Effectiveness of the career interest profile

This study examined the effectiveness of group‐based career counseling using the Career Interest Profile (CIP). The study used an experimental design involving 2 groups of Italian university students: an experimental group (42 participants) who received narrative career counseling and a control group (47 participants) who did not. Results indicated more specific life and occupational goals after the intervention among members of the experimental group in addition to a decrease in career decision‐making difficulties and an increase in career decision‐making self‐efficacy, thus suggesting the value of group‐based career counseling on the basis of the principles embodied in the CIP.     

Improving executive functioning in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders

An extensive body of literature has documented executive function (EF) impairments in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD); however, few studies have aimed specifically at improving EF. One treatment program that shows promise for children with FASD is the Alert Program for Self-Regulation®, which is a 12-week treatment specifically designed to target self-regulation, a component of EF. The present study sought to examine if Alert would produce improvements in self-regulation that would generalize to other aspects of EF, behavior, and social skills in children with FASD. Twenty-five children aged 8–12 years diagnosed with an FASD were assigned in alternating sequence to either an immediate treatment (TXT) or a delayed treatment control (DTC) group. Both groups received a comprehensive evaluation of EF at baseline and upon completing therapy (TXT), or after a 12- to 14-week interval from baseline (DTC). Parents also completed questionnaires assessing EF and behavior at both time points. For the TXT group only, parent questionnaires were readministered at 6-month follow-up. At the 12-week follow-up, the TXT group displayed significant improvements in inhibitory control and social cognition. Parents of children in the TXT group reported improved behavioral and emotional regulation, as well as reduced externalizing behavior problems. These behavioral improvements along with further improved parent-rated inhibitory control was maintained at the 6-month follow-up. The EF disabilities in children with FASD can be remediated through a targeted treatment approach aimed at facilitating self-regulation skills.     

Two plus blue equals green: Grapheme-color synesthesia allows cognitive access to numerical information via color

In grapheme-color synesthesia, graphemes (e.g., numbers or letters) evoke color experiences. It is generally reported that the opposite is not true: colors will not generate experiences of graphemes or their associated information. However, recent research has provided evidence that colors can implicitly elicit symbolic representations of associated graphemes. Here, we examine if these representations can be cognitively accessed. Using a mathematical verification task replacing graphemes with color patches, we find that synesthetes can verify such problems with colors as accurately as with graphemes. Doing so, however, takes time: ～250 ms per color. Moreover, we find minimal reaction time switch-costs for switching between computing with graphemes and colors. This demonstrates that given specific task demands, synesthetes can cognitively access numerical information elicited by physical colors, and they do so as accurately as with graphemes. We discuss these results in the context of possible cognitive strategies used to access the information.     

Personality Factors Explaining Career Success for Soldiers: An Analytical Review

Personality factors influence career success of soldiers in the military. This article focuses on the diversity and complexity of the nature of the military as a working environment. In this regard the article focuses on general personality characteristics (like locus of control, ego power, etc.) and specific personality characteristics for pilots and divers as an example to explain career success with the person-environment fit model as moderator, in the military.     

Hardiness as predictor of work readiness: a preliminary exploratory study

This study explored hardiness as a possible predictor of work readiness in cross-cultural settings. In order to explore which factors may elicit hardiness, the sub-scales were identified and explored. Participants were from two African countries, namely South Africa (n = 47; females = 57%) and Uganda (n = 45; females = 51%). They completed the Sense of Coherence (SOC), Psychological Capital (PSYCAP) and Dispositional Hardiness/Resilience Scale (DRS-15). The results showed a strong positive correlation between psychological capital and dispositional hardiness.     

THE SECULAR HERO

This article examines the ideas of a number of leading Israeli intellectuals on basic questions of secularism and the link between secular Jews and their Jewish heritage. The secular Jews at the focus of the intellectuals’ thinking are individualists, men and women of outstanding personality and aptitude. Most of the article discusses their trend towards individualism (which is often only implied). The last part of the article tries to classify the reasons for that trend—some of which are rooted in the political tension inherent in questions of identity and tradition in Israeli society, and others that are the apolitical legacy of spiritual Zionism.     

Levels of perceptual processing as a function of stimulus material and spatial location

Craik and Lockhart (1972) have proposed a framework for human memory research which is based on levels of processing. Most of the studies which support this approach have been concerned with comparing structural vs. semantic tasks. The present paper extends the levels of processing approach to earlier stages of processing and emphasizes levels ofperceptual processing. It is suggested that depth of perceptual processing depends on the nature of the stimulus material. Neisser’s (1967) theory of preattentive mechanisms and focal attention is shown to be a theory of levels of perceptual processing. Differences in the nature in which these two processes operates are discussed.     

Negative-based prominence: the role of negative features in matching and choice

Previous research related to the prominence effect (e.g., Tversky, Sattath, & Slovic, 1988) has mainly focused on the causes and boundary conditions of the effect. This article investigates the determinants of prominence and explores a negative-based prominence effect in which the negative attribute becomes the prominent one. Using a matching-choice procedure, Experiments 1 and 2 show that the negative dimension became the prominent one under two different cover stories, suggesting that the negative feature looms larger in choice than in matching. The robustness of negative-based prominence was further demonstrated in a direct choice task without matching (Experiment 3) and was shown to be resistant to the impact of added positive features (Experiment 4). Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 distinguish between two determinants of prominence: intrinsic prominence caused by attribute importance and negative-based prominence caused by negative attribute values. By lowering the values on the positive dimension and enhancing the values on the negative dimension, one can reverse the prominence effect. The results suggest that, compared to a matching task, choice leads to enhanced sensitivity to negative features. The relations between negative characteristics of an attribute and other factors that determine prominence are discussed in the final section.     

Failures to see: attentive blank stares revealed by change blindness

Change blindness illustrates a remarkable limitation in visual processing by demonstrating that substantial changes in a visual scene can go undetected. Because these changes can ultimately be detected using top-down driven search processes, many theories assign a central role to spatial attention in overcoming change blindness. Surprisingly, it has been reported that change blindness can occur during blink-contingent changes even when observers fixate the changing location [O'Regan, J. K., Deubel, H., Clark, J. J., & Rensink, R. A. (2000). Picture changes during blinks: Looking without seeing and seeing without looking. Visual Cognition, 7, 191-212]. However, eye blinks produce a transient disruption of vision that is independent of any associated changes in the retinal image. We determined whether these 'attentive blank stares' could occur in the absence of blink-mediated visual suppression. Using a flicker change-blindness paradigm we confirm that despite direct attentive fixations, obvious scene changes often remain undetected. We conclude that change detection involves object or feature based attentional mechanisms, which can be 'misdirected' despite the allocation of spatial attention to the position of the change.     

The whole moves less than the spin of its parts

When individually moving elements in the visual scene are perceptually grouped together into a coherently moving object, they can appear to slow down. In the present article, we show that the perceived speed of a particular global-motion percept is not dictated completely by the speed of the local moving elements. We investigated a stimulus that leads to bistable percepts, in which local and global motion may be perceived in an alternating fashion. Four rotating dot pairs, when arranged into a square-like configuration, may be perceived either locally, as independently rotating dot pairs, or globally, as two large squares translating along overlapping circular trajectories. Using a modified version of this stimulus, we found that the perceptually grouped squares appeared to move more slowly than the locally perceived rotating dot pairs, suggesting that perceived motion magnitude is computed following a global analysis of form. Supplemental demos related to this article can be downloaded from app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.