Psych 403 Exam 1 Questions With Verified Solutions Latest Update 2026

PSYCH 403 EXAM 1 QUESTIONS WITH VERIFIED SOLUTIONS LATEST UPDATE 2026 Psychology Triad - Answers 3 essential topics of psych; how people think, feel, and behave Personality - Answers An individual's characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior The whole person - Answers How all other areas of psychology come together Basic approach or paradigm - Answers A theoretical view of personality that focuses on some phenomena and ignores others Trait approach - Answers -focuses on individuals differences in personality and behavior and the psychological processes behind them -This is the largest and most dominant approach b/c individual differences are central to most everything - focuses on how "every man is in certain respects like some other men" Biological approach - Answers Focuses on the way behavior and personality are influenced in terms of the body Psychoanalytic approach - Answers Focuses on the unconscious mind and internal mental conflict (Freud) Phenomenological approach - Answers Focuses on people's conscious experience of the world -Emphasizes experience, free will, and the meaning of life Humanistic psychology - Answers A type of phenomenological approach HOW conscious awareness produces uniquely human attributes (like creativity, free will, and existential anxiety); understand meaning and basis of happiness Cross-cultural personality research - Answers Type of phenomenological approach emphasizes how the experience of reality might be different across cultures Learning and cognitive approaches - Answers How people change their behaviors as a result of rewards, punishments, and life experiences -Behaviorism, social learning theory, cognitive personality psychology Social Learning Theory - Answers How observation and self-evaluation determine behavior Classic behaviorism - Answers Focuses on overt behaviors Cognitive personality - Answers Focuses on cognitive processes, including perception, memory, and thought One Big Theory (OBT) - Answers Explains everything about personality It's too difficult to do everything well Funder's First Law - Answers Great strengths are usually great weaknesses, and surprisingly often the opposite is true as well There is no one real answer! Advantages of accounting for the whole person and real-life concerns - Answers It is inclusive, interesting, and important Disadvantages of accounting for the whole person and real-life concerns - Answers Over-inclusiveness or unfocused research Advantages of basic approaches - Answers Good at addressing certain topics Disadvantages of basic approaches - Answers Poor at addressing other topics or ignores them Pigeonholing vs. Appreciation of Individual Differences - Answers Negative: Pigeonholing (an idea is too exclusive or "labeling"; some people are uncomfy with being categorized b/c they find it to be undignified and/or implausible) Positive: leads to sensitivity and respect for individual differences What is the goal of research in this field? - Answers To continuously improve on tentative answer to questions Research - Answers Exploration of the unknown SILB - Answers Clues that we gather to determine one's personality Ideally, we use as many clues as we can Funder's Second Law - Answers There are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous Funder's Third Law - Answers Something beats nothing, two times out of three S data - Answers -Self-reports -Usually questionnaires or surveys, most frequent -High face validity -Often matches I data Advantages of S data - Answers 1. large amount of information 2. access to thoughts, feelings, and emotions 3. some S data are true by definition (self-esteem, etc) 4. Causal force (have a way of creating own reality) 5. Simple and easy Face validity - Answers The degree to which respondents can tell what the items are measuring Self-verification - Answers When people try to bring others to treat them in a manner that confirms their self-conceptions (ex. of causal force of S data) (if you think you are smart, you make an extra effort to make other people think you're smart) Fish-and-water effect - Answers People may be so used to the way they characteristically react and behave that their own actions stop seeming remarkable (error of S data) Disadvantages of S data - Answers 1. bias (desire for privacy; faking) 2. error (distortion or memory; carelessness) 3. too simple and easy I data - Answers -Informant reports -May be more accurate than self-judgements for either extremely good or bad traits -Based on use of judgements -Used frequently in daily life (gossip, etc); no training needed Advantages of I data - Answers 1. Large amount of information (everyone has acquaintances) 2. Real-world basis (not from constructed tests or controlled environments) 3. Common sense (takes context into account) 4. Definitional truth 5. Causal force (expectancy effects) Expectancy effects/behavioral confirmation/self-fulfilling prophecy - Answers When someone becomes the kind of person people expect them to be (causal force of I-data) Disadvantages of I data - Answers 1. limited behavioral information 2. lack of access to private experience 3. error (more likely to remember extreme/unusual behaviors 4. Bias Letter of recommendation effect - Answers Participants tend to nominate informants who think well of them, leading to a more positive picture (Bias for I-data) L data - Answers -Life outcomes - From archival records Advantages of L data - Answers 1. Objective and verifiable 2. Intrinsic importance 3. Psychological relevance Disadvantages of L data - Answers 1. multidetermination (outcome has many different causes) (to get a PhD, need many different factors/traits) 2. possible lack of psychological relevance B data - Answers - Behavioral - Most visible indication of an individual's personality Natural B data - Answers - Diary/experience-sampling methods, private investigators, social media etc. -Wearable cameras, social media, EAR, etc. Advantages of Natural B data - Answers 1. Realistic Disadvantages of Natural B data - Answers 1. difficult 2. desired contexts seldomly occur Laboratory B Data - Answers -Experiments -Represents real life contexts that are difficult to observe directly -Physiological measures (sweat, heart rate, etc.) Advantages of Laboratory B data - Answers 1. range of contexts 2. appearance of objectivity (but subjective judgements must still be made) Disadvantages of Laboratory B data - Answers 1. difficult and expensive 2. uncertain interpretation Reliability - Answers In measurement, the tendency of an instrument to provide the same comparative information on repeated occasions (consistency) Measurement error/error variance - Answers The variation of a number around its true meaning due to uncontrolled influences -State or trait -All measurements include some error Factors that undermine reliability - Answers -low precision -state of the participant -state of the experimenter -variation in the environment Techniques to improve reliability - Answers - be careful - use a constant, scripted procedure - measure something that is important and engages participants -aggregation (Spearman Brown)(allows for random influences to cancel each other out) Psychometrics - Answers The technology of psychological measurement Spearman-Brown Formula - Answers In psychometrics, a mathematical formula that predicts the degree to which the reliability of a test can be improved by adding more items. Validity - Answers -The degree to which a test actually measures what it's supposed to measure (accuracy) - Invokes the idea of the ultimate truth, but personality constructs cannot be seen directly ++For data to be valid, it must be reliable Construct validation - Answers Is the tool really measuring what its supposed to? Generalizability - Answers Extent to which research results apply to a range of individuals not included in the study Generalizability over participants - Answers -college students vs. others -gender bias -shows vs. no-shows -ethnic and cultural diversity Case method - Answers A procedure for gathering scientific info by studying a single individual in order to understand a particular case and discover general lessons or scientific laws Advantages of case methods - Answers 1. describes the whole phenomenon 2. source for ideas 3. sometimes necessary for understanding an individual Disadvantages of case methods - Answers 1. Unknown generalizabililty Experimental method - Answers A research technique that establishes the causal relationship between an independent variable (x) and a dependent variable (y) by randomly assigning participants to experimental groups characterized by differing levels of x, and measuring the average behavior y that results in each group Correlational method - Answers established a relationship between 2 variables by measuring both in a sample (scatter plot&correlation coefficient) "Self-Monitoring" Scale - Answers asks how much/how closely you watch other people for cues as to how you should act "Attributional Complexity" Scale - Answers Asks about the levels of complexity in your thinking about the causes of behavior Performance-based assessment - Answers IAT, MMPI, IQ (these all yield B-data) Projective hypothesis - Answers Answers reveal inner psychological needs, feelings, experiences, thought processes, or other hidden aspects of the mind Objective tests - Answers -Questions seem more objective and less open to interpretation -Shows the elusiveness of objectivity (items are still not absolutely objective) The rational method of objective test construction - Answers -Includes items that seem directly and obviously related to what the test developer wishes to measure -Based on theory, but sometimes less systematic -Provides S data Woodsworth Personality Data Sheet in WWI (WPDS) -Most common form of test construction The factor analytic method of objective test construction - Answers -Identifies a group of things that seem to have something in common -has been used to decide how many fundamental traits exist The empirical method of objective test construction - Answers -Attempts to allow reality to speak for itself -"dust bowl empiricism" bc its dry and boring and also derived in the midwest Null-Hypothesis Significance Testing - Answers -The traditional method of statistical data analysis that determines the chance of getting the result if nothing were really going on Statistical significance - Answers A result that would only occur by chance less than 5 percent of the time p-level - Answers Probability level of obtaining a result from a statistical test if there really is no difference between groups or no relationship between variables Null hypothesis - Answers The possibility of a zero result Population value - Answers the real value Type I error - Answers Mistake of thinking that one variable has an effect on another variable when it really does not (false positive) Type II error - Answers The mistake of thinking that one variable does not effect another when it really does (false negative) Binomial Effect Size Display (BESD) - Answers Concrete display of what a correlation means in terms of specific outcomes -Assume you have 200 participants, with 100 in each of two groups, and 100 with each of two outcomes. Publication bias - Answers The tendency for journals to publish positive findings but not negative or ambiguous ones p-hacking - Answers Hacking around one's data in various ways until one finds the desired result Open science - Answers Emerging principles intended to improve transparency of scientific research; encouragement of full reports on all variables between scientists PDNOS - Answers -Personality disorder not specified -Diagnose individuals with several features from more than one personality disorder -Diagnose a specific disorder that is not included in the classification system GLAD Technique - Answers -Grateful, Learned, Accomplished, Delight -Is an acronym for ways of finding joy and balance. It works by paying attention to certain positive aspects of life that are around you all the time, but which frequently go unnoticed. The trait approach strengths - Answers assesses and attempts to understand how people differ The trait approach weaknesses - Answers neglects aspects of personality common to all people and how each person is unique Situationism - Answers -The belief that behavior is largely driven by the situation, and that personality is relatively unimportant -Personality does not exist The situationist arguments (Mischel) - Answers There is an upper limit to how well one can predict what a person will do based on any measurement of that person's personality, and this upper limit is low (.40) - correlations rarely exceeded .30 (-- we can do better) Interactionism - Answers The effect of a personality variable may depend on the situation, or vise versa -certain types of people go to or find themselves in different types of situations (situations are not randomly populated) Situationism's view of human nature - Answers -People are free to do whatever they want -Everybody is equal, and differences are a function of the situation Personality's view of human nature - Answers -Behavior is partly determined by personality -Every individual is unique -People can develop consistent identities and styles that allow them to be themselves across situations Constructivism - Answers The philosophical view that reality, as a concrete entity, does not exist and