UCLA's Career Counseling Center: A Dialogue About a Unique Service

In this interview, two counseling psychologists describe aspects of a relatively unique career counseling service that has been validated by 40 years of success in the marketplace. Composed of 3 intensive individual interviews and 15 to 25 hours of educational and psychological testing, the service assists clients in identifying and beginning pursuit of suitable educational and occupational goals. The counselors describe how they organize and sift through test results to formulate recommendations for a client's unique career circumstances, why they accept responsibility for developing and presenting concrete recommendations, and what the changes in their clients' concerns suggest about the evolution of work in the United States. Their specificity and professionalism will help counselors understand the craft of career counseling.     

Evaluation of a mutual help network for the elderly residents of planned housing

We set up a mutual help network among the elderly residents of a government-subsidized apartment building and evaluated its impact on their social ties, social support satisfaction, and depression. A quasi-experimental design was used, with the residents of a similar building located in the same neighborhood serving as the control group. A total of 230 individual services were exchanged, and 28 group activities were organized during the study period. There was almost no difference between experimental and control groups with respect to the change over the study period in the number of social ties with other residents of the building. Support satisfaction decreased in both groups, but the decrease was larger in the experimental group. The control group had a slight decrease in the frequency of their depressive symptoms, whereas the experimental group had a moderate increase. More research is needed on the ability of social support interventions to produce beneficial effects on mental health among individuals who are not experiencing a particular life stress.     

A longitudinal study of the psychosocial impact of stroke on primary support persons

We investigated longitudinally the effects of a stroke on the social support systems and well-being of the patient's primary support person, both acutely and as the condition stabilized. Individuals who had suffered a first stroke and a primary support person participated in two waves of data collection, carried out in 6-month intervals beginning 7 weeks after the stroke. Our data show that the prevalence of depressive symptoms is from 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 times higher than rates found among representative samples of middle-aged and elderly populations. Mean level of depression did not change over time, although level of optimism declined significantly. Multiple regression analyses showed that levels of depression and perceived burden in support persons are highly related to aspects of the stroke such as its severity, and that demographic variables such as age and income play a relatively minor role in attenuating these relations in the acute adjustment phase. However, from 7 to 9 months after the stroke, well-established demographic variables such as health, income, and age were significant predictors of depression. Individuals who were older and who had good health and higher incomes were least depressed.     

A content analysis of the conversational behavior of accepted and rejected children

The present study was designed to assess whether the conversational behavior of children separated into accepted, rejected, and mixed-status dyads differed along the dimensions of listening to, paying attention to, and indicating interest in their dyadic partner. Conversations of 40 third-grade dyads were analyzed as they occurred in a 2- min waiting period and a 4- min conversation period. Seventeen categories of verbal behaviors that indexed these dimensions were used as content codes. Multivariate analyses of variance performed on the observational data yielded significant main effects for status, sex, and experimental condition. Results are interpreted in terms of previous social skills research, and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Cognitive monitoring and strategy choice in younger and older adults

Younger (24- to 39-year-old) and older (60- to 88-year-old) adults learned a list of vocabulary words; one half of the words were studied using a generally more powerful strategy (mnemonic keyword method), and one half mediated with a less powerful approach (generating semantic contexts). Before using these strategies as part of the experiment, neither younger nor older adults judged that the keyword method was more effective and neither group preferred one strategy over the other. After using the strategies and taking a test of strategically studied unfamiliar vocabulary words, the younger subjects reported accurately the relative effectiveness of the two strategies and selected the one that had worked better for them to apply to a subsequent list of vocabulary items. The older participants were not as aware of the differential potency of the strategies and did not rely as much as did the younger subjects on knowledge of strategy utility in making strategy choices. In short, metacognitive awareness of strategy effects produced by monitoring and use of metacognitive awareness in regulating strategy choice were more pronounced in the younger compared with the older sample in this study.     

Forgetting of pictures over a long retention interval in young and older adults

Young and older adults were presented with pictures for study. Their recognition of the information was tested at five retention intervals: immediately, and 48 hr, 1 week, 2 weeks, and 4 weeks later. The main finding of interest was that picture recognition did not show an age-related decline until the 1-week retention interval.     

Norm-of-reaction: definition and misinterpretation of animal research

The development of a phenotype is due to an interaction of the genotype with the environment. Two terms have been used to describe the outcome of this interaction, the norm-of-reaction and the reaction range. The first represents the theoretically limitless distribution of the phenotypes that may be expressed by a given genotype. The reaction range implies an upper and lower limit for phenotype expression possible from a given genotype. A critical distinction between the reaction range and the norm-of-reaction is that the norm-of-reaction is a statement of the conceivable interactions found but does not imply any predictability other than that within the conditions previously tested experimentally, that is, the tails of a normal distribution are infinitely variable, whereas the concept of reaction range implies a limitation inherent in the genotype, that is, a finite range. Empirical support for the reaction-range concept is questionable. Animal studies cited in support of the reaction range have been inappropriately and incorrectly interpreted.     

Effects of male social status on reproductive success and on behavior in mice (Mus musculus)

Differences in reproduction as well as in behavior in the presence of females were evaluated according to dominant and subordinate male rank in albino mice, in the temporary absence of each male's antagonist. Dominant males reproduced more successfully than subordinate males. Subordinate males were generally inactive, except for displacement activities, during the first 15 min they were exposed to female partners. These findings suggest that mechanisms other than male-male interference or mating order may be operating or influencing behavior and reproductive results.