Developmental Career Assessment and Counseling: The C-DAC Model

The C-DAC model seeks to implement current development theory and to use innovative assessment measures together with improved counseling methods to improve vocational and life career counseling. At this stage, the project pays more attention to assessment, partly because if one is to counsel with career maturity in mind, one must understand the developmental status of the counselee. In career counseling, facts as well as feelings are important. Therefore, in this article the authors deal with the assessment of career development in detail, treating interests (measured by the Strong) and expressed preferences as basic status data to be viewed in the light of career maturity, the salience of life roles, and the values sought in life as moderator variables. The instruments are described and their use shown in a sample profile for assessment and checking by the reader in another readily available published source.     

Paternal autonomy restriction,neighborhood safety,and child anxiety trajectory in community youth

Intrusive parenting, primarily examined among middle to upper-middle class mothers, has been positively associated with the presence and severity of anxiety in children. This study employed cross-sectional linear regression and longitudinal latent growth curve analyses to evaluate the main and interactive effects of early childhood paternal autonomy restriction (AR) and neighborhood safety (NS) on the trajectory of child anxiety in a sample of 596 community children and fathers from the NICHD SECYD. Longitudinal analyses revealed that greater paternal AR at age 6 was actually associated with greater decreases in child anxiety in later childhood. Cross-sectional analyses revealed main effects for NS across childhood, and interactive effects of paternal AR and NS that were present only in early childhood, whereby children living in safer neighborhoods demonstrated increased anxiety when experiencing lower levels of paternal AR. Findings further clarify for whom and when paternal AR impacts child anxiety in community youth.     

Alpha-1 Couples: Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Predictors of Spousal Communication and Stress

Couples often discuss genetic test results, and then manage their implications together. This interdependence can lead to common, shared experiences, similar intrapersonal processes to manage shared stressors, or interpersonal influences between spouses, leading to different outcomes. This study sought to reveal the intracouple, intrapersonal, and interpersonal influences of genetic stigma and negative feelings on spousal communication and perceived stress with 50 couples in which one spouse is a member of a genetic disease registry. The results were analyzed with dyadic analysis, including multilevel modeling. The findings showed that registered members and their spouses were not statistically different in their mean levels of perceived genetic stigma, negative feelings about alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD), conversations with each other about the AATD test results, and their perceived stress. The findings also showed that their intracouple consistencies were not high, and their intrapersonal and interpersonal influences on communication and stress differed. The social implications of genetic research at the interpersonal level are discussed.     

Gender influences on preschool children's social problem-solving strategies

The authors investigated gender influences on the nature and competency of preschool children's social problem-solving strategies. Preschool-age children (N = 179; 91 boys, 88 girls) responded to hypothetical social situations designed to assess their social problem-solving skills in the areas of provocation, peer group entry, and sharing or taking turns. Results indicated that, overall, girls' responses were more competent (i.e., reflective of successful functioning with peers) than those of boys, and girls' strategies were less likely to involve retaliation or verbal or physical aggression. The competency of the children's responses also varied with the gender of the target child. Findings are discussed in terms of the influence of gender-related social experiences on the types of strategies and behaviors that may be viewed as competent for boys and girls of preschool age.     

The role of animacy and thematic relationships in processing active English sentences: evidence from event-related potentials

Recent event-related potential studies report a P600 effect to incongruous verbs preceded by semantically associated inanimate noun-phrase (NP) arguments, e.g., "eat" in "At breakfast the eggs would eat...". This P600 effect may reflect the processing cost incurred when semantic-thematic relationships between critical verbs and their preceding NP argument(s) bias towards different interpretations to those dictated by their sentences' syntactic structures. We have termed such violations of alternative thematic roles, 'thematic role violations.' Semantic-thematic relationships are influenced both by semantic associations and by more basic semantic features, such as a noun's animacy. This study determined whether a P600 effect can be evoked by verbs whose thematic structures are violated by their preceding inanimate NP arguments, even in the absence of close semantic-associative relationships with these arguments or their preceding contexts. ERPs were measured to verbs under four conditions: (1) non-violated ("At breakfast the boys would eat..."); (2) preceded by introductory clauses and animate NPs that violated their pragmatic expectations but not their thematic structures ("At breakfast the boys would plant..."); (3) preceded by semantically related contexts but inanimate NPs that violated their thematic structures ("At breakfast the eggs would eat..."); (4) preceded by semantically unrelated contexts and inanimate NPs that also violated their thematic structures ("At breakfast the eggs would plant..."). Pragmatically non-thematic role violated verbs preceded by unrelated contexts and animate NPs evoked robust N400 effects and small P600 effects. Thematically violated verbs preceded by inanimate argument NPs evoked robust P600 effects but no N400 effects, regardless of whether these inanimate arguments or their preceding contexts were semantically related or unrelated to these verbs. These findings suggest that semantic-thematic relations, related to animacy constraints on verbs' arguments, are computed online and can immediately impact verb processing within active, English sentences.     

Relationships between autistic-like and schizotypy traits: An analysis using the Autism Spectrum Quotient and Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences

To further investigate claims of a relationship between autism and schizophrenia, the current study examined the associations between specific dimensions of autistic-like and schizotypy traits. These traits were assessed using the Autism Spectrum Quotient and the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences. After using factor analysis to explore the dimensions of autistic-like and schizotypy traits represented in these measures in two separate groups of students (N₁ = 362, N₂ = 639), the relationships between these dimensions were examined. While the results are consistent with suggestions in the literature of an overlap in the interpersonal deficits associated with autism and schizophrenia, they offer little support for Crespi and Badcock’s (2008) claim that autism and positive schizophrenia are diametrically opposed disorders.     

The translation effect in memory search

The function relating recognition reaction time to the size of a memorized set of items is steeper when the memorized items and the probe are in two different categories, related by a memorized translation scheme, than when they are in the same category. Experiment 1 demonstrates that this “translation effect” is obtained for both familiar and unfamiliar translation schemes and further demonstrates that the zero-intercepts of the functions are lower when the probe differs from the memorized items in category than when it does not. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the slopes of the functions relating negative RT to memorized set size when probe and set are the same in category are steeper than the slopes of the corresponding positive functions just in case subjects are aware that the probe and set categories may differ. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the translations between memorized items and a probe that differ in category are done during the rehearsal of the memorized set, not after the probe is presented. Arguments are presented that rehearsal strategy determines memory comparison time, presumably through a hypothetical memory strength variable, but that direct-access strength theories that deny a memory scanning process are inadequate to account for the data.     

Factors affecting the acquisition and elimination of children's donating behavior

Thirty-five 6- to 10-year-old children with initial low rates of donating to help a peer either simply received a fine for each failure to donate (n = 7) or also were informed of the contingency between the fine and failure to donate (n = 28). Explanation of the contingency was necessary to increase children's donation rates. Donations continued at high rates during a gradual, unannounced removal of the fine contingency, but decreased when children were informed that fines were no longer in effect, particularly for children who had failed to donate at least once during training and had actually been fined. Overall, addition of a distraction or an inequity procedure did not reduce donating below rate reductions due to the announced extinction procedure alone.     

Dominance and sex differences in nonverbal responses to differential eye contact

Sixteen male and 16 female subjects were divided into high- and low-dominant groups and assigned to one of two cohorts who either avoided eye contact or maintained a steady gaze. Starting 100 in. apart, subjects were asked to approach the cohort to the point where they felt most comfortable. Dependent measures were personal space, approach rate, reciprocal eye contact, and attitude toward cohort. It was found that high-dominant subjects showed increased proxemic behavior in responding to a direct gaze, while low-dominant subjects showed a decrease. Also men tend to use personal space and approach rate to signal dominance, while women use reciprocal eye contact. Finally, an exception was found to previous findings that positive attitudes are associated with high levels of eye contact. Low-dominant males, but no other groups, respond to direct gaze with a more negative attitude.