the police academy. If the tests show that the officer has a serious psychological disorder such as narcissistic personality disorder, they would be disqualified. Other uses for psychological testing is to help current police officers deal with traumatic incidences such as discovering the bodies of murdered children.

Question 6

Approximately _________ of child sexual abuse cases are considered to be false.

Accepted Answer

Approximately 8% of child sexual abuse cases are considered to be false.
Key Takeaway: There are approximately 200,000 new cases of child sexual abuse that are made in the United States every year. Researchers estimate that 8% of those cases are later found out to be blatantly false allegations. Some of the reasons for these false allegations are custody fights between parents. For example, a mother who wishes to gain full physical custody of her children in a divorce may file a false allegation of the father sexually abusing the children. These types of false allegations can seriously damage a child's mental health and ruin the life of the accused.

Question 7

Research shows that crime scene profiling has significant _________ and ___________ in solving crimes.

Accepted Answer

Research shows that crime scene profiling has significant reliability and validity in solving crimes.
Key Takeaway: Crime scene profiling can help solve crimes by studying the consistent pattern of behavioral traits across different situations. For example, a crime of passion usually happens when cheating within an intimate relationship is discovered. A crime scene profile of a crime of passion shows an excessive and exaggerated destruction of property such as setting a house on fire or slashing vehicle tires. In physical assault cases, the crime scene also shows the use of excessive and repeated force of the victim. These point crime scene observations lead detectives to believe that rage and extreme anger are involved in committing these crimes.

Question 8

Lack of ________________ is the main diagnostic criterion for psychopathy.

Accepted Answer

Lack of empathy is the main diagnostic criterion for psychopathy.
Key Takeaway: Psychopathy is a personality disorder for which lack of empathy is the main diagnostic criterion. A psychopath will cause his or her victims unimaginable pain and suffering without feeling empathy or remorse. Killers who torture their victims before they murder them are usually psychopaths. However, not all psychopaths are murderers. Some engage in cruel and abusive behavior towards their victims (who are usually family members) for long periods of time. Psychopathy responds very poorly to psychological and medical intervention and often the person is thrown in prison to protect society.

Question 9

A detective using the minimization technique in interrogating a criminal will likely say____________.

Accepted Answer

A detective using the minimization technique in interrogating a criminal will likely say "he probably provoked you first".
Key Takeaway: The minimization technique in interrogating a criminal is designed to give him or her a false sense of security. To do so, the interrogator will most likely offer the criminal some excuses for their behavior in an effort to help them save face. This technique is designed to tease the truth out of the criminal while he or she is under the impression that interrogator understands his motivation, and even finds it excusable. Since many criminals tend to have a low assessment of their own guilt, they tend to believe the interrogator's technique and begin to tell the truth about their crime.

Question 10

Brad is a gifted athlete with scholarships to top schools. His trainers believe that he is in the top 2% of athletes in today's colleges. According to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence, which of the following abilities does Brad possess?

Accepted Answer

Bodily-kinesthetic is one of the abilities included in Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence.
Key Takeaway: Bodily-kinesthetic is one of the abilities defined in Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence (1983). According to Gardner, this ability is concerned with body movement and physiology. Of the careers that suit people who are highly intelligent in this ability are athletics, dance, and police work.

Question 11

Melissa prepares notes that detail biochemical pathways. To help her remember the multiple steps and retain them, she uses easy-to-remember words to identify each step. What kind of learning aid is Melissa using?

Accepted Answer

A mnemonic device is a learning aid that helps with memory and retention.
Key Takeaway: Mnemonic devices are a popular learning aid for students who are memorizing difficult and multi-step processes. One such method is to take the first letter of each step and replace it with an easy to remember word such as dog or cat. This learning aid is especially useful for students who cover a great deal of volume such as science and medical students.

Question 12

According to British Psychologist Frederic Bartlett, a child will associate an object in the real world such as a burning object with an abstract representation such as fear. What is the term used to refer to this representation?

Accepted Answer

A schema is the association of a real world object with an abstract mental representation.
Key Takeaway: To make sense of the world and to develop a worldview, a person makes a number of associations between the real world and abstract mental representations. A schema is a learning tool that helps solidify our knowledge of the outside world and tends to remain unchanged. Since it is normally unchanged, a schema influences how we process and interpret information as we receive it.

Question 13

Samantha is a heavy smoker who has given up on a number of smoking cessation programs. While otherwise committed to healthy living, Samantha is liable to say the following in order to reduce Cognitive Dissonance:

Accepted Answer

To reduce cognitive dissonance between two thoughts, a person will minimize the evidence for one of the thoughts.
Key Takeaway: As a heavy smoker, Samantha's commitment to healthy living is not as strong as she wants to believe since smoking leads to poor health. By believing one thing and doing the opposite of that belief, Samantha is facing cognitive dissonance which causes feelings of shame and guilt. To reduce these feelings, she convinces herself that the link between smoking and poor health is not as strong as doctors say.

Question 14

David is a cognitive scientist interested in the response of trauma victims to different types of stimuli. To carry out his research, he measures his participants' responses to pictures by using an fMRI. What does the 'f' refer to?

Accepted Answer

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (or fMRI) are used in cognitive science research to measure brain responses to stimuli.
Key Takeaway: An fMRI is a useful tool in cognitive science as it measures the relative amount of oxygenated blood that flows to a part of a brain under study. In David's research, trauma victims' brains may be more stimulated in some areas in response to visual stimuli than non-trauma victims. An fMRI provides a differential analysis of the part of the brain that is more engaged in processes and thus, requiring more oxygenated blood.

Question 15

Drivers become adept at recognizing a red sign and coming to a complete stop. What is the term used to refer to a set of mental processes that is NOT accessible to introspective awareness?

Accepted Answer

Adaptive unconscious is a set of mental processes that is not accessible to introspective awareness.
Key Takeaway: Adaptive unconscious is different from our conscious processing of information in that we are not aware of it. A red light is mentally processed at the unconscious level and thus, our reaction to it is much faster and effortless than conscious processing. Our brain engages in adaptive unconscious to make the thousands of decisions that are made easier and faster to process.

Question 16

Which psychologist coined the term 'collective unconscious'?

Accepted Answer

Carl Jung is the psychologist who coined the term 'collective unconscious'.
Key Takeaway: Carl Jung's collective unconscious is said to refer to pre-existing forms and archetypes of knowledge that are not developed by an individual person but inherited. These forms and archetypes are organized and stored in a similar way amongst all humans. For example, the archetypes of good and evil are organized similarly amongst people despite their differing cultures and languages.

Question 17

Which two types of information are processed in the Dual-coding theory of cognition?

Accepted Answer

Visual and verbal information are processed in the Dual-coding theory of cognition.
Key Takeaway: The Dual-coding theory of cognition asserts that visual and verbal information are processed differently and along distinct pathways in the brain. For example, if you are listening to instructions at an ATM that provides a written instruction as well as a verbal one, your brain will process the two information differently and separately. This theory is supported by evidence that shows the brain retains information from the two sources differently.

Question 18

Crisis management is an important aspect of good government functioning. The main purpose of planning for crises is to help people overcome the normalcy bias. What is the normalcy bias?

Accepted Answer

Normalcy bias is a cognitive bias that makes people refuse to plan for crisis that has never happened.
Key Takeaway: A normalcy bias makes people underestimate the possibility of a crisis to happen and its potential effects. When a crisis has never happened, the normalcy bias leads to a mental state whereby people are reluctant to acknowledge its possibility and the damage it can cause. Crisis management's role is to fight the normalcy bias and force people to think through what they would do if a flood or a riot were to happen in their city, for example, when it has never happened before.

Question 19

As a research psychologist, Michael is interested in studying self-defeating behavior. He engages in a number of methods to find out the causes of this behavior. What type of analysis is designed to uncover the causes of psychological phenomena methodically?

Accepted Answer

Root cause analysis is designed to uncover the causes of psychological phenomena methodically.
Key Takeaway: Root cause analysis is a type of problem solving used in cognitive research analysis. By uncovering multiple potential causes a psychological phenomenon, a research psychologist can narrow down those contributing to a certain behavior. For example, low self-esteem could be a root cause of self-defeating behavior.

Question 20

Cognitive science is an important contributor to the field that studies and designs intelligent computers. What is this field called?

Accepted Answer

Artificial intelligence is the field of study that designs intelligent computers.
Key Takeaway: Cognitive science is an important contributor to the field of artificial intelligence. By elaborating and explaining the different ways that the human mind maps and processes information, cognitive scientists provide models that help design intelligent computers. Similarly, cognitive science provides important information on learning and memory. Other fields that promote artificial intelligence are philosophy and engineering.

Quiz 33: (AP) Psychology: Part A