Cognition, emotion and stress sample question 1

Assimilation, then accommodation

MCAT · Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior · Psychology

Cognition, emotion and stress

Cognition, emotion and stress is part of Psychology in the MCAT Psychological, Social, and Biological Foundations of Behavior section. The questions below are written in the style of the real test, each with the answer and a worked explanation.

Question types you will see here include piaget stage and process recognition, heuristic and bias identification, emotion theory test and stress physiology and adaptation stages.

Common traps: confusing preoperational with concrete operational; swapping assimilation and accommodation; treating the zone of proximal development as a Piaget concept.

Sample questions

Question 1
A toddler who has only seen dogs calls a cow “big dog.” After being told it is a cow, she begins to use a separate category for cows. In order, which processes in Piaget’s theory are shown?
- A.
  Assimilation, then accommodation
- B.
  Accommodation, then assimilation
- C.
  Equilibration, then object permanence
- D.
  Centration, then conservation
Answer: A. Assimilation, then accommodation
Fitting a cow into her existing dog schema is assimilation; creating a new schema when that fails is accommodation (A). Reversing the order (B) mislabels both steps. Equilibration (C) is the overall balancing process and object permanence is a sensorimotor achievement, and centration and conservation (D) concern the preoperational and concrete operational stages.
Question 2
Some people with high spinal cord injuries, who receive less sensory feedback from their bodies, report that certain emotions feel less intense than they did before the injury. This finding most directly supports:
- A.
  the James-Lange theory
- B.
  the Cannon-Bard theory
- C.
  Lazarus's cognitive appraisal theory
- D.
  the opponent-process theory of emotion
Answer: A. the James-Lange theory
The James-Lange theory holds that emotional experience results from perceiving one's own physiological responses, so reduced bodily feedback should weaken felt emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory holds that physiological arousal and emotional experience occur simultaneously and independently, so it predicts that losing bodily feedback would leave emotional experience intact.

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