Guidance and Educational Opportunity: The German Perspective

This article is based on information about the status of guidance and counseling in German education acquired by the author during his 1977 summer Fulbright Fellowship to the Federal Republic of Germany. Menacker identifies some points of comparison regarding the roles of guidance and counseling in the American and German education systems. The less developed German educational-guidance system is used to shed light on the nature of guidance contributions made by the American system.     

The Dynamics of Personality Approach (DPA): 20 Tenets for Uncovering the Causal Mechanisms of Personality

Over the last few decades, most personality psychology research has been focused on assessing personality via scores on a few broad traits and investigating how these scores predict various behaviours and outcomes. This approach does not seek to explain the causal mechanisms underlying human personality and thus falls short of explaining the proximal sources of traits as well as the variation of individuals' behaviour over time and across situations. On the basis of the commonalities shared by influential process-oriented personality theories and models, we describe a general dynamics of personality approach (DPA). The DPA relies heavily on theoretical principles applicable to complex adaptive systems that self-regulate via feedback mechanisms, and it parses the sources of personality in terms of various psychological functions relevant in different phases of self-regulation. Thus, we consider personality to be rooted in individual differences in various cognitive, emotional–motivational, and volitional functions, as well as their causal interactions. In this article, we lay out 20 tenets for the DPA that may serve as a guideline for integrative research in personality science. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology     

Motivation, affect, and hemispheric asymmetry: power versus affiliation

In 4 experiments, the authors examined to what extent information related to different social needs (i.e., power vs. affiliation) is associated with hemispheric laterality. Response latencies to a lateralized dot-probe task following lateralized pictures or verbal labels that were associated with positive or negative episodes related to power, affiliation, or achievement revealed clear-cut laterality effects. These effects were a function of need content rather than of valence: Power-related stimuli were associated with right visual field (left hemisphere) superiority, whereas affiliation-related stimuli were associated with left visual field (right hemisphere) superiority. Additional results demonstrated that in contrast to power, affiliation primes were associated with better discrimination between coherent word triads (e.g., goat, pass, and green, all related to mountain) and noncoherent triads, a remote associate task known to activate areas of the right hemisphere.     

Motivational determinants of motor performance: The hidden second task

Summary The present study was designed to test facilitating and debilitating effects of motivational processes on motor behavior. It was predicted that motivational processes have a more pronounced effect on motor performance when control is frequently transferred to attentional mechanisms (i. e., early in the acquisition phase). The results were consistent with this expectation. A strong motive to achieve success and pretreatment designed to enhance achievement motivation were associated with an increase in the quality of performance. A strong tendency to engage in state-oriented cognitive activities, by contrast, (e.g., thinking about the potential threat to one's selfesteem resulting from failure) was associated with poorer performance, It is concluded that experiments on motor behavior in which subjects are instructed to perform a single motor task may actually involve dual-task (or even multiple-task) performance if some part of the subjects' attentional capacity is used for task-irrelevant cognitive activities.