AP Psychology Full-length practice exam 3

The Weber-Fechner law describes the relationship between physical stimulus intensity and the resulting psychological perception. Which statement best captures this principle?

Maria can vividly recall the day she received her college acceptance letter — where she was, what she was wearing, who she told first. She also knows that the capital of France is Paris, though she can't remember when or where she learned that fact. Maria's recollection of the acceptance day is BEST described as ____ memory; her knowledge that Paris is the capital is ____ memory.

The DSM-5 is the primary tool used by mental health professionals in the United States to:

Researchers study identical twins raised apart to investigate the relative contributions of heredity and environment to personality. This research design is best described as a:

Activities like winning a game, eating delicious food, and using addictive drugs all increase activity in brain pathways that release which neurotransmitter — central to the brain's reward system?

Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) describes the body's response to prolonged stress in three sequential stages. In the correct order, these stages are:

When solving a problem, someone always tries the same solution strategy that worked in the past, even when a novel approach would be more efficient. This tendency is called:

A researcher lesions the lateral hypothalamus of a rat. Which behavioral change is most likely to result?

Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation procedure identified different attachment styles. An infant who explores freely when the caregiver is present, protests briefly when the caregiver leaves, and quickly calms and resumes play when the caregiver returns shows which attachment pattern?

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), commonly prescribed for depression, work by:

After a football game, fans of the winning team say 'We won!' while fans of the losing team say 'They lost.' This tendency is an example of:

Spearman proposed that intelligence can be described as a single general factor (g) underlying all mental abilities. Gardner challenged this view by proposing that humans have multiple distinct intelligences. Which of the following correctly distinguishes these two positions?

After studying Spanish for two years, Elena now has difficulty remembering the French she learned in high school. This forgetting is best explained by:

A used-car salesperson lists a vehicle at $25,000,knowingcustomerswillnegotiatedown.Customerswhocounter-offertypicallysettlearound$22,000 — much higher than they would have if no price had been listed. This pattern BEST illustrates:

After receiving a painful injection at the doctor's office, a toddler begins to cry at the sight of the white lab coat, even before anything happens. Which term describes the white coat in this scenario?

A researcher assigns participants to be either 'guards' or 'prisoners' in a simulated prison and finds that the guards quickly began abusing power and the prisoners became submissive. This describes Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. Its primary psychological lesson is that:

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Carl Rogers's person-centered therapy both belong to which broad personality tradition?

A locksmith eventually figures out a complex puzzle after a long period of being stuck. The moment the solution appears, it seems sudden and complete — not the result of incremental trial-and-error. This BEST illustrates:

In Milgram's obedience experiments, what factor most reliably reduced participants' compliance with the experimenter's commands to administer shocks?

Solomon Asch's conformity experiments involved participants judging the lengths of lines while confederates gave obviously wrong answers. The key finding was that:

Which brain structure, part of the limbic system, plays a central role in processing fear and emotional memories?

A teacher reads a list of 20 words aloud and asks students to recall as many as possible. Most students remember the FIRST few words better than the middle ones. This is BEST explained by the:

Harlow's studies of rhesus monkeys raised with wire versus cloth surrogate mothers showed that when frightened, monkeys clung to the cloth mother even when only the wire mother provided food. This finding challenged which prior assumption about attachment?

REM sleep is characterized by:

Asked to guess whether someone is a librarian or a salesperson based on the description "quiet, organized, enjoys reading," most people choose librarian — even when told salespeople outnumber librarians 75 to 1 in the population. This demonstrates:

A cognitive psychologist studies how people decide whether an object belongs to a category. Participants judge a robin as a 'bird' faster than they judge a penguin as a 'bird.' This finding is best explained by:

A fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule delivers a reward after a set number of responses. Compared to a variable-ratio schedule, fixed-ratio schedules produce which pattern of responding?

George Miller's classic research on short-term memory capacity concluded that people can hold approximately how many chunks of information at one time?

Knowing how to ride a bicycle without consciously thinking about each movement is BEST classified as which type of long-term memory?

Research on optimism and health outcomes consistently shows that dispositional optimists have better immune function and recover more quickly from surgery. The biopsychosocial model best explains this finding by noting that:

A patient is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Which cluster of symptoms is categorized as 'positive symptoms' in DSM-5?

A rat in a Skinner box presses a lever and receives a food pellet. Over time, lever-pressing increases. If pressing the lever now causes a mild electric shock instead of food, lever-pressing will decrease through the process of:

What is the KEY difference between an algorithm and a heuristic in problem-solving?

Action potentials follow the all-or-none principle. A researcher increases the intensity of a stimulus applied to a neuron well above threshold. Compared to a threshold-level stimulus, the action potential will:

A psychiatrist prescribes an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) to a patient with depression. At the synaptic level, this medication works by:

According to Craik and Lockhart's levels of processing framework, which of the following encoding strategies should produce the BEST long-term retention of a list of new vocabulary words?

In language, phonemes are BEST described as:

In the Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory, which store holds sensory information for only a fraction of a second before it either fades or is passed to short-term memory?

Muzafer Sherif's Robber's Cave experiment demonstrated that intergroup conflict could be reduced most effectively by:

A researcher hypothesizes that a particular vitamin improves memory. To test this, they survey people who already take the vitamin and ask, "Has your memory improved since starting?" Most report yes. Why is this study design vulnerable to confirmation bias even before considering placebo effects?

A four-year-old watches an adult hide candy under a cup while a second adult is out of the room. When asked where the absent adult will look for the candy upon returning, the four-year-old says, 'Under the cup, where it really is.' This response demonstrates the child has NOT yet developed:

Kohlberg presented the Heinz dilemma (stealing a drug to save a spouse) to assess moral reasoning. A person who reasons 'Heinz should steal because the law fails to account for every special case, and higher moral principles take precedence over legal rules' is operating at which level?

Baddeley and Hitch proposed that working memory includes a phonological loop, a visuospatial sketchpad, and a central executive. Which component is primarily responsible for coordinating and directing attention between the other components?

A patient suffers a stroke and afterward can understand spoken language and read normally, but their own speech is slow, effortful, and limited to short ungrammatical phrases like "want... water... now." This pattern is consistent with damage to which area, and is known as which type of aphasia?

Which neurotransmitter is most directly implicated in Parkinson's disease due to the degeneration of neurons in the substantia nigra that produce it?

The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus plays a KEY role in:

Identical (monozygotic) twins reared apart still show striking similarities in personality, intelligence, and certain mental health conditions. These findings provide evidence supporting:

A neurotransmitter that generally inhibits neural firing and is linked to anxiety disorders when levels are low is:

Erik Erikson proposed eight psychosocial stages. A 70-year-old professor reviews his career with deep satisfaction and few regrets. According to Erikson, this person has successfully resolved which stage?

A researcher wants to assess personality using the Big Five (OCEAN) model. A participant scores very high on Neuroticism and very low on Agreeableness. Which behavioral profile is most consistent with these scores?

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that when people behave in ways inconsistent with their attitudes, they will:

Which of the following best describes the hallmark features of major depressive disorder (MDD) according to DSM-5 criteria?

A therapist treats a patient with anxiety disorder by teaching deep breathing and relaxation, then gradually exposing the patient to feared stimuli from least to most anxiety-provoking. This technique is called:

In the diathesis-stress model of psychological disorders, a person develops a disorder when:

A student studies a chapter in sections, pausing to quiz herself after each section rather than re-reading it. Research on memory encoding predicts that the self-quizzing method will produce better long-term retention because it relies primarily on:

Albert Bandura's Bobo doll experiment provided evidence for observational learning. Which of the following findings from that study best supports the concept of vicarious reinforcement?

During a sleep study, a participant shows high-amplitude, slow delta waves on an EEG recording. This pattern is most characteristic of which sleep stage?

Maria suffered a stroke affecting Broca's area. Which symptom is she most likely to exhibit?

Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) describes the range of tasks that:

Elizabeth Loftus's research on eyewitness testimony demonstrated that memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive. Which experimental finding most directly supports this conclusion?

A client with post-traumatic stress disorder works with a therapist who uses EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). The therapist also helps the client identify distorted thoughts like 'I am permanently ruined.' This cognitive component is most closely associated with which therapy approach?

William James and Walter Cannon debated the sequence of events in emotional experience. James-Lange theory and Cannon-Bard theory differ in that James-Lange argues:

Albert Ellis developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) based on his ABC model. In this model, 'B' stands for:

According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory, a person who repeatedly makes self-defeating decisions after a painful divorce is unconsciously recreating familiar patterns from childhood. This dynamic best illustrates which Freudian concept?

Which part of the neuron receives incoming signals from other neurons and carries them toward the cell body?

During a clinical interview, a patient consistently interprets ambiguous facial expressions as hostile. According to Aaron Beck's cognitive theory, this error in thinking is an example of:

Which structure of a neuron is primarily responsible for RECEIVING signals from other neurons?

A chess grandmaster can glance at a mid-game board for five seconds and reconstruct piece positions far better than a novice can. This difference is best explained by the grandmaster's superior use of:

Sometimes when trying to remember a word, you feel as if it's "on the tip of your tongue" — you know related information about it but can't produce the word itself. This phenomenon BEST illustrates:

According to Noam Chomsky's theory of language acquisition, children develop language so rapidly and uniformly across cultures because humans have an innate:

A study finds that cancer patients who participate in a structured social support group have significantly longer survival times than those who do not. Critics argue the study may confound social support with the effects of patients discussing healthier behaviors. To control for this alternative explanation, the researchers should:

Benjamin Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis proposed that:

When a stimulus reaches sufficient strength, a neuron fires an action potential. If the stimulus becomes EVEN STRONGER, what happens to that single neuron's action potential?

According to Piaget, a child who can think logically about concrete objects but cannot yet reason about abstract hypothetical situations is in which cognitive stage?

When a person sees a snake on a hiking trail, their heart rate accelerates, pupils dilate, and breathing quickens. Which division of the nervous system is PRIMARILY responsible for these responses?