Discovering Psychology - Topic 3

The Strange Situation is an effort to measure which aspect of behaviour?

• How well an adolescent can resist peer pressure

• A child’s attachment to the parents

• How rapidly a child is progressing through Piaget’s stages

• A child’s ability to coordinate vision with action

One explanation for adolescent impulsivity is that the prefrontal cortex, important for inhibiting inappropriate behaviours, is still gradually becoming mature during this period. What evidence indicates that this explanation cannot be the full answer?

• People with damage to the prefrontal cortex tend to make many poor and impulsive decisions

• Twenty-year-olds rate many risky activities more acceptable than young teenagers do

• Most teenagers believe the ‘personal fable’ that they are different from everyone else

• Adolescents make the same decisions regardless of peer pressure

In a society where almost everyone becomes a farmer, which of the following would be most common?

• Identity diffusion

• Identity moratorium

• Identity foreclosure

• Identity achievement

Which of the following studies suggests a cultural influence on a child’s interest in boys’ or girls’ toys?

• Girls exposed before birth to higher testosterone levels show greater interest in boys’ toys late

• Boys exposed before birth to chemicals that interfere with testosterone show decreased interest in boys’ toys later

• Children who watch a commercial showing just boys playing with a toy assume it is only for boys

• Male monkeys show more interest in boys’ toys than female monkeys do

Suppose you want to test the effect of birth order on intelligence by comparing firstborn children to third-born children. To do the study properly, which of the following is important?

• Use only firstborn children who are unrelated to the third-born children

• Include only those firstborns who come from a family of at least three children

• Include an equal percentage of males and females in each group

If we want to determine whether children resemble their parents because of genetic influences or because of social influences, which of the following would be the most helpful kind of information?

• Compare monozygotic and dizygotic twins

• Examine the amount of similarity between adopting parents and their adopted children

• Compare children’s similarity to their mother and their father