Psychology Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Durganand Sinha traces the history of modern psychology in India in four phases, as the key states and as the Indian psychology texts that follow his 1986 book describe. The two, three and five-phase options do not match his account.

The key is Four. In his 1986 book, Sinha treats the development of modern psychology in India in four stages, so the two, three and five-phase options do not match. I could not check the details of each phase independently, so the answer follows the key.

Answer: D

Computer science helped cognitive science grow, through computing models of the mind and artificial intelligence that treat thinking as information processing. Anthropology, psychoneuroimmunology and mass communication are named in the other options; the key accepts only computer science, and psychoneuroimmunology concerns links between stress, the nervous system and immunity, so it belongs to health psychology.

Cognitive science grew from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology and computer science, but the key picks computer science as the discipline that supplied the information processing model.

Answer: B

The key accepts anthropology, economics and political science (1, 3 and 4). When psychology studies behaviour in its socio-cultural context, it shares knowledge with the social sciences that study culture, economic behaviour and political behaviour. Medicine is grouped with health and the biological sciences, not with the socio-cultural disciplines the stem asks about, so the options that include 2 are wrong.

All three social sciences study how behaviour is shaped by culture, economy and political structure, which is what a socio-cultural study of behaviour requires.

Answer: B

Environmental psychology is the discipline that studies how people interact with, and are affected by, their external surroundings, including the built and natural environment, crowding, noise and pollution. Political science studies government and power, anthropology studies human cultures and origins, and sociology studies social groups and institutions, so none of them is concerned mainly with the person-environment relationship.

Answer: A

The first psychology department in India was established in 1916 at the University of Calcutta. 1913, 1914 and 1915 are the other years offered but the department began in 1916. The department was set up at the University of Calcutta under Narendra Nath Sen Gupta, who had studied under Hugo Munsterberg at Harvard, and Calcutta also began the first psychological laboratory in India in 1916.

Answer: C

Sir Francis Galton wrote Hereditary Genius in 1869, arguing that ability runs in families. James McKeen Cattell developed mental tests, Karl Pearson developed correlation, and Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species. Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin, a pioneer of the study of individual differences and the inventor of the correlation idea that Karl Pearson later developed into the correlation coefficient. Hereditary Genius was an early study of eminent men in Britain, in which Galton argued that mental ability runs in families.

Answer: D

The biological perspective primarily studies brain processes, genes and evolution. Learning and rewards belong to behaviourism, thinking and memory to the cognitive perspective, and unconscious motives to the psychodynamic perspective. The biological perspective explains behaviour through the nervous system, hormones, heredity and evolution; the other perspectives named in the options belong to learning, cognitive and psychodynamic approaches respectively.

Answer: D

Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain how evolution shaped modern human behaviour. Behaviour genetics studies the genetic basis of behaviour, comparative psychology studies different species, and behavioural neuroscience studies the brain and behaviour. Evolutionary psychology applies Darwin's natural selection to behaviour, asking how mental traits that helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce shaped present behaviour.

Answer: B

Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, which presents dreams as expressions of unconscious wishes. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Karen Horney wrote on personality and neurosis, but not this book. Freud's book of 1899, published with the date 1900, proposed that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, and it set out the manifest and latent content of dreams.

Answer: C

The keyed answer is Spirituality.

The word comes from the Latin spiritus, 'breath', the life-giving principle that animates a living being. Definitions built on that root describe spirituality as the study of, or concern with, the spirit as the life-giving essence in a person, which is the sense this definition uses.

Existential phenomenology studies human existence as it is lived and experienced. Philosophy, literally 'love of wisdom', is the broad inquiry into knowledge, reality and value. Anthropology is the study of human beings and their cultures. None of these is defined by a life-giving substance or spirit.