EPPP Part 1 (Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology) — All Questions

A teacher gives a child hints that let her solve problems she cannot yet solve alone, then gradually withdraws the hints as she improves. This best illustrates:

• a.Accommodation following cognitive disequilibrium
• b.Assimilation of problems into an existing schema
• c.Scaffolding within the zone of proximal development✓
• d.Shaping through reinforcement of successive approximations

Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is the gap between what a learner can do alone and with guidance; Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) called the adult's adjustable, gradually withdrawn support scaffolding. Accommodation and assimilation are Piagetian processes of individual schema change, and shaping reinforces successive approximations rather than providing and fading hints.

In the Strange Situation, a 12-month-old shows little distress when his mother leaves and turns away and ignores her when she returns. This pattern is classified as:

• a.Insecure-avoidant✓
• b.Secure
• c.Insecure-resistant (ambivalent)
• d.Disorganized/disoriented

Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) classified infants who show little distress at separation and actively avoid the caregiver at reunion as insecure-avoidant. Resistant infants are highly distressed and both seek and resist contact, disorganized infants (Main & Solomon, 1990) show contradictory or disoriented behavior, and secure infants seek and are comforted by the caregiver at reunion.

Parents set clear, firm expectations, explain the reasons behind their rules, and respond warmly to their child's point of view. In Baumrind's typology, this style is:

• a.Permissive
• b.Authoritative✓
• c.Authoritarian
• d.Uninvolved

Baumrind described authoritative parenting as combining high demands and control with warmth, responsiveness and reasoning. Authoritarian parents are demanding but low in warmth and explanation, permissive parents are warm but make few demands, and the uninvolved (neglectful) style, added by Maccoby and Martin (1983), is low on both.

A 48-year-old accountant finds renewed purpose in mentoring junior colleagues and coaching a youth team. In Erikson's theory, this reflects the stage of:

• a.Industry versus inferiority
• b.Generativity versus stagnation✓
• c.Intimacy versus isolation
• d.Integrity versus despair

Erikson (1950) placed generativity versus stagnation in middle adulthood, with generativity expressed through guiding the next generation, including mentoring. Integrity versus despair is the late-life review stage, intimacy versus isolation belongs to young adulthood, and industry versus inferiority to the school-age years.

Asked whether Heinz should steal a drug to save his wife, a teen says no, because laws must be obeyed or society would fall apart. In Kohlberg's scheme, this reasoning is at which level?

• a.Postconventional
• b.Instrumental
• c.Preconventional
• d.Conventional✓

Kohlberg scored the reasoning, not the yes-or-no answer; justifying a choice by the need to uphold laws and social order is the law-and-order orientation (stage 4) of the conventional level. Preconventional reasoning centers on punishment or personal gain, and postconventional reasoning appeals to social contract or universal ethical principles that can outrank specific laws. 'Instrumental' names the stage-2 exchange orientation, which sits within the preconventional level, not the level this reasoning reflects.

A college student is committed to becoming a dentist, the career his parents chose for him, and has never seriously considered alternatives. Marcia would classify his identity status as:

• a.Achievement
• b.Foreclosure✓
• c.Moratorium
• d.Diffusion

Marcia (1966) defined foreclosure as commitment without a period of exploration, often adopting parents' choices. Achievement is commitment after exploration, moratorium is active exploration without commitment yet, and diffusion is neither exploring nor committed.

A 13-year-old is convinced that everyone at school will notice a small pimple and talk about it all day. Elkind called this aspect of adolescent egocentrism:

• a.Preoperational centration
• b.The personal fable
• c.The imaginary audience✓
• d.Childhood animism

Elkind (1967) described the imaginary audience as the adolescent's belief that others are as preoccupied with his or her appearance and behavior as he or she is. The personal fable is the belief that one's experiences are unique and that one is invulnerable, while centration and animism are features of Piaget's preoperational thought.

A child's home life becomes tense after a parent's employer switches her to rotating night shifts, though the child never visits the workplace. In Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, the workplace belongs to the child's:

• a.Exosystem✓
• b.Microsystem
• c.Mesosystem
• d.Macrosystem

Bronfenbrenner (1979) defined the exosystem as settings the developing person does not participate in but that affect, or are affected by, what happens in his or her immediate settings, with a parent's workplace as a standard example. The microsystem is the child's own immediate settings, the mesosystem the links among them, and the macrosystem the overarching culture.

A cross-sectional study finds that 70-year-olds score lower than 30-year-olds on a reasoning test. What is the main alternative explanation to age-related decline?

• a.Cohort differences in education and experience✓
• b.Practice effects from repeated testing of the same people
• c.Selective dropout of lower-scoring participants over time
• d.Regression toward the mean across repeated testings

A cross-sectional design compares different people born in different eras, so age differences are confounded with cohort differences in schooling, health and experience, a problem Schaie's Seattle Longitudinal Study documented. Practice effects, selective attrition and regression across testings arise when the same people are measured repeatedly, which a single cross-sectional testing does not involve.

A pregnant client asks how much alcohol is safe during pregnancy. Which answer is consistent with CDC guidance?

• a.Occasional drinks are safe during the second trimester
• b.No amount of alcohol during pregnancy is known to be safe✓
• c.Wine and beer are safe in moderation, but not liquor
• d.Up to one drink a day is safe after the first trimester

CDC states that there is no known safe amount of alcohol use during pregnancy, no safe time during pregnancy to drink, and that all types of alcohol, including wine and beer, can be harmful; alcohol can cause fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Each distractor claims a safe amount, type or trimester that CDC guidance rejects.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study (Felitti et al., 1998) is best known for showing:

• a.That health effects disappeared once adult income was statistically controlled
• b.A graded link between the number of ACE categories and later health risks✓
• c.That adverse experiences were rare in its middle-class, insured sample
• d.That a single severe event outweighs any amount of cumulative exposure

Felitti and colleagues (1998), studying adult HMO members, found a strong graded (dose-response) relationship between the number of categories of childhood exposure and risk factors and diseases in adulthood; CDC continues to describe ACEs this way. More than half of respondents reported at least one category, so ACEs were common, and the study emphasized cumulative exposure rather than a single event.

In a false-belief task, Sally puts a marble in a basket and leaves; Anne moves it to a box. A child who correctly says Sally will look in the basket is showing:

• a.Theory of mind✓
• b.Conservation of number
• c.Object permanence
• d.Deferred imitation

Predicting that Sally will act on her outdated belief requires understanding that others hold mental states that differ from reality, the core of theory of mind tested by Wimmer and Perner (1983) and Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith (1985). Object permanence concerns knowing hidden objects still exist, conservation concerns quantity invariance, and deferred imitation concerns reproducing a model's action later.

An 80-year-old has let many casual acquaintances drift away but spends more time with a few close family members and friends, saying that at this point in life she wants meaningful time. Which theory best explains this pattern?

• a.Socioemotional selectivity theory✓
• b.Activity theory of aging
• c.Disengagement theory of aging
• d.Continuity theory of aging

Carstensen's socioemotional selectivity theory holds that as people perceive their time as limited, they prioritize emotionally meaningful goals and prune their networks toward close partners. Disengagement theory proposes a mutual withdrawal of older adults and society in general, activity theory says well-being depends on staying broadly active, and continuity theory stresses maintaining earlier patterns.

An aging concert pianist performs fewer pieces, practices those pieces more, and slows down before fast passages so they sound faster by contrast. Baltes used this kind of example to illustrate:

• a.The shift from fluid to crystallized ability
• b.Disengagement from valued social roles
• c.Terminal decline in cognitive functioning
• d.Selective optimization with compensation✓

Baltes and Baltes (1990) described successful aging as selecting fewer domains, optimizing performance in them, and compensating for losses with new strategies, and they used the pianist Arthur Rubinstein's reported approach as an illustration. Terminal decline refers to sharp drops shortly before death, disengagement to withdrawal from roles, and the fluid-crystallized distinction describes ability types rather than an adaptive strategy.

In the New York Longitudinal Study, an infant with irregular sleep and feeding, slow adaptation to new situations, and intense, often negative reactions would be described as temperamentally:

• a.Easy
• b.Difficult✓
• c.Slow-to-warm-up
• d.Behaviorally inhibited

Thomas and Chess described the difficult child as irregular in biological functions, withdrawing from and slow to adapt to new situations, and intense and frequently negative in mood. The slow-to-warm-up child adapts slowly but with mild, low-intensity reactions, the easy child is regular and adaptable, and behavioral inhibition is a separate construct from Kagan's research.