Repressors—people who unconsciously inhibit

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct63% picked this

   Encountering an emotion-provoking situation is not sufficient to cause nonrepressors’ heart rates

   Why this is right

   When Necessary Assumption answer choices are phrased like they're ruling-out a possibility "it is not the case that ____ ", we should be tempted and immediately try negating it. The correct answer, when negated, weakens more than any other answer. If we said "encountering an emotion-provoking situation is sufficient to cause nonrepressors' heart rates to rise sharply", would that weaken? Yes. If their heart rates sharply went up just from the situation itself, then we wouldn't say that their conscious decision to inhibit their emotion is what caused the sharp rise in heart rate. Whether they decided to show their emotions or to consciously hide them, their heart rate had already sharply increased.

   Skill tested: Necessary Assumption · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   63%
2. B

   Too Strong: as well as8% picked this

   Nonrepressors can inhibit facial and bodily displays of emotion as well

   The author doesn't have to believe that conscious repressors are identically capable of hiding emotion as unconscious repressors are. If consciously repressing emotion is only 85% as effective at inhibiting facial / bodily displays of emotion, that wouldn't change anything in this argument. Hence, negating this answer doesn't weaken.

   8%
3. C

   Out of Scope Comparison2% picked this

   Despite their outward calm, repressors normally feel even more excited than do nonrepressors in

   Given that this argument is treating repressors and nonrepressors equivalently in the conclusion ("whether done consciously or unconsciously"), there's no reason we'd be saying that the author had to assume a difference between them. If we negated this and said that repressors feel pretty much equally excited as nonrepressors do, that wouldn't change anything in the argument.

   2%
4. D

   Out of Scope: asked to repress4% picked this

   People who are ordinarily very emotional can refrain from feeling strong emotions when experimenters ask

   This argument doesn't speak at all to a hypothetical scenario in which a "very emotional" person is asked to refrain from feeling strong emotions. We have no idea what the author thinks about this answer choice.

   4%
5. E

   Out of Scope24% picked this

   In situations that do not tend to provoke emotions, the average heart rate of repressors is the same

   Out of Scope: other situations Too Strong: same The argument is only dealing with the heart rate of people who encounter emotion-provoking situations. She hasn't weighed in on how repressors and nonrepressors would compare to each other in a situation that doesn't provoke emotions. If we said that "in other situations, the heart rates of repressors is not identical to the heart rate of nonrepressors" that wouldn't weaken the argument at all.

   24%