A New Model of Job Training for Economic Rebirth

Many current welfare recipients lack the adequate training and education needed to become self-sufficient. Historically, government administered Job training programs have not been successful in efficiently moving people from government assistance to permanent employment, suggesting the need for a new model of job training. This article presents a resiliency model of job training that emphasizes applicant recruitment, assessment and development. Use of a resiliency model is intended to increase program success rates by using psychological assessment and professional development goals of the individual.     

Religion and Spirituality in Variously Accredited Counselor Training Programs: A Comment on Pate and High (1995)

Accreditation standards for counselor preparation have the potential for bringing appropriate consideration of religious and spiritual issues into the training of counselors. This article extends Pate and High's (1995) study of CACREP-accredited programs and includes data comparing the attention given to religion and spirituality in programs accredited by several different counselor and therapist-training accrediting bodies.     

Mental Imagery in Counseling

Heightened interest in conscious mind phenomena such as mental imagery has been evident among professionals and lay people in recent years. In this article the author discusses some of the uses of mental imagery techniques in counseling. Special emphasis is given to the potential of mental images in the tapping of creative energy and other positive aspects of the “higher self that may enhance daily living. These uses of mental imagery have significant implications for contemporary counselors.     

The Effects of Vocalics and Nonverbal Sensitivity on Compliance A Speech Accommodation Theory Explanation

A speech accommodation theory explanation for the interaction between a receiver's decoding ability and a speaker's voice tone on compliance with requests for help was tested. It was predicted that good decoders would speak faster than poor decoders. Speech accommodation theory predicts that given this speech style difference, good decoders would make more favorable interpretations of a fast request that converged toward their faster speech rate; whereas poor decoders would make more favorable interpretations of a slow request that converged toward their slower speech rate. Requests receiving more favorable evaluations should result in greater compliance, because compliance with requests for help was predicted to follow an identification process. An experiment involving 168 participants confirmed this explanation. Good decoders spoke faster than poor decoders. Moreover, good decoders rated the fast request as more intimate and immediate, while poor decoders rated the slow request as more intimate and immediate. Good decoders, in turn, complied more with the fast request, which they rated more intimate and immediate, whereas poor decoders complied more with the slow request, which they rated more intimate and immediate.     

Associations Between Religious Personality Dimensions and Implicit Homosexual Prejudice

Personality correlates of implicit and explicit attitudes toward homosexual and heterosexual individuals were examined within a sample of predominantly Protestant college students in the south-central United States. Implicit attitudes were measured with the Implicit Association Test, a computer program that recorded reaction times as participants categorized symbols (of heterosexual individuals and gay men) and adjectives (good or bad words). Participants also completed self-report measures of religious fundamentalism (RF), Christian orthodoxy (CO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), impression management (IM), and attitudes toward heterosexuals, gay men, and lesbians. Participants displayed fairly negative implicit and explicit attitudes toward homosexual relative to heterosexual individuals. Consistent with previous research, RF, CO, RWA, and IM were associated with increases in self-reported homosexual prejudice. Religious fundamentalism was the strongest predictor of a negative implicit attitude toward gay men relative to heterosexuals.     

PERSONALITY MEASURES AND BIODATA: EVIDENCE REGARDING THEIR INCREMENTAL PREDICTIVE VALUE IN THE LIFE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

This study examines the extent to which a theoretically based set of personality measures can add incremental validity to an existing biodata instrument in terms of predicting both traditional (task) and expanded (contextual) dimensions of performance in the life insurance industry. Four of the Big Five measures of personality predicted contextual performance while just the Extraversion scale predicted task performance. This study demonstrates that personality measures can provide significant incremental prediction of contextual performance over biodata, and vice versa.