Career Awareness and Self-Exploration (CASE) Groups: A Self-Assessment Model for Career Decision Making

A small group program (CASE groups) for self-assessment is described and advantages to education undergraduates and counseling student group leaders are detailed.     

The Relationship of Work Environment and Client Contact to Burnout in Mental Health Professionals

The authors explored the relationship of the work environment (assessed by the Work Environment Scale) and client contact to scores of 94 mental health professionals on the Emotional Exhaustion, Personal Accomplishment, and Depersonalization subscales of the Maslach Burnout Inventory.     

Background Television as an Inhibitor of Cognitive Processing

Proposed and tested is a causal process that could account for empirical relationships between television viewing and academic achievement. It is argued that television, when used as a secondary activity, interferes with performance on otherwise intellectually demanding tasks. Performance on seven different cognitive processing tests were examined for respondents in four television-viewing conditions and a no-TV control group. Dependent variables included measures of short-term memory, linguistic processing speed, reading comprehension, complex problem-solving abilities, and mental flexibility. Predictions based on four mechanisms were tested. Significant performance decrements in television conditions occurred for measures of reading comprehension, spatial problem solving, and cognitive flexibility. Results were most consistent with the idea that background television influences performance by causing cognitive processing capacity limits to be exceeded on difficult and complex tasks.     

Why Athletic Doping Should Be Banned

So long as a ban is enforceable, large private athletic institutions—such as Major League Baseball and the National Collegiate Athletic Association—should not allow their athletes to take performance‐enhancing drugs. The argument I present is game‐theoretic: though each athlete prefers unilateral permission to dope over a universal ban, he also prefers a universal ban over universal permission to dope. That is because, while doping improves absolute measures of performance, it does not improve relative performance if many athletes dope. Large private athletic institutions should honour their athletes' preferences and should not enact any policy that gives only some athletes but not others permission to dope. Thus, they should ban doping. My paper examines and defends this game‐theoretic argument. After explaining the argument, I compare it (favourably) to other arguments for the same conclusion. I then discuss whether the game‐theoretic argument counterintuitively fails to justify banning some forms of doping (no), and whether it counterintuitively justifies banning things other than doping (also no). After arguing that a doping ban on game‐theoretic grounds is neither wrongly paternalistic or nor wrongfully coercive, I end by discussing some limitations of the argument.     

USING WEB-BASED FRAME-OF-REFERENCE TRAINING TO DECREASE BIASES IN PERSONALITY-BASED JOB ANALYSIS: AN EXPERIMENTAL FIELD STUDY

We identify sources of biases in personality-based job analysis (PBJA) ratings and offer a Web-based frame-of-reference (FOR) training program to mitigate these biases. Given the use of job analysis data for the development of staffing, performance management, and many other human resource management systems, using biased PBJA ratings is likely to lead to a workforce that is increasingly homogenous in terms of personality but not necessarily a workforce with improved levels of performance. We conducted a field experiment (i.e., full random assignment) using 2 independent samples of employees in a city government and found evidence in support of the presence of biases as well as the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Specifically, FOR training was successful at decreasing the average correlation between job incumbents' self-reported personality and PBJA ratings from .27 to .07 (administrative support assistants) and from .30 to .09 (supervisors). Also, FOR training was successful at decreasing mean PBJA ratings by d = .44 (administrative support assistants) and by d = .68 (supervisors). We offer the entire set of Web-based FOR training materials for use in future research and applications.