Questions and Answers
1. What is Psychology? - Correct Answer -The study of mind and behavior.
2. What is Nativism (Nature)? - Correct Answer -Nativism is the theory that knowledge
is innate and inborn. Our biological endowment makes up who we are.
3. What is Empiricism (Nurture)? - Correct Answer -Empiricism is the idea that we gain
knowledge through experience and surroundings. Our environment makes up who
we are.
4. Plato - Correct Answer -He believes in the philosophical view that certain kinds of
knowledge are innate and inborn (nativism/nature).
5. Aristotle - Correct Answer -He believes in philosophical empiricism which states that
knowledge is gained through experience.
6. Wilhelm Wundt - Correct Answer -He believes in the idea of structuralism.
Structuralism is when you analyze the brain by breaking it down to its main
components.
7. William James - Correct Answer -He believes in the idea of functionalism.
Functionalism is when you see how someone functions or adapts to new aspects in
their environment.
8. John Watson - Correct Answer -He believed that psychology and the mind was not
able to be studied through scientific inquiry. Instead, he was a behaviorist who
focused more so the actions of humans to explain their train of thought.
9. B.F. Skinner - Correct Answer -He was another behaviorist that believed in Pavlov's
experiments and Watson's theories. He studied how behavior was learned according
to circumstance.
10. Sigmund Freud - Correct Answer -He came up with psychoanalytic theory which is
very much so used today. Psychoanalysis is the study of unconscious mind and how it
affects a person's thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
11. Behaviorism - Correct Answer -an approach that advocates that psychologists
restrict themselves to the scientific study objectively observable behavior
12. Cognitive Psychology - Correct Answer -the scientific study of mental processes
including perception, thought, memory, and experience
13. Evolutionary Psychology - Correct Answer -a psychological approach that explains
mind and behavior in terms of the adaptive value of abilities that are preserved over
time by natural selection (Influenced by Darwin, James, and EO Wilson)
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, 14. Humanistic Psychology - Correct Answer -an approach to understanding human
nature that emphasizes the positive potential of human beings
15. Social Psychology - Correct Answer -A subfield of psychology that studies the causes
and consequences of interpersonal studies
16. Cultural Psychology - Correct Answer -Study of how cultures reflect and shape the
psychological processes of their members
17. Emergence of Cognitive Psychology - Correct Answer -It became a thing when Max
Wertheimer began to study illusions and errors when it came to the mind. He came
up with the Gestalt theory that states that we rather perceive the "sum" over the
"parts". Kurt Lewin believed that we saw the world as we saw it and not at all how it
actually was. The invention of computers made most psychologists ignore this and
see psychology objectively.
18. Operational Definition - Correct Answer -It is the description of a property in
concrete, measurable terms. For example, you can operationally define happiness as
the amount of times that someone smiles.
19. Dependent variable - Correct Answer -A variable whose value depends on another
variable
20. Independent variable - Correct Answer -A variable who is manipulated for an
experiment, but does not depend on another
21. Reliability - Correct Answer -It is the tendency for an instrument to produce the same
measurement whenever it is used to measure the same thing.
22. Power - Correct Answer -An instrument's ability to detect change in the property.
23. Validity - Correct Answer -The goodness with which a concrete event defines a
property
24. Demand Characteristics - Correct Answer -The aspects of an observational setting
that caused people to behave as they think they should
25. What is a correlation? - Correct Answer -They are two variable that are said to be
correlated when variation of one variable is synchronized with the variation in the
value of another. However, correlation does not equate to causation.
26. What is the third variable problem (confounding variable)? - Correct Answer -It is the
chance that two variable are only related because of each are causally related to a
third one.
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