Helping Those Who Help Themselves: Does Counseling Enhance Retention?

This study examined how academic distress changed over the course of counseling and predicted retention. The sample comprised students receiving services at the campus counseling center (n = 404), students from a psychology department subject pool (n = 311), and students from the general campus population (n = 75,748). The analyses performed included t test, analysis of covariance, chi‐square test, and logistical regression. The results suggested that students whose academic distress did not decrease had lower retention rates than both clients whose academic distress improved and the general student body.     

Gritting their teeth to close the sale: the positive effect of salesperson grit on job satisfaction and performance

This research is the first to examine the effect of “grit” – defined here as perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals – on salesperson performance and job satisfaction in a business-to-business (B2B) sales context. While more commonly studied in the psychology and education literatures, grit has heretofore been underexplored in sales research, a notable omission given its importance in predicting performance outcomes across multiple domains. In response, we demonstrate that gritty salespeople perform better and enjoy greater job satisfaction than their less gritty counterparts. Moreover, we show that competitiveness and self-efficacy help to develop grit and reveal important moderating effects; grit is highest when salespeople are self-efficacious and socially astute. Moreover, the results also suggest that need for power attenuates the positive effect of grit on performance, revealing a potential “dark side” of grit. We then provide some future research ideas involving grit in an effort to encourage further exploration of this construct in sales research. Finally, we conclude by offering cautions to future researchers as they decide whether to examine this interesting construct in a sales context.     

Comparing memory skill maintenance across the life span: preservation in adults, increase in children

The authors examined life-span differences in the maintenance of skilled episodic memory performance by assessing 100 individuals (10 -11, 12-13, 21-26, and 66-79 years old) 11 months after termination of an intensive multisession mnemonic training program (Y. Brehmer, S.-C. Li, V. Müller, T. von Oertzen, & U. Lindenberger, 2007). Skill maintenance was tested in 2 follow-up sessions, the first without and the second with mnemonic reinstruction. Younger and older adults' average performance levels were stable across time. In contrast, both younger and older children's memory performance improved beyond originally attained levels. Older adults' performance improved from the first to the second follow-up session, presumably profiting from instruction-induced skill reactivation. Results suggest that (a) skill maintenance is largely intact in healthy older adults, (b) older adults need environmental support to fully reactivate their former skill levels (cf. F. I. M. Craik, 1983), and (c) children adapt a skill learned 11 months ago to their increasing cognitive capabilities.     

Personality as a Prospective Vulnerability to Dysphoric Symptoms Among College Students: Proposed Mechanisms

Personality and psychopathology have long been associated; however, the mechanisms that account for this link are not well understood. Stress generation and cognitive vulnerability are examined as potential mechanisms to explain the association between negative emotionality and dysphoria. To evaluate these mechanisms, college students completed measures of personality, dysfunctional attitudes, negative cognitive style, dysphoric symptoms, and negative events. Two years later the same students reported on the occurrence of negative events and levels of dysphoric symptoms that they had experienced over the 2-year follow-up period. Consistent with hypotheses, negative emotionality predicted prospective increases in dysphoric symptoms and the generation of more stressors over time. Both dysfunctional attitudes and negative cognitive style interacted with these additional stressors to predict prospective elevations in dysphoria, and these cognitive vulnerability–stress components partially mediated the association between negative emotionality and future elevations of dysphoric symptoms.

Children's knowledge acquisition through film: influence of programme characteristics

Several characteristics of educational programmes for children are discussed to influence learning of content. In the present study, positive effects of a preview and inserted summaries in educational films for learning are examined. A total of 127 6‐and 8‐year‐old participating children watched one of the four educational film versions: The original film (without preview and summaries), a version with a preview, with inserted summaries or with a verbal ‘preview’. One week later, children's recollection of facts was tested in a memory interview. Results show that previews and summaries in educational films can enhance learning, and that visual scene repetition appears to further boost knowledge acquisition. Formal and content characteristics of educational programmes are discussed in terms of the underlying mechanisms influencing children's cognitive processing and learning. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How do constraints on leaving a marriage affect behavior within the marriage?

Like relationship satisfaction, constraints on leaving a relationship have been described as a component of global commitment. But do constraints increase or decrease efforts to maintain the relationship? To address this question, the authors of the current article describe 3 independent studies of spouses and married couples. Across all studies, wives who perceived more constraints on leaving the marriage exhibited lower levels of negative behavior only when their husbands were relatively unconstrained. In Study 3, this association was especially pronounced among less satisfied wives. In Study 2, spouses' perceived constraint also interacted to predict husbands' behavior, but in the opposite direction: Husbands who perceived more constraints behaved less negatively when their wives were similarly constrained but more negatively when their wives were less constrained. These results highlight differences in behavior between couples who persist in marriage because they desire to and those who endure because they have to, raising questions about measures of global commitment that obscure these distinctions. They also highlight the need for a dyadic perspective on the forces that keep relationships together.     

The role of mothers' control in children's mastery orientation: a time frame analysis

Important to understanding the process by which parents' control shapes children's motivation is identifying the time frame in which it does so. To this end, mothers and their 4-year-old children were observed interacting for 15 min while working on a challenging task twice over 6 months. Mothers' control and children's mastery orientation were coded in 1-min intervals at both times. Analyses over the 6 months indicated that mothers' heightened control foreshadowed children's dampened mastery because mothers' control was stable over time. Analyses over the 15-min interactions revealed that the more controlling mothers were one minute, the less mastery oriented children were the next minute, adjusting for their earlier mastery. Moreover, when mothers began these interactions highly controlling, children's mastery was particularly likely to decrease over the 15 min. Taken together, the results suggest the effect of mothers' control on children's mastery is immediate and maintained through mothers' continued controlling practices.     

Self-reported Magic Eye stereogram skill predicts stereoacuity

Autostereograms--commonly known as Magic Eye stereograms (MESs)--are two-dimensional images that support stereoscopic depth perception given an appropriate crossing or uncrossing of the eyes. We find that self-reported MES skill is highly predictive of stereoacuity as measured by a standard clinical test (r142 = 0.45, p < 0.0001; TNO test). Indeed, in our sample of 194 individuals, those who report poor MES skill have a five-fold increased risk of stereo impairment. Those who report poor MES skill also require on average five times greater binocular disparity to perceive stereoscopic depth than those who report good MES skill. Reported MES skill thus carries significant information about stereoacuity.     

Do we only dream in colour? A comparison of reported dream colour in younger and older adults with different experiences of black and white media

This study aimed to find out whether differences in the reported colour of dreams can be attributed to the influence of black and white media or to methodological issues. Two age groups, with different media experience, were compared on questionnaire and diary measures of dream colour. Analysis revealed that people who had access to black and white media before colour media experienced more greyscale dreams than people with no such exposure, and there were no differences between diary and questionnaire measures of dream colour. Moreover, there were inter-group differences in the recall quality of colour and black and white dreams that point to the possibility that true greyscale dreams occur only in people with black and white media experience.     

The liberty principle and universal health care

A universal entitlement to health care can be grounded in the liberty principle. A detailed examination of Rawls's discussion of health care in Justice as Fairness shows that Rawls himself recognized that illness is a threat to the basic liberties, yet failed to recognize the implications of this fact for health resource allocation. The problem is that one cannot know how to allocate health care dollars until one knows which basic liberties one seeks to protect, and yet one cannot know which basic liberties to protect until one knows how health care dollars will be allocated. The solution is to design the list of basic liberties and the health care system in tandem so as to fit each other, such that every citizen is guaranteed a set of basic liberties and access to the health services needed to secure them.