Famous Psychologists
Abnormal Psychology
Cognitive Biases
The Brain
Psychology Myths
100
This American psychologist is considered by many to be one of the founders of modern psychology.
Who is William James?
100
This is the current version of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic and classification guidelines for mental disorders.
What is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5)?
100
This is the tendency to seek evidence that confirms one’s beliefs.
What is the confirmation bias?
100
This lobe of the brain is associated with reasoning, motor skills, higher level cognition, and expressive language
What is the frontal lobe?
100
This is how much of our brain many people think we use, when in fact, we use closer to 100%.
What is 10%?
200
This Russian physiologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on the physiology of digestion before his work with classical conditioning.
Who is Ivan Pavlov?
200
This is a disorder in which the person experiences recurrent obsessions or compulsions that are perceived by the person as excessive or unreasonable, but cause significant distress and disruption in the person’s daily life.
What is obsessive-compulsive disorder?
200
This is the tendency to make attributions so that one can perceive oneself favorably.
What is the self-serving bias?
200
This hemisphere is better at mathematical skills and logic—it is more analytical.
What is the left-hemisphere?
200
This effect was believed to make babies smarter by exposing them to classical music.
What is the Mozart effect?
300
This person was an American psychologist in the early part of the twentieth century and the founder of behavioral psychology.
Who is John B. Watson?
300
This is an anxiety disorder indicated by a marked and persistent fear of one or more social performance situations in which embarrassment may occur and in which there is exposure to unfamiliar people or scrutiny by others.
What is social anxiety disorder?
300
This is the tendency, after learning about an outcome, to be overconfident in one’s ability to have predicted it
What is the Hindsight Bias?
300
These are the two types of visual receptor cells in the retina, named for their actual physical shapes.
What are the rods and cones?
300
This technique is believed by many to be useful for retrieving memories of forgotten events, when it is really not.
What is hypnosis?
400
This psychologist proposed that there are actually eight different intelligences.
Who is Howard Gardner?
400
This is the inability to form new explicit long-term memories for events following surgery or trauma to the brain.
What is anterograde amnesia?
400
This is the tendency as an observer to overestimate dispositional influences and underestimate situational influences on others’ behavior.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
400
These neurons fire both when performing an action and when observing another person perform that same action.
What are mirror neurons?
400
These abstract tests of ambiguous shapes are presented to people in an attempt to get at their unconscious, yet there is no evidence that this works.
What are inkblot tests?
500
A twentieth-century Swiss psychologist whose research on children’s thinking led to a landmark theory of cognitive development.
Who was Jean Piaget?
500
This is a psychotic disorder in which at least two of the following symptoms are present most of the time during a 1-month period—hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, disorganized or catatonic behavior, or negative symptoms such as loss of emotion
What is schizophrenia?
500
This is the tendency we have to compare and contrast only a limited set of items. We tend to fixate on a value or number that in turn gets compared to everything else.
What is the anchoring bias or anchoring effect?
500
This is the visual sensory register that holds an exact copy of the incoming visual input but only for a brief period of time, less than 1 second.
What is iconic memory?
500
This form of biomedical treatment is believed to be physically dangerous and barbaric, yet that is mainly due to Hollywood's erroneous portrayal of earlier versions of this therapy.
What is Electroconvulsive (“Shock”) Therapy?