U3 AOS 1
While walking through the hallway, you accidentally touch a scorching hot pan and immediately jerk your hand away before your brain even registers the pain. What division of the nervous system coordinated this rapid, unconscious response?
Somatic Nervous System.
classical conditioning, what specific type of stimulus starts out causing no predictable or natural response from the subject before being paired with an unconditioned stimulus?
The neutral stimulus.
What hormone is released by the pineal gland at night to induce a relaxed state and promote drowsiness?
Melatonin
What indicator of mental wellbeing involves the degree to which an individual can complete daily tasks in an independent and effective manner?
Levels of functioning
What measure of central tendency (mean, median or mode) is best for data distributed on a bell curve?
Mean
When you are facing an acute stressor (like jumping out of your skin at a TikTok scare video), your sympathetic nervous system kicks into gear. Name two specific physiological changes it causes in the body to help you fight or flee.
Any two: increased heart rate, dilated pupils, increased breathing rate, release of adrenaline/cortisol, sweating, or inhibited digestion
According to Atkinson and Shiffrin’s multi-store model of memory, what are the exact capacity and duration limits of the short-term memory store?
Capacity: 7+/- 2 items.
Duration: 18-30 seconds.
According to research by Dawson and Reid (1997), remaining awake for 24 consecutive hours produces cognitive performance impairment equivalent to having what specific blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level?
0.10% BAC
In the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional Wellbeing (SEWB) framework, what are the 3 of the 7 core dimensions that serve as sources of wellbeing, and from where do these dimensions originate in the model?
3 of: Connection to... body, mind and emotions, family and kinship, community, culture, Country, ancestors and spirituality.
When evaluating experimental design and data, what is the precise scientific term for data that differs from the true value due to a consistent, repeating amount, which directly impacts the accuracy of a measurement rather than its precision?
Systematic error
According to Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome, when does the body actually mobilize resources by activating the sympathetic nervous system and triggering the fight-flight-freeze response?
Alarm - countershock.
During the multi-step process of observational learning, a learner must create a mental representation to commit a model's behavior to memory before they can reproduce it. What specific stage of observational learning is this, and why would someone with aphantasia inherently struggle with it?
Retention - limited ability to visualise in order to form the mental representation.
A clinician is treating a patient with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS) who struggles to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. Explain how bright light therapy (BLT) must be timed for this patient in order to correct the misalignment.
Patient A (DSPS) - BLT in the morning to advance cortisol release that morning / advance melatonin release that evening.
Using what you know of operant conditioning, explain, in terms of the consequence, why in psychoeducation family members supporting someone with specific phobia are advised to discourage avoidance behaviours.
Allowing avoidance perpetuates the phobia by negatively reinforcing the avoidance behaviour.
A student researcher conducts an experiment investigating the effect of sleep duration on short-term memory, but uses an unrepresentative convenience sample of 8 students, fails to standardise the testing environment (resulting in classroom noise disruptions), and relies entirely on participants' self-reported sleep hours. Assess either the internal or external validity of this research.
Internal validity: limited/low because extraneous/confounding variables mean the IV may not have cleanly caused the change in the DV.
External validity: limited/low because the small, non-representative convenience sample, prevents the findings from being validly generalised to the population.