Essential Psychology
Student Resources
Multiple Choice Questions
1. Exposure to some maternal hormones before birth may result in the child having
- borderline personality disorders in later life
- lower levels of emotional response
- an insecure attachment
- none of these
Answer: A
2. What is a teratogen?
- a noxious substance found in soil that crosses the maternal placental barrier
- a hormonal trigger that stimulates excessive cell growth in the embryo
- an allergen that affects both mother and foetus
- a substance or environmental influence that affects the development of the foetus and results in physical abnormalities
Answer: D
3. Foetal alcohol syndrome results in
- attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- poor sleep patterns
- changes in brain structure and behavioural problems
- blindness
Answer: C
4. One difficulty of experimental research involving infant perception is
- they tire quickly
- a parent has to be present
- pre-verbal infants become easily distracted
- they cannot relate to the researcher
Answer: C
5. What does the preferential looking technique assume?
- young infants prefer to look at familiar objects
- young infants are afraid of looking at unfamiliar objects
- young infants have an innate predisposition to respond to novel stimuli
- young infants learn to respond to novel stimuli
Answer: C
6. Preferential sucking technique is used to test an infant’s preference for
- sounds and voices
- tastes
- faces and voices
- smells and textures
Answer: A
7. Infants use imitation to
- increase the bond with their primary caregiver
- communicate
- make sense of information provided by the average face
- get what they want
Answer: C
8. The ‘visual cliff’ experiment was used to demonstrate that an infant has
- distance perception
- depth perception
- space perception
- volume perception
Answer: B
9. What did Quinn (2006) hypothesize we have in place to allow the categorization of objects in the first 6 months of life?
- neural architecture
- hormone triggers
- spatial awareness
- none of these
Answer: A
10. In which stage did Piaget say that infants are essentially limited in their thinking and show a primitive understanding of objects in their environment?
- the concrete operational stage
- the formal operational stage
- the sensorimotor stage
- preoperational stage
Answer: C
11. What is egocentric thinking?
- thinking that takes into account other people
- thinking that is focussed on the feelings of others
- thinking that has little regard for others
- thinking that is a mix of the three
Answer: C
12. An internal cognitive map of stimuli is also called a
- road map
- internal map
- mental representation
- wiring map
Answer: C
13. Harris (1973) criticized Piaget’s claims about infants’ abilities to distinguish between objects and their own actions because
- infants have a short attention span
- infants have a fragile short-term memory
- infants have reduced cognition
- infants get distracted by shiny things
Answer: B
14. What is prosody?
- tone, pitch and rhythm of speech
- pitch, intonation and depth of speech
- tone, depth and stress of speech
- rhythm, stress and intonation of speech
Answer: D
15. Which of the following lists of words best fits the following statement?
It was found that the foetuses’ heart rates ______ when they heard a familiar ______, indicating that they recognized the ______ of speech sounds.
- decreased, rhyme, sequence
- increased, voice, pitch
- increased, song, tone
- decreased, sentence, speed
Answer: A
16. It has been found that infants can notice elements of speech when
- it’s played quieter
- it’s played louder
- it’s played forwards
- it’s played backwards
Answer: C
17. In order to acquire language, an infant needs which two things?
- vocabulary and grammar
- grammar and hearing
- vision and vocabulary
- vision and hearing
Answer: A
18. At 2 years of age, an infant’s language mainly consists of
- cooing
- one-word utterances
- two-word sentences
- sentences of three words or longer
Answer: C
19. Infants begin to babble at
- 5 months
- 7 months
- 9 months
- 11 months
Answer: B
20. Which of the following statements is TRUE?
- hearing infants of deaf parents never babble, they only use hand signals
- hearing infants of deaf parents’ babies do continue to babble, but with hand signals instead
- hearing infants of deaf parents mix babbling and hand signals throughout infancy
- hearing infants of deaf parents babble and do not use hand signals until much later
Answer: B
21. Skinner (1957) suggested that children learn language because of
- reinforcement from adults
- experimenting with sounds
- simply imitating others
- an innate skill to develop language
Answer: A
22. Which of the following is a criticism of Skinner’s theory of language development?
- children make mistakes that adults do not make
- children reinvent language
- adults do not correct children’s grammar
- all of these
Answer: C
23. Motherese is better known as
- babbling
- learning through imitation
- child-directed speech
- operant conditioning
Answer: C
24. What are protoconversations?
- interactions between infants of a similar age
- the monologues infants use to reinforce the words they have learned
- early turn-taking behaviour between adults and infants
- adults labelling the objects in the infant’s environment
Answer: C
25. What are the three stages of Ainsworth et al.’s (1978) ‘strange situation’?
- interaction, separation, reunion
- play, stranger introduction, parent abandonment
- isolation, reunion, play
- interaction, alienation, stranger introduction
Answer: A
26. Which of the four attachment types was added at a later date?
- disorganized
- secure
- insecure
- ambivalent/resistant
Answer: A
27. Insecurely attached or maltreated children are more likely to
- have learning difficulties
- develop emotional disorders
- break the law
- develop obsessive compulsive disorder
Answer: B
28. Which of the following words best fit the following statement?
During the ______ year of life, children’s relationships with their peers are characterized by ______ behaviour, but as infants approach their ______ birthday, they will begin to engage in ______ behaviour.
- second, antisocial, second, prosocial
- first, shy, first, confident
- first, prosocial, first, aggressive
- second, confident, second, antisocial
Answer: C
29. During the first year of life, infants begin to develop a sense of self-awareness. This involves the development of the subjective self and the objective self. What is the subjective self?
- the recognition that the individual is separate from others
- the recognition that the self is something that is an object with properties
- the recognition that the individual is a part of the group
- the recognition that the self is the same as others
Answer: A
30. What are the processes that a child must go through in order to develop gender categorization?
- gender identity, gender stability, gender consistency
- gender stereotype, gender identity, gender distinction
- gender stability, gender distinction, gender consistency,
- gender discrimination, gender stability, gender stereotype
Answer: A
31. Gender identity involves
- the recognition that people remain the same gender throughout their life
- knowing that people’s biological sex remains the same, even though their appearance can change
- the infant being able to correctly label other people according to their gender
- discovering that certain roles are assigned to men compared to women
Answer: C
32. At what age do children show a preference for gender-stereotyped toys?
- 12 months
- 18 months
- 24 months
- 30 months
Answer: B