Insights Into the Long-Term Effects of Parents' Careers on Reported Parent-Offspring Closeness

This study examined the effects of career-family orientation, hours worked per week, and salary level on parent-offspring closeness as perceived by offspring. Results show that how close offspring felt toward their parents was directly related to their parents' family-versus-career orientation.     

BEHAVIORAL SUPPORT FOR SYSTEMATIC DESENSITIZATION FOR COMMUNICATION APPREHENSION

This study reports two experiments designed to further our understanding of the effects of systematic desensitization (SD) training on college students. Experiment 1 demonstrates that students who participate in SD report significantly higher self-esteem after doing so. Experiment 2 provides behavioral support for SD. Using Mulac and Sherman's BASA scale, it was discovered that students who successfully completed the SD program exhibited more verbal fluency and less rigidity in their speeches than did those students who were originally as anxious but did not join the program. Also included was the measurement of a student's predisposition towards verbal behavior. Mortensen, Arntson, and Lustig's scale was used to measure this predisposition. The results showed, however, that students in SD did not differ significantly from those who chose not to join SD.     

The Stress Strategy Test in relation to personality traits and cognitive abilities

Federmann, R., Bäckström, M. & Goldsmith, R. (2010). The Stress Strategy Test in relation to personality traits and cognitive abilities. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51 , 16–22.
Relations between results of the Stress Strategy Test (SST), a computerized test the first author developed partly involving the Stroop effect, and of an interview and an intelligence test used by the Swedish armed forces as selection instruments for placement of recruits in type of military service were investigated in a group of 3,205 recruits. The SST results were found able to explain 17.64% and 12.25% of the variance in results of the intelligence test and the interview, respectively. Emotional stability and psychological energy were the two interview variables most closely related to results of the SST. The usefulness of the SST in a selection context is discussed.     

Stability and change of attachment representations during emerging adulthood: An examination of mediators and moderators of change

Using Bartholomew’s model of attachment (K. Bartholomew, 1990; K. Bartholomew & L. Horowitz, 1991), we explored stability and change of attachment in a group of young adults graduating from university and examined reasons for change of attachment. Consistent with previous research, we found that attachment dimensions were moderately stable; however, several variables predicted change. We explored the effect of changing relationship status and parental divorce on attachment and found that individuals who remained single reported lower stability of avoidance over time. Next, we tested whether distress reported before the transition would mediate stability of attachment. The results provided some support for J. Bowlby’s (1969/1982) proposal that distress would be associated with stability and change of attachment. We found that participants who reported low distress at Time 1 (T1) were more likely to report changes in attachment anxiety than participants who reported high distress at T1.     

The Normative Context of Advice as Social Support

Much of the existing research on social support overlooks the communicative processes that link supportive acts to beneficial effects. The present study represents an alternative approach: The authors document the multiple goals and implications of advice and the situational, conversational, and cultural context far the evaluation of advice among some White, middle-class, U.S. Americans. On the basis of observation of 112 advice episodes and interviews with 18 informants, the authors identify three dilemmas of seeking, receiving, and giving advice: Advice may be seen as helpful and caring or as butting in; advice may be experienced as honest or supportive; and seeking and taking advice may enact respect and gratitude, yet recipients reserve the right to make their own decisions. The identification of these dilemmas provides the basis for future research on the characteristics of more and less effective advice and for comparative research on advice in other speech communities.     

Issue-Event Extensions and Interaction Involvement Text-Based and Meaning-Based Discourse Strategies

Prior research focusing on textual features in the talk of high and low-involved speakers has characterized the discourse strategy of low-involved speakers as text-based and that of high-involved speakers as meaning-based. This study examined the extensions of issue-event structures by high-involved and low-involved participants to determine if this characterization of discourse strategies held on a pragmatic level as well. Results indicated that low-involved communicators extended the event significantly more directly than high-involved communicators. Furthermore, the issue extensions of low-involved communicators were shown to be more sensitive to the comprehensibitity and information value of the stimulus utterance than the issue extensions of high-involved communicators. The results confirm that low-involved communicators have more difficulty than high-involved communicators in responding to the flow of conversation and that low-involved communicators compensate by relying on a text-based discourse strategy.     

PARALLEL TEST FORM DEVELOPMENT: A PROCEDURE FOR ALTERNATE PREDICTORS AND AN EXAMPLE

A procedure for developing alternate test forms that are parallel in the sense that scores on the different forms have similar means, standard deviations, and factor structures is described and applied to a bio-data inventory and a situational judgment test. Careful consideration of item-by-item parallelism during development resulted in alternate forms that were parallel at the item level. Further, comparison with a biodata test form comprised of items randomly selected from a pool of biodata items revealed that for the types of measures described here it may be necessary to produce parallel forms of each item to create alternate forms that are parallel in the way in which Cronbach (1947) originally defined parallelism.     

DEVELOPMENT OF MULTIPLE JOB PERFORMANCE MEASURES IN A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE OF JOBS

The goal of criterion development in Project A was to construct multiple measures of the major components of job performance such that the total performance domain for a representative sample of the population of entry-level enlisted positions in the U.S. Army was covered. These measures were to be used as criteria against which to validate both experimental and existing predictors of job performance. The initial model specified that performance is multidimensional within two major categories of dimensions designated as organization-wide and job specific. The development strategy involved describing the total domain of job content via extensive task analyses and critical incident analyses, generating the critical performance dimensions that constitute it, constructing measures for each dimension, and evaluating each measure using expert judgment and field test data. The specific measures developed consisted of rating scales, tests of job knowledge, hands-on job samples, and archival records. The major steps in the job analyses, content sampling, instrument construction, and instrument evaluation are described, and the final array of criterion measures is presented.