Self-Efficacy for Enhancing Students’ Career and College Readiness: A Survey of Professional School Counselors

Grounded in Bandura’s (1997) self-efficacy theory and Savickas’s (2011) career construction theory, this study examined school counselors’ beliefs about whether they can perform specific tasks related to supporting students’ career and college readiness. A national sample of school counselors (N = 2,047) completed the School Counselor Self-Efficacy for Enhancing Student Career and College Readiness Scale (Baker, Parikh-Foxx, & Martinez, 2017). Findings from a survey research design indicated that the extent of related training and the challenges associated with implementation of career service delivery were of concern to participants. Recommendations for training, practice, and further research are presented.     

Seeking the Pathos of God in a Secular Age: Theological Reflections on Mystical Experience in the Twentieth Century

Our current context is a “moving” and unstable one. We are facing not only a time of change, but what Pope Benedict XVI terms “an epochal change.” The impact of this transformation upon religion is unmistakable. In this article I reflect on one aspect of this impact: the one that affects and transforms the experience of God, also called mystical experience. I explore the concept of experience, trying to give a more precise idea of what we understand by mystical experience. I then reflect on the importance of mystical biographies and narratives to theology, including the particular characteristics that emerge when this narrative is about the mystical experiences of twentieth‐century people of faith. I present the specific “case” of Dorothy Day as an exemplification of mystical experience. I conclude with several reflections about how human beings find the way towards God in our secular.     

The Effects of Censorship on Attitude Change: The Influence of Censor and Communication Characteristics1

The effects of censor characteristics and audiences' initial agreement with a censored communication on attitude change and desire to hear a communication were investigated. Subjects were informed that a communication taking a position with which they had originally agreed or disagreed had been censored. The censor was either an attractive or unattractive agent and his expertise on the topic of the speech was either high or low. The results indicated that in all cases except one, censorship led to an increased desire to hear the communication and attitude change toward the position of the communication. In the one exceptional case, when an attractive expert censor forbade a communication with which the audience disagreed, the subjects decreased their desire to hear the speech and did not change their attitudes on the topic of the communication. The results were interpreted as indicating that censorship arouses both reactance and balancing attempts but that balancing will be observed only in limited situations.     

Linguistic influences on visual memory

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis has raised considerable controversy in the literatures of psychology and anthropology. Several misconceptions of the hypothesis are reviewed, and the hypothesis was experimentally supported in a visual reproduction paradigm. Subjects were first given label training for a set of figures, and were then asked to recall by drawing the shapes. Training with categorized labels resulted in a 25% improvement in recall when compared to a condition with nonword (paralog) labels. Even stronger evidence of linguistic influence on visual memory was obtained by examining the order of recall. The conceptual relationships among labels strongly influenced the sequence of reproductions.     

Reducing delusional speech in chronic, paranoid schizophrenics

Four schizophrenic patients with paranoid and grandiose delusions who had been hospitalized for an average of 17 yr were exposed to social reinforcement contingencies in a multiple baseline design. During the baseline period, each patient was interviewed for four 10-min sessions each day. The elapsed time from onset of conversation to onset of delusional talk was recorded. At the end of each day, the patients engaged in a 30-min informal chat with a nurse-therapist while relaxing with coffee, snacks, and cigarettes. The intervention introduced two contingencies: (1) The 10-min interviews were terminated as soon as the patient began talking delusionally; (2) The patients earned time for their evening chat by talking rationally during their daytime interviews. Increases of from 200 to 600% in the amount of rational talk exhibited during the interviews occurred as the contingencies were introduced for each patient sequentially over time. These increases were maintained in three patients when the amount of reinforcement was halved, but declined when the patients were confronted directly with their delusional ideas. A modest amount of generalization occurred from the day-time interviews to the evening chats but did not extend to the behavior of the patients on the ward.     

Reinforcement therapy in the classroom

Teachers were trained in the systematic use of attention and praise to reduce the disruptive classroom behavior of four first-grade children. Observation measures showed a significant improvement from baseline to treatment for these children and no significant changes for same-class controls. While the amount of teacher attention to target children remained the same from baseline to treatment, the proportion of attention to task-relevant behavior of these children increased. Psychological tests revealed no adverse changes after treatment.