international students' employment search in the united states: a phenomenological study

After completing their academic degree, international student populations face unique situations in their search for employment in the United States. This study used a phenomenological examination to identify the perceptions and the experiences of eight undergraduate international students who participated in a 10‐week support group during the employment exploration and application process. Participants documented their personal reflections in journal entries and engaged in a single‐session focus group after the support group. Themes that emerged from the focus group and participants' journal entries were (a) discovering personal uniqueness, (b) coping with acculturation, and (c) dealing with a lack of resources. Implications for career development practitioners are discussed.     

Syrian hamster males below an age threshold do not elicit aggression from unfamiliar adult males

In many species, young males are the dispersers, leaving their natal area after weaning to establish a breeding area of their own. As young males disperse, however, they are bound to encounter unfamiliar adult males with established territories. Such interactions between an adult male and a young male may always be agonistic. Alternatively, there may be an age threshold below which aggression is not elicited and above which the adult male is aggressive toward the juvenile male. To test these two alternative hypotheses, we paired 47 young Syrian hamster (Mesocricetus auratus) males ranging from 24 to 65 days of age with 47 adult male hamsters and measured aggressive and investigatory behavior for 5 min. We observed no aggression by the adult toward young males between 24 and 47 days of age or toward the single male that was 49 days of age. Young males that were 50 days of age or older, however, elicited significant levels of aggression from the adults. These results indicate that in Syrian hamsters, young males are less vulnerable to adult aggression up to an age threshold and are more vulnerable to adult aggression beyond that threshold. This pattern may facilitate the establishment of territories by dispersing young males below that age threshold. Aggr. Behav. 37:91–97, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Observational analysis of the free throw shot made by grassroots basketball players

This article represents an approach to the free throw from the perspective of observational methodology. Faced with the obvious difficulty of transferring quantitative data resulting from the habitual biomechanical studies to everyday sports intervention, an easily accessible observational tool has been produced which, as a main contribution, allows the detection of T-patterns in free-throw shots. As the endorsement of the usefulness of the designed observational tool, an example is presented of the results obtained in a research design that studies a selection of grassroots basketball players (11-12 years).     

The effects of sleep deprivation on the attentional functions and vigilance

The study of sleep deprivation is a fruitful area of research to increase our knowledge of cognitive functions and their neural basis. In the current work, 26 healthy young adults participated in a sleep deprivation study, in which the Attentional Networks Test for Interactions and Vigilance (ANTI-V) was performed at 10a.m. after a night of normal sleep and again at 10 a.m. after 25.5-27.5 h of total sleep deprivation. The ANTI-V is an experimental task that provides measures of alerting, orienting and executive control attentional functions. Compared with previous versions, the ANTI-V includes a vigilance task, more reliable auditory alerting signals, non-predictive peripheral orienting cues, and also a neutral no-cue condition allowing the analysis of reorienting costs and orienting benefits. Thus, new evidence to evaluate the influence of sleep deprivation on attentional functioning is provided. Results revealed differences in both tonic and phasic alertness after sleep deprivation. Vigilance performance was deteriorated, while a warning tone was more helpful to increase participants' alertness, resulting in slightly faster RT and, in particular, fewer errors. The reorienting costs of having an invalid spatial cue were reduced after sleep loss. No sleep deprivation effect on the executive control measure was found in this study. Finally, since no control group was used, particular precautions were taken to reduce the influence of potential practice effects.     

ASSESSMENT OF PREFERENCE FOR EDIBLE AND LEISURE ITEMS IN INDIVIDUALS WITH DEMENTIA

We conducted 2 studies on reinforcer preference in patients with dementia. Results of preference assessments yielded differential selections by 14 participants. Unlike prior studies with individuals with intellectual disabilities, all participants showed a noticeable preference for leisure items over edible items. Results of a subsequent analysis with 3 participants showed reinforcement effects when highly preferred items were delivered as consequences.     

Life review therapy using autobiographical retrieval practice for older adults with clinical depression

The aim of this experiment was to examine the efficacy of life review based on autobiographical retrieval practice for treating depression in older adults. Thirty-seven clinically depressed older adults aged 64-83, who were also receiving pharmacological treatment, were randomly assigned to life review therapy or to a placebo condition with supportive therapy. Results indicated decreased depression for both conditions, with no significant differences between the two therapies. There was some indication of greater gain in production of specific memories among those in life review therapy. Patients who produced higher numbers of specific memories decreased their depression scores at a faster rate.     

Tolerance towards dating violence in Spanish adolescents

The study of intimate partner violence among adolescent and young couples in Spain remains unattended, although such abuses are well known and more frequent than in adulthood. The aim of this study is, on the one hand, to provide epidemiological information on dating relationships, and on the other hand, to identify attitudes towards violence. 2205 women enrolled in schools in diverse provinces of Spain, participated in the study. Average age was near 19 years (SD= 2.25). The Dating Violence Questionnaire (DVQ, in Spanish, CUVINO), a questionnaire that assesses both frequency and distress associated with violent behavior, was used. The DVQ allowed differentiating between groups of women self-labeled as abused and not abused on the basis of the frequency of sustained violence, although the levels of distress in the face of violence were statistically similar in both groups. Implications for future research and prevention programs are discussed.     

Validation study of the Questionnaire on School Maladjustment Problems (QSMP)

The aim of this study was to analyze the exploratory and confirmatory structure, as well as other psychometric properties, of the Cuestionario de Problemas de Convivencia Escolar (CPCE; in Spanish, the Questionnaire on School Maladjustment Problems [QSMP]), using a sample of Spanish adolescents. The instrument was administered to 60 secondary education teachers (53.4% females and 46.6% males) between the ages of 28 and 54 years (M= 41.2, SD= 11.5), who evaluated a total of 857 adolescent students. The first-order exploratory factor analysis identified 7 factors, explaining a total variance of 62%. A second-order factor analysis yielded three dimensions that explain 84% of the variance. A confirmatory factor analysis was subsequently performed in order to reduce the number of factors obtained in the exploratory analysis as well as the number of items. Lastly, we present the results of reliability, internal consistency, and validity indices. These results and their implications for future research and for the practice of educational guidance and intervention are discussed in the conclusions.     

Attentional factors in conceptual congruency

Conceptual congruency effects are biases induced by an irrelevant conceptual dimension of a task (e.g., location in vertical space) on the processing of another, relevant dimension (e.g., judging words' emotional evaluation). Such effects are a central empirical pillar for recent views about how the mind/brain represents concepts. In the present paper, we show how attentional cueing (both exogenous and endogenous) to each conceptual dimension succeeds in modifying both the manifestation and the symmetry of the effect. The theoretical implications of this finding are discussed.     

The role of stress on the language-independence and code-switching phenomena

this investigation studies the extent to which stress affects the assumed functional separation of coordinate bilingual's linguistic organization. Spanish/English bilinguals were subjects in a GSR linguistic conditioning experiment using two intensities of buzzer sounds (stressful conditions) and two lists of words. One word for each list functioned as the conditioned stimulus. Generalization to semantically, phonemically, and unrelated words occurred in both languages and buzzer conditions. We found a differential impact of the buzzer on the functional separation of the languages, although not in the direction predicted. We concluded that stress produced code-switching, and hence, a primitivization of the subject's cognitive and linguistic functioning is assumed to have occurred. These findings are important in understanding the way stress affects the bilingual's languages at the linguistic and cognitive levels. They are also important in understanding the role of stress in language development and in the transfer of linguistic information.Different portions of this paper were presented at several scientific meetings, including the conference on Treating Hispanic Clients: Cultural, Ethnic and Linguistic Considerations, Long Island University, May 1986, and the Annual Convention of the New York State Psychological Association, April 1987