AP Psych Quiz
Questions: 16 · 10 minutes
1. Evan believes a particular study method is superior, so he searches for articles supporting it and dismisses conflicting findings without examining them closely. Which tendency is he showing?
Confirmation bias
The availability heuristic
Functional fixedness
The representativeness heuristic
2. A researcher studies whether daily stress affects sleep. Which choice is an operational definition of stress?
The prediction that greater stress will be associated with less sleep
Each participant's score on a specified 10-item stress questionnaire
The group of university students invited to participate
Any variable other than stress that could influence sleep
3. A study finds a correlation of r = -0.70 between weekly exercise and reported stress. Which conclusion is best supported?
Exercise necessarily causes stress to decrease
Greater exercise is associated with lower reported stress, but causation is not established
Stress necessarily causes people to exercise less
Exercise and reported stress have little meaningful relationship
4. Just before giving a speech, Maya's heart races, her palms sweat, and her breathing quickens. Which division is most directly producing these changes?
The somatic nervous system
The sympathetic nervous system
The parasympathetic nervous system
The enteric nervous system
5. A restaurant customer receives slow service and decides the server is lazy, overlooking that the restaurant is severely understaffed. This judgment best illustrates:
The fundamental attribution error
Group polarization
Social facilitation
The mere-exposure effect
6. A driver fastens her seat belt to stop the car's persistent warning sound, making her more likely to buckle up promptly in the future. This is an example of:
Positive reinforcement
Negative reinforcement
Positive punishment
Negative punishment
7. Participants in a study are temporarily misled about its true purpose. After their participation ends, what should the researchers ordinarily do?
Debrief participants by explaining the study's purpose and the reason for the deception
Reveal the identities and responses of the other participants
Avoid discussing the deception so participants remain unbiased
Exclude the participants' data because deception was used
8. While solving a multistep arithmetic problem mentally, Jordan holds intermediate results in mind and updates them. Which memory system is most directly involved?
Working memory
Procedural memory
Semantic memory
Iconic memory
9. Researchers randomly assign volunteers to sleep either four or eight hours before a memory task. What is the main purpose of random assignment?
To make the volunteers representative of the entire population
To ensure that participants do not know the study's hypothesis
To reduce systematic preexisting differences between the two groups
To allow the researchers to calculate a correlation coefficient
10. To address a specific phobia, a therapist teaches relaxation and gradually guides a client through an anxiety hierarchy, from imagining the feared object to approaching it. Which technique is being used?
Aversive conditioning
A token economy
Free association
Systematic desensitization
11. A dog repeatedly hears a tone immediately before receiving food. Eventually, the dog salivates when the tone sounds alone. In this example, the tone is the:
Conditioned response
Unconditioned stimulus
Conditioned stimulus
Unconditioned response
12. Damage to both hippocampi would most directly impair which ability?
Performing a well-practiced motor skill
Maintaining automatic heart and breathing functions
Detecting basic edges in the visual field
Forming new explicit long-term memories
13. After changing a password, Priya repeatedly types her old password instead of the new one. Which process best explains the error?
State-dependent memory
Retroactive interference
Proactive interference
The spacing effect
14. A neuron's stimulation reaches its threshold. What is most likely to happen next?
Neurotransmitters are released directly from the neuron's dendrites
The action potential's strength increases in proportion to the stimulation
The neuron permanently loses its resting potential
An all-or-none action potential travels along the axon
15. An infant watches a caregiver hide a toy under a blanket and then reaches under the blanket to find it. This behavior most clearly demonstrates:
Conservation
Stranger anxiety
Theory of mind
Object permanence
16. After wearing perfume for several minutes, Liam barely notices its scent because his odor receptors respond less strongly to the unchanged stimulus. What does this illustrate?
Perceptual constancy
Difference threshold
Sensory adaptation
Signal detection