The Impact of Virginia's Career Information Delivery System

The Virginia VIEW Career Information Delivey System has served as an impetus for generating excitement and new activities in local guidance programs.     

The Conjoint Family Diagnostic Interview and the Family Index of Tension

The present paper is written in response to the, as yet, unmet need for a broadly applicable, clinical rubric for assessing the psychiatric patient's situation in his family. It describes a conjoint family diagnostic interview procedure (CFDI) which enables a clinical interviewer, within a single ninety-minute, problem-focused, conjoint interview, to describe or rate the verbal and nonverbal behavior of a Ten family unit along dimensions relevant to clinical decision-making for the psychiatric patient. A rating instrument, the Family Index of Tension (FIT) will also be described. It provides a convenient format for quantifying the information obtained at the CFDI, facilitating comparisons within and across family systems. Though initially developed and protested on 350 families of hospitalized psychiatric patients, the procedure described appears applicable to all clinical situations in which families, regardless of their composition and background, are seen together with an “identified patient” for purposes of evaluation and treatment planning.     

Confidence in own and others' knowledge

A person's confidence judgement of a statement reflects his/her degree of belief in the correctness of that statement. Deficient ability to assess the correctness of statements (or beliefs) can have serious consequences in many situations. This study compares the realism (calibration) of subjects' confidence ratings in two situations ( n = 64). The first situation was when the subjects confidence rated their own answers to general knowledge questions. The second was when the subjects gave confidence ratings of another person's answers to general knowledge questions. The results show that subjects were more poorly calibrated and were more overconfident in the second situation, i.e. when they gave confidence ratings of answers given by another person, compared with when they rated their own answers. The data further indicates that the results can not be explained in terms of the amount of cognitive processes invested when making the confidence judgements. For example, the subjects rated the other person's answers to questions they had answered themselves, and to questions they had not seen before. No differences in confidence or in calibration and other measures of judgmental realism were found between these two categories of questions. Nor did instructions to imagine the thought process of the other person improve any of these measures. The subjects disagreed with the other person's answer on 23% of all occasions. Significantly poorer calibration was shown where subjects disagreed with the other person than where they agreed. Contents of a social nature attended to by the subjects may have affected the results. The results, when related to previous research in the area, give rise to the question of how the social situation can be arranged to achieve the best calibration.     

The Tables Turned: Factors MBA Students Use in Deciding Among Prospective Employers

Past research has revealed a number of determinants of selection decisions for college students. Given the large number of students graduating with MBA degrees and firms recruiting and hiring applicants with such degrees, the purpose of this study was to examine how MBA students would rate certain job factors. This study reports students' ratings of 23 factors potentially present in workplaces. The most and least important factors are discussed. In addition, implications for organizational recruiting practices and for on-campus career counselors are presented.     

The influence of temporal distance on justice and care morality

Agerström, J., Björklund, F. & Allwood, C. M. (2010). The influence of temporal distance on justice and care morality. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 46–55.
The primary goal of this study was to examine whether changes in the temporal distance of a moral dilemma affect how it is perceived and subsequently resolved. Based on Construal Level Theory ( Trope & Liberman, 2003 ), it was predicted that the relative weight of abstract justice features should increase and the relative weight of concrete care features should decrease with temporal distance. The results showed that females became increasingly justice-oriented with greater temporal distance. However, this was not the case for males who were unaffected by temporal distance. This interaction was conceptually replicated in a follow-up experiment in which abstraction was manipulated directly by a mindset manipulation. The present results suggest that temporal distance is a contextual factor that can alter the extent to which moral judgments and reasoning are based on justice and care, although this effect seems to be moderated by gender.     

MANAGER COMMUNICATIVE STYLE AND NURSE MORALE

This research project examined questions concerning the effectiveness of female managers using stereotypically masculine or feminine communication management styles. Nurses from three hospitals were surveyed on the perceptions of the communication management style of their superiors and answered self-report questions about their morale and job satisfaction. Employees of female managers who were perceived as managing in a stereotypically feminine style reported significantly greater morale and job satisfaction than did employees whose female managers were perceived as managing in a stereotypically masculine style. Implications are discussed.