Candidates who are preparing for the Civil Services Main Exam in the forthcoming year, can find out what kind of questions were asked in this exam in the year 2013. Some questions from Psychology Paper I of UPSC Civil Services Main Exam 2013 are as follows:

Q.1. Answer the following, each in not more than 150 words each :-

(a) Critically evaluate the cognitive approach to the study of psychological phenomena.
(b) What is ethnocentrism? How is reflected in psychological research?
(c) What factors contribute to the encoding of information into LTM?
(d) How do genes affect development?
(e) Describe different reinforcement schedules and indicate their effects on the strength of learning.

Q.2. Answer the following, each in not more than 250 words :

(a) What do you understand by ‘effect size’ and ‘statistical power’? Explain their significance.
(b) Discuss the importance of early relationship for developmental outcomes in the light of researches by Bowl by and Anisworth.
(c) Compare template matching and feature detection accounts of pattern recognition.

Q.3. Answer the following, each in not more than 400 words :

(a) The discipline of psychology has grown and developed through debate between those who held that it should be modelled  on natural science and those who subscribed to the view that it has to follow the model of social sciences. What arguments you envision for or against these views? What position you would like to endorse and why?
(b) Bring out the key developmental challenges faced by adolescents in the cognitive and social domains.

Q.4. Answer the following, each in not more than 250 words :

(a) Why our representation of the external world are not entirely accurate?
(b) Describe and evaluate the modal model of short-term memory.
(c) Describe the basic elements of observation and bring out the implications of the dimension of participation in observation research.

Click here to read question paper on official website of UPSC.

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