EPPP Practice Questions (2026) — Free Sample Questions with Answers

Answer: C

CBT alone and fluoxetine alone were equally effective, and both were superior to placebo.: At 12 weeks fluoxetine alone outperformed CBT alone, and CBT alone did not separate from placebo.

CBT alone matched the combination and was the preferred first treatment.: CBT alone had the lowest active response rate at 12 weeks; it was not equal to the combination.

Combined treatment responded best, and CBT alone did not differ from placebo.: Correct. At 12 weeks response rates were about 71% for fluoxetine plus CBT, 61% for fluoxetine, 43% for CBT and 35% for placebo; CBT alone was not significantly better than placebo (KN3).

Fluoxetine alone had the highest response rate and was significantly better than the combination.: Fluoxetine alone was effective but below the combination; the combination produced the best acute outcome.

TADS acute phase: combined fluoxetine plus CBT was best, fluoxetine alone next, and CBT alone was not superior to placebo at 12 weeks.

Answer: D

Alzheimer disease with psychosis; a low-dose typical antipsychotic is reasonable.: Alzheimer disease begins with steady memory decline; marked fluctuation, early hallucinations and parkinsonism with relatively spared memory point elsewhere, and a typical antipsychotic is risky here.

Parkinson disease dementia; the hallucinations likely reflect dopamine therapy.: Parkinson disease dementia requires dementia arising well after (more than a year after) established parkinsonism; here cognition changed first, and the client takes no dopaminergic drugs.

Delirium; the day-to-day fluctuation calls for a search for a medical cause.: Fluctuation suggests delirium, but a 10-month course with a negative medical workup and no medications argues against an acute confusional state.

Lewy body disease; the planned antipsychotic risks severe sensitivity.: Correct. Fluctuating cognition, recurrent well-formed visual hallucinations and parkinsonism that begins within a year of the cognitive decline are core features of major or mild neurocognitive disorder with Lewy bodies, and severe neuroleptic sensitivity makes haloperidol dangerous (DSM-5-TR) (KN1, KN2).

Fluctuation, visual hallucinations and parkinsonism within a year of cognitive decline point to Lewy body disease; the key implication is severe sensitivity to antipsychotics, especially high-potency agents.

Answer: D

reduce the client's felt distress more effectively.: Reappraisal, not suppression, reliably reduces the subjective experience of negative emotion.

act earlier in the sequence of emotion generation.: Suppression is response-focused and acts after the emotion has begun; reappraisal is antecedent-focused and acts earlier.

lower the client's physiological arousal during the criticism.: Suppression tends to raise sympathetic activation, while reappraisal does not.

leave felt distress unchanged while raising arousal.: Correct. Expressive suppression reduces outward expression but not the felt emotion, and it increases sympathetic activation and costs memory, unlike reappraisal (KN10).

Reappraisal (antecedent-focused) lowers felt emotion without physiological cost; suppression (response-focused) hides expression but keeps the feeling and adds arousal.

Answer: C

Pre-encounter.: In pre-encounter, race has low salience or the person holds pro-White, assimilationist attitudes; she has strong racial salience.

Encounter.: Encounter is the event or series of events that challenges earlier views; the incidents were her encounter, and she has since moved on to a new stage.

Immersion–emersion.: Correct. Immersion–emersion involves complete immersion in Black culture, idealizing it, and anger toward White people, which matches her current behavior and feelings.

Internalization.: Internalization brings a secure, flexible Black identity with less anti-White anger and openness to coalitions; her intense anger points to the earlier stage.

In Cross's sequence, an encounter is followed by immersion in one's own group and anger toward the dominant group, which later gives way to a secure, internalized identity.

Answer: C

pluralistic ignorance.: Pluralistic ignorance operates when a situation is ambiguous and bystanders read each other's calm as a sign there is no emergency; here everyone recognized the emergency.

audience inhibition.: Audience inhibition is fear of embarrassment in front of others; the onlookers reported assuming others had acted, not fear of looking foolish.

diffusion of responsibility.: Correct. Each onlooker's sense of personal obligation was reduced by the presence of others ("someone else has called"), the mechanism Darley and Latané identified for the bystander effect in clear emergencies.

the just-world hypothesis.: Belief in a just world leads people to blame victims; nothing suggests onlookers thought the man deserved his collapse.

In the Latané–Darley model, bystanders must notice, interpret, take responsibility, decide how and act; when interpretation is clear, the step that fails in crowds is taking responsibility.

Answer: C

adolescents' incomplete mastery of formal operational reasoning about probabilities.: The adolescents judged the risks as accurately as adults did, so a reasoning deficit does not explain the peer effect.

the imaginary audience, which makes adolescents feel they are constantly being watched.: The imaginary audience (Elkind) is a belief about being watched even when one is not; it does not explain why real peers raise risk taking while risk judgments stay accurate.

reward circuitry that matures earlier than the brain's cognitive control systems.: Correct. The dual-systems model (Steinberg) holds that socioemotional reward circuitry matures earlier than prefrontal control systems; peers heighten reward sensitivity, which outweighs intact risk knowledge.

the personal fable, which leads adolescents to believe that harm cannot happen to them.: The personal fable would show up as lower ratings of risk; adolescents rated the risks the same as adults.

Adolescent risk taking reflects an imbalance between an early-maturing reward system and a slower-maturing control system, made worse by peers, rather than ignorance of risk.

Answer: D

the diathesis–stress model.: Diathesis–stress predicts worse outcomes for vulnerable children under adversity but no advantage in supportive settings.

the principle of equifinality.: Equifinality means different pathways lead to the same outcome; the finding concerns one trait leading to opposite outcomes.

the cumulative risk model.: Cumulative risk holds that the number of risk factors predicts outcome; it does not predict a better-than-average result for a "risk" trait.

the differential susceptibility model.: Correct. Differential susceptibility (Belsky & Pluess, 2009) holds that some children are more sensitive to environments "for better and for worse."

Diathesis–stress predicts vulnerability only under adversity; differential susceptibility predicts heightened sensitivity to both negative and positive environments.

Answer: B

1. PPV = true positives ÷ (true positives + false positives).
2. PPV = 40 ÷ (40 + 60) = 40 ÷ 100.
3. PPV = .40.
4. Interpretation: despite good sensitivity (.80) and specificity (.94), only 40% of positive screens have depression, because the base rate is low (.05).

.05.: This is the base rate (50 ÷ 1,000), the proportion of all patients who have depression.

.40.: Correct. PPV = true positives ÷ all positive screens = 40 ÷ 100 = .40 (KN37).

.80.: This is sensitivity (40 ÷ 50), the proportion of depressed patients who screen positive.

.94.: This is specificity (890 ÷ 950 ≈ .94), the proportion of nondepressed patients who screen negative.

PPV depends on the base rate: with a low base rate, even an accurate screen yields many false positives, so positive screens need confirmation.

Answer: C

Administer a standardized depression inventory to establish baseline severity.: Measuring severity is useful, but it does not address whether a medical condition explains the symptoms.

Begin cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a first-line treatment for depression.: CBT is first-line for major depression, but treating before ruling out a medical cause is the wrong order.

Refer the client for a medical evaluation that includes thyroid function testing.: Correct. Cold intolerance, dry skin, constipation and weight gain suggest hypothyroidism; DSM-5-TR excludes episodes attributable to another medical condition.

Screen for past hypomanic episodes to rule out a bipolar spectrum disorder.: Screening for hypomania is part of a depression workup, but the physical symptom cluster makes the medical rule-out the priority.

When depressive symptoms come with somatic signs of an endocrine disorder (here, hypothyroidism), rule out the medical condition before diagnosing or treating a depressive disorder.

Answer: B

client-centered case consultation.: Client-centered case consultation focuses on assessing the student and recommending what to do with that case; the consultant here is working on the teacher's perception.

consultee-centered case consultation.: Correct. Consultee-centered case consultation addresses the consultee's difficulty with a case (lack of knowledge, skill, confidence or objectivity); a distortion such as theme interference is a lack-of-objectivity problem (Caplan).

program-centered administrative consultation.: Program-centered administrative consultation helps administrators plan or improve a program, not a teacher handling one student.

consultee-centered administrative consultation.: Consultee-centered administrative consultation addresses administrators' difficulties with organizational and policy functions, not a teacher's view of an individual student.

Caplan's four types: client-centered case, consultee-centered case, program-centered administrative, consultee-centered administrative; working on a consultee's lack of objectivity about one case is consultee-centered case consultation.

Answer: D

Schedule several pleasant activities for the coming week, starting with the most enjoyable ones.: Activity scheduling is central to BA, but it is planned from monitoring data; scheduling first risks choosing activities that do not fit the client's patterns or values.

Break the household tasks into small graded steps and assign the first one.: Graded task assignment is a later BA technique applied once targets are identified from monitoring.

Help the client identify and challenge the automatic thoughts that keep the client in bed.: Cognitive restructuring is the cognitive-therapy component; BA deliberately works from the outside in, through behavior.

Ask the client to record daily activities and mood ratings hour by hour for a week.: Correct. After the rationale, behavioral activation begins with activity and mood monitoring to establish a baseline and reveal links between activity, avoidance and mood; scheduling and graded tasks are then built from these data (Martell et al.).

In behavioral activation, monitor first (activity–mood baseline), then schedule and grade activities based on what the monitoring shows.

Answer: C

The difference is unlikely to be real, because very large samples inflate the Type I error rate.: Alpha is fixed by the researcher; large samples increase power to detect small effects, not the Type I error rate.

The app produced a clinically important reduction, because p is below .01.: A small p value reflects reliability of a difference, not its size or clinical importance.

The difference is statistically significant, but its size (about 0.08 SD) is trivial.: Correct. d = (22.4 − 21.6) / 10 = 0.08: with 2,400 per group a tiny difference reaches significance, but it is far below a clinically meaningful effect (KN56).

The effect is large, because the 0.8-point difference corresponds to d = 0.80.: The 0.8-point difference must be divided by the SD of 10, giving d = 0.08, not 0.80.

With very large samples, judge importance by effect size (and clinical benchmarks), not by the p value.

Answer: A

refer the family to the specialized program and help coordinate the transition.: Correct. The case lies outside her competence, and qualified services are available, so referral serves the client best (APA 2.01(a); KN64).

begin treatment while getting consultation and studying family-based treatment.: Gaining competence while treating (APA 2.01(d)) applies when appropriate services are not available; here they are.

begin CBT, because her anxiety-treatment skills generalize to eating disorders.: Related skills do not establish competence with a medically risky adolescent eating disorder.

accept the case on condition that the family also sees a physician.: Medical monitoring is needed, but it does not fix the psychologist's lack of competence in the treatment itself.

Practice within competence; the "treat while gaining competence" option is for when appropriate services are unavailable.

Answer: C

release all of the requested materials, because the evaluee has authorized it.: The release covers test data, but test materials (manuals, booklets, stimuli) are protected separately under APA 9.11.

decline the whole request, because test data may be released only to another psychologist.: That was the rule before 2002; the current APA 9.04 allows release to the client or to persons named in a release.

release the test data and protect the test materials consistent with law and contracts.: Correct. Under APA 9.04 test data go to the person identified in the release; under 9.11 the psychologist maintains the security of test materials, consistent with law and contractual obligations (KN61).

send only a summary report, because the attorney is not trained to interpret raw scores.: Lack of training alone does not justify withholding; refusal under 9.04 needs a risk of substantial harm or misuse, which is absent here.

APA 9.04 (test data: raw and scaled scores, responses, notes) differs from 9.11 (test materials: manuals, protocols, stimuli, which are kept secure).