Contextual Themes in Career Decision Making of Female Clients Who Indicate Depression

Difficulties concerning female counseling center clients' career decision making were explored in this qualitative study. The authors reviewed counseling intake and progress notes of 18 female students who sought counseling services at a university counseling center and who presented career concerns and reported feeling depressed. Most women in this study described their career decision‐making difficulties in the context of relationships with their parents or significant others. Both external (i.e., family relationships, family and culture, and relationships with significant others) and internal (i.e., developmental, developmental and mental health issues, and skill deficits) conditions emerged as significantly affecting these women's career decision‐making process.     

SINDSCAL source weight transformations are not always necessary or desirable: reply to Hodgkinson

Hodgkinson (1998) argues that we should have transformed the SINDSCAL source weights we used for an analysis presented on page 15 of our paper on the judgement of HIV cases (Irwin, Jones, and Mundo, 1996). In this reply we present theoretical and empirical arguments for why we did not transform the weights. Our statements are presented in the context of a more general discussion of how source weights should be interpreted and used. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prediction of toddlers’ expressive language from maternal sensitivity and toddlers’ anger expressions: A developmental perspective

Despite evidence for the importance of individual differences in expressive language during toddlerhood in predicting later literacy skills, few researchers have examined individual and contextual factors related to language abilities across the toddler years. Furthermore, a gap remains in the literature about the extent to which the relations of negative emotions and parenting to language skills may differ for girls and boys. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to investigate the associations among maternal sensitivity, children's observed anger reactivity, and expressive language when children were 18 (T1; n = 247) and 30 (T2; n = 216) months. At each age, mothers reported on their toddlers’ expressive language, and mothers’ sensitive parenting behavior was observed during an unstructured free-play task. Toddlers’ anger expressions were observed during an emotion-eliciting task. Using path modeling, results showed few relations at T1. At T2, maternal sensitivity was negatively related to anger, and in turn, anger was associated with lower language skills. However, moderation analyses showed that these findings were significant for boys but not for girls. In addition, T1 maternal sensitivity and anger positively predicted expressive language longitudinally for both sexes. Findings suggest that the relations between maternal sensitivity, anger reactivity and expressive language may vary depending on the child's developmental stage and sex.