Retention,Role Modeling,and Academic Readiness: A Perspective on the Ethnic Minority Student in Higher Education

This article discusses retention, role modeling, and academic readiness as these issues relate to ethnic minority students in higher education. The central points of the discussion revolve around the need to stem the unusually high rates of attrition of minority students through academic role modeling and recognition of the concept of delayed academic readiness. Methods of implementing a mentor-student program are also suggested.     

Client-Oriented Interactional Behaviors for Professional-Client Settings

The outcomes of professional-client relationships are often less satisfactory than one would expect them to be. This study suggested that professionals using client-oriented interaction behaviors grounded in the interactional view (Reusch & Bateson, 1968; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967) would be rated as more effective than those who did not. A field study of computer professionals revealed that highly rated professionals used client-oriented communication behaviors more frequently than their counterparts who were rated lower. Moreover, the client-oriented interactional behaviors provided substantial discrimination between high- and low-performing professionals.     

Nonverbal Expectancies and the Evaluative Consequences of Violations

This report reviews the construct of expectancy and its relevance to understanding communication phenomena. Given the shortage of empirically based knowledge about what constitute expected and unexpected interpersonal behaviors and how they are evaluated, a two-part experiment was conducted to determine the expectedness and evaluation of three nonverbal variables: touch, conversational distance, and posture. The possible moderating effects of communicator attractiveness, status, and gender were also examined. Respondents (N = 622) viewed photographs of an attractive or unattractive male or female stimulus interacting with a male or female partner, attributed to be of same, higher, or lower status, who displayed one of seven forms of touch or one of nine combinations of posture and proximity. Respondents rated the appropriateness, typicality, and desirability of the observed behavior. Results demonstrated that several behaviors are expected and positively valenced, while others qualify as positive or negative violations of expectations. Attractiveness influenced expectancies and evaluations; gender and status had limited effects. Implications for information processing and nonverbal expectancy violations theory are discussed.     

USING MINIAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATION IN APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY TO PERSONALIZE COURSE CONTENT AND IMPROVE CONCEPTUAL APPLICATION

­In the present investigation, I implemented a series of brief, written, autobiographical assignments, each associated with material from one of 12 different chapters covered throughout an introductory course in applied psychology. In completing each assignment, students described and applied psychological principles to their past and present life experiences. Students completing the autobiographical writing assignments demonstrated greater comprehension and application of course concepts than students exposed to traditional didactics alone. Students' anecdotal comments combined with narrative excerpts from selected assignments in offering additional evidence of the effectiveness of miniautobiographical narration as a constructivist pedagogical tool.     

Can There Be Full Excuses for Morally Wrong Actions?*

Most people (and philosophers) distinguish between performing a morally wrong action and being blameworthy for having performed that action, and believe that an individual can be fully excused for having performed a wrong action. My purpose is to reject this claim. More precisely, I defend what I call the “Dependence Claim”: A's doing X is wrong only if A is blameworthy for having done X. I consider three cases in which, according to the traditional view, a wrong action could be excused: duress, mental illness, and mistake. I try to show that the reasons for excusing in either case are not relevantly distinguishable from the reasons for claiming that the prima facie wrong action is not wrong all things considered.