As an unfamiliar adult starts to talk to three-year-old Rose, she becomes anxious and
looks at her father, who smiles calmly at her. Reassured, Rose relaxes and responds to
the new adult. Rose is demonstrating the use of
A) sympathy.
B) social referencing.
C) empathy.
D) emotional display rules.
Eight-year-old Carlos and 9-year-old Theresa are arguing over a bag of candy. Which of
the following statements most accurately reflects their probable response to
intervention?
A) They will stop fighting if an adult threatens to spank them or put them in time out.
B) They will stop fighting in an adult’s presence but will resume the argument once the
adult leaves the room.
C) They will view a directive to stop fighting and share as right, regardless of who
states it.
D) They will not listen to anyone because candy involves a primary motivator, and their
desire for it is too strong to control their actions.
Deena understands that a person’s sex remains the same even if clothing, hairstyle, and
activities change. Deena is demonstrating an understanding of gender
A) labeling.
B) constancy.
C) stability.
D) consistency.
In a study in which 20- to 40-year-olds were shown photos of children and adults and
asked to rate each on “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neutral” personality traits, adults
A) differentiated men from women more sharply than they did boys from girls.
B) differentiated girls from women more sharply than they did boys from men.
C) differentiated boys from girls more sharply than they did men from women.
D) had great difficulty assigning gender-stereotyped traits based on photos.
At birth, the brain is nearly _____ percent of its adult weight.
A) 20
B) 30
C) 50
D) 70
Sperm live for up to _____ days and can lie in wait for the ovum, which survives for
_____ day(s).
A) 2; 1
B) 4; 2
C) 6; 1
D) 8; 2
Which of the following statements is true regarding only children?
A) They tend to be spoiled and self-centered.
B) They tend to experience high levels of anxiety due to extreme parental pressures to
succeed.
C) They tend to be less well-accepted in their peer group, because they have not had
opportunities to learn effective conflict-resolution strategies.
D) They tend to have low self-esteem and perform poorly in school.
In contrast to Freud, Erikson
A) viewed children as taking a more active role in their own development.
B) focused on the impact of early experiences on later behavior.
C) minimized the role of culture in individual development.
D) recognized the lifespan nature of development.
Which of the following statements is a limitation of Chomsky’s nativist perspective?
A) Chomsky’s theory cannot explain how children weave statements together into
connected discourse and sustain meaningful conversations.
B) Chomsky’s theory is inconsistent with research on efforts to teach language to
nonhuman primates.
C) Chomsky’s theory overemphasizes the role of social experience in language
development.
D) Chomsky’s theory ignores the existence of specialized regions in the brain that
support language skills.
Children’s knowledge of personality trait stereotypes is first acquired through
A) in-group favoritism.
B) out-group favoritism
C) interactions with other-sex peers.
D) interactions with same-sex siblings.
Which of the following behaviors is consistent with Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory?
A) When working on a math assignment, Michelle tries several solutions before
arriving at the correct answer.
B) When building a tower with blocks, Ted produces the same guiding comments that
his father previously used when helping him build block towers.
C) When his mother takes him to the store, Tom is well-behaved because he knows that
he will be rewarded with a lollipop.
D) When playing in her sandbox, Amy builds the same castle that she saw her friend
build yesterday.
Evidence on Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME)
confirms that
A) stimulation provided by parents is moderately linked to mental development.
B) the black”white disparity in preschoolers’ IQ decreases with age.
C) the extent to which parents talk to infants and toddlers contributes strongly to early
spatial reasoning skills.
D) little can be done to increase the mental development of poverty-stricken children.
Which of the following statements is supported by research on the influence of early
experience in the organization of the cerebral cortex?
A) Deaf infants depend only on the left hemisphere for language processing, whereas
hearing infants depend on both hemispheres.
B) Adolescents and adults show more diffuse fMRI activity than children while
performing motor and cognitive skills.
C) Deaf adults who learned sign language as infants and children depend more than
hearing adults on the right hemisphere for language processing.
D) Toddlers who are advanced in language development show greater right-hemisphere
specialization than their more slowly developing agemates.
In a study of children reared in extremely depleted Romanian orphanages, the longer
they remained in the orphanages, the
A) higher their IQ scores.
B) more resilient they became to environmental stressors.
C) higher their cortisol levels.
D) lower their cortisol levels.
Evolutionary theorists speculate that our unique capacity to act prosocially toward
genetic strangers originated
A) when man began walking upright.
B) several million years ago.
C) about 500 years ago.
D) during the Reformation.
Most neurobiological research has focused on children who fall at opposite extremes of
the __________ and __________ dimensions of temperament.
A) positive-affect; fearful-distress
B) activity-level; attention-span
C) attention-span; irritable-distress
D) activity-level; fearful-distress
British philosopher John Locke viewed the child as
A) tainted by original sin.
B) a tabula rasa.
C) a noble savage.
D) an active, purposeful being.
The most recent revision of Bandura’s theory places such strong emphasis on how
children think about themselves and other people that he calls it a __________
approach.
A) social learning
B) social-cognitive
C) behavior modification
D) psychosocial
Assuming the following four boys will eventually engage in various forms of
adolescent delinquency, which child is likely to engage in less violent forms, such as
theft?
A) Mark, who has high levels of oppositional behavior
B) Matt, who has high levels of physical aggression
C) Mike, who has low levels of oppositional behavior
D) Max, who has medium levels of physical aggression
Similarity in development of processing speed across diverse tasks in several cultures
A) is most likely due to a decrease in the level of neurons and their connections.
B) implies a fundamental change in efficiency of the information-processing system.
C) indicates irregular levels of synaptic pruning.
D) is unrelated to increased capacity of working memory.
Andre has an IQ of 115. He performed __________ than _____ percent of his
agemates.
A) better; 15
B) worse; 16
C) better; 50
D) better; 84
Because __________ appears early and develops rapidly, it is probably a fairly
automatic process.
A) rehearsal
B) recovery
C) recognition
D) elaboration
Newborns’ remarkable capacity for __________ supports the beginnings of
self-awareness.
A) intermodal perception
B) attribution training
C) empathetic responding
D) social cognition
Lamis likes to play “Go Fish.” One day when her older brother suggests changing the
rules, she adamantly insists that the rules cannot be changed. Lamis has not yet made
the transition to
A) heteronomous morality.
B) a punishment and obedience orientation.
C) an instrumental purpose orientation.
D) morality of cooperation.
Harshly treated children react with resentment and a chronic sense of being personally
threatened, which prompts
A) timid, but more social, behavior.
B) a strong internalization of moral rules.
C) a focus on the self’s distress rather than a sympathetic orientation to others’ needs.
D) increased genetic risk for aggression.
Disagreements between adolescents and parents are most often
A) due to different moral imperatives.
B) related to social conventions.
C) disputes over personal issues.
D) related to drug use and antisocial behavior.
Statements like “Boys can be firefighters” and “Most girls don”t like playing football”
are examples of
A) observational learning.
B) generic utterances.
C) expressive traits.
D) gender schemas.
In industrialized nations, studies confirm that
A) heredity accounts for excessive weight gain.
B) obesity risk is greatest for individuals living in economically well-off households.
C) parental feeding practices have little impact on childhood obesity.
D) children of mothers who smoked during pregnancy are more likely to be overweight.
The language abilities of individuals with Williams syndrome
A) are evidence that language is controlled by an innate LAD.
B) are not impaired in any significant ways.
C) indicate that language is not separate from other human mental abilities.
D) are very weakly correlated with working-memory capacity.
In !Kung society, infants are
A) provided with a diverse range of learning toys.
B) provided with natural objects, such as twigs, grass, stones, and nutshells.
C) encouraged to explore objects independently.
D) discouraged from interacting with nonrelatives.