Abnormal Psychology Quiz
Questions: 16 · 10 minutes
1. A clinician maps how a client’s sleep loss, recent job stress, avoidance, family support, and long-standing vulnerability interact. What is the clinician primarily developing?
A case formulation
A laboratory reliability coefficient
A list of symptoms without an explanatory framework
A prevalence estimate
2. What does comorbidity mean in abnormal psychology?
A disorder has both genetic and environmental causes.
A treatment causes symptoms resembling those of another disorder.
One symptom appears in several different diagnostic criteria sets.
Two or more disorders or clinically relevant conditions occur in the same person.
3. Everyone in an uncontrolled treatment group reports fewer depressive symptoms after eight weeks. Why can researchers not conclude from this alone that the treatment caused the improvement?
Self-reported symptoms can never be used in treatment research.
A treatment can only be effective if every participant becomes symptom-free.
Eight weeks is too short to study any change in depressive symptoms.
Without an appropriate comparison, improvement could reflect time, expectations, or other influences.
4. A person repeatedly experiences unwanted, intrusive thoughts that their hands are contaminated. The thoughts themselves are best classified as what?
A dissociative state
An obsession
A compulsion
A negative symptom
5. Which statement best describes the biopsychosocial approach to psychological disorders?
Social circumstances determine whether symptoms occur, while biology mainly affects treatment response.
Every disorder ultimately has one primary biological cause, even when stress affects its expression.
Psychological difficulties can reflect interacting biological, psychological, and social influences.
Psychological disorders are learned behavior patterns and should be explained without medical concepts.
6. A behavior is viewed as unusual in one cultural setting but expected in another. What is the best assessment principle?
Meaning, context, distress, impairment, and culturally informed norms should all be considered.
Cultural expectations should replace consideration of distress and functional impact.
Any statistically uncommon behavior should be treated as evidence of a disorder.
Standard diagnostic concepts cannot be applied when people have different cultural backgrounds.
7. In epidemiology, what does the prevalence of a disorder describe?
The proportion of a population that has the disorder at a point or during a period
The number of new cases beginning during a specified period
The proportion of treated people who recover during a specified period
The probability that one person with the disorder will transmit it to another
8. Two clinicians independently interview the same clients and usually assign the same diagnoses. Which measurement quality does this most directly demonstrate?
Predictive validity
Interrater reliability
Population representativeness
Treatment specificity
9. One week after a frightening accident, a person has nightmares, feels on edge, and avoids the crash location. Which conclusion is most accurate?
The symptoms establish post-traumatic stress disorder because they followed a traumatic event.
The experience warrants compassionate assessment, but its timing and symptoms alone do not establish PTSD.
The response cannot be trauma-related unless symptoms continue unchanged for several years.
Avoidance shows the event has been processed successfully and assessment is unnecessary.
10. Someone reports tremor, rapid heartbeat, poor sleep, and persistent nervousness. Why might a clinician ask about medication use and thyroid function during assessment?
Anxiety disorders can only be considered after every medical test returns a normal result.
Physical symptoms establish a medical explanation and exclude psychological influences.
Medical conditions and substances can produce or worsen symptoms that resemble anxiety.
Thyroid function determines which psychotherapy approach will be effective.
11. A student remains deeply distressed two weeks after a family death. What information is most important before deciding whether the response may represent a psychological disorder?
Whether the student has previously studied common stages of grief
The student’s age compared with the average age of people seeking bereavement support
Whether sadness began immediately rather than several days after the death
The response’s severity, functional impact, cultural context, and course over time
12. Which feature most clearly distinguishes a manic episode from a hypomanic episode?
Mania causes marked functional impairment, may require hospitalization, or may include psychosis.
Mania always includes hallucinations, whereas hypomania never changes behavior.
Mania lasts several hours, whereas hypomania continues for at least one month.
Mania involves only elevated mood, whereas hypomania involves only irritable mood.
13. A friend says, “Sometimes I think everyone would be better off without me.” What is the most appropriate immediate response?
Change the subject briefly so the person does not become more focused on the thought.
Wait to see whether the person repeats the statement before discussing safety.
Respond calmly, ask directly about immediate suicide risk, stay engaged, and connect them with urgent help when needed.
Reassure the person that they do not mean it and suggest discussing it at a later time.
14. What is a central aim of exposure-based therapy for many anxiety-related problems?
To erase the person’s memory of the feared situation
To support new learning that feared cues and anxious feelings can be approached and tolerated
To identify one hidden conflict that fully explains the fear
To prevent contact with anxiety triggers until anxious feelings disappear permanently
15. What is the sensitivity of a psychological screening instrument?
The extent to which respondents find its questions emotionally acceptable
Its ability to correctly identify people who do not have the condition
The consistency of scores when the instrument is repeated
Its ability to correctly identify people who truly have the condition being screened for
16. During an assessment, a person speaks very little and shows markedly reduced emotional expression. In the study of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, these features are most clearly examples of what?
Positive symptoms
Manic symptoms
Negative symptoms
Cognitive distortions