Persistent career indecision over time: Links with personality,barriers, self-efficacy,and life satisfaction

Taking control over one's career requires the ability to make career decisions; thus, remaining in a state of career indecision is problematic. However, the stability of career indecision has not yet been investigated using advanced statistical modeling approaches. We present two studies of German university students applying three-wave, longitudinal designs. Study 1 investigated the stability of career indecision by means of latent state-trait analysis within two samples with different time lags (Sample 1: N = 363, 7 weeks; Sample 2: N = 591, 6 months). The results indicated that career indecision was determined by a stable component (i.e., trait career indecisiveness) that was associated with lower core self-evaluations, lower occupational self-efficacy, and higher perceived career barriers. Study 2 (N = 469) examined career indecision over one year. We found that the stable career indecision component explained 5% of the variance in student life satisfaction beyond self-evaluated generalized indecisiveness.     

Making and Unmaking Prejudice: Religious Affiliation Mitigates the Impact of Mortality Salience on Out‐Group Attitudes

Research inspired by terror management theory has established that being reminded of the inevitability of death (i.e., “mortality salience”) leads people to express more negative attitudes toward out‐groups. We examined the hypothesis that being affiliated with a religion may buffer individuals against this negative impact of mortality salience. Two studies, conducted in two cultures that differ in their emphasis on religiosity (the United Kingdom and Italy), supported this hypothesis. Specifically, we found that mortality salience resulted in more negative out‐group attitudes only among participants not affiliated with any religion. Further, this buffering effect of religious affiliation was not moderated by participants’ specific religious orientations or by their levels of social dominance orientation. In addition, the buffering effect did not hold when prejudice against the target out‐group was not proscribed by religious authorities. Implications for research on religion, prejudice, and terror management are discussed.     

The Spatial Power Motivation Scale: A Semi-Implicit Measure of Situational Power Motivation

We introduce a new nonverbal and unobtrusive measure to assess power motive activation, the Spatial Power Motivation Scale (SPMS). The unique features of this instrument are that it is (a) very simple and economical, (b) reliable and valid, and (c) sensitive to situational changes. Study 1 demonstrates the instrument's convergent and discriminant validity with explicit measures. Study 2 demonstrates the instrument's responsiveness to situational power motive salience: anticipating and winning competition versus losing competition and watching television. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that thoughts of competition result in higher power motivation specifically for individuals with a high dispositional power motive.     

Construing multiple ingroups: Assessing social identity inclusiveness and structure in ethnic and religious minority group members

The combination of multiple social identities into a coherent ingroup construal is of immediate relevance in today's complex and diverse societies. This paper proposes a conceptual and operational framework to examine how individuals subjectively construe their ingroup in the context of multiple, cross‐cutting group memberships. The subjective combination of multiple social identities is described in terms of structure (social identity structure) and inclusiveness (social identity inclusiveness (SII)). Two studies assess SII and social identity structure in community samples to whom the subjective combination of multiple, cross‐cutting ingroups is of particular relevance: a sample of Turkish‐Belgian Muslims (Study 1) and Turkish‐Australian Muslims (Study 2). Across both studies, SII uniquely predicted attitudes toward a range of outgroups, over and above identification with singular ingroups. Moreover, a wide range of social identity structures were identified, further attesting to broad individual differences in the construal of the perceived ingroup. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The being a patient effect: negative expectations based on group labeling and corresponding treatment affect patient performance

Patient studies provide insights into mechanisms underlying diseases and thus represent a cornerstone of clinical research. In this study, we report evidence that differences between patients and controls might partly be based on expectations generated by the patients’ knowledge of being invited and treated as a patient: the Being a Patient effect (BP effect). This finding extends previous neuropsychological reports on diagnosis threat. Participants with mild allergies were addressed either as patients or control subjects in a clinical study. We measured the impact of this group labeling and corresponding instructions on pain perception and cognitive performance. Our results provide evidence that the BP effect can indeed affect physiological and cognitive measures in clinical settings. Importantly, these effects can lead to systematic overestimation of genuine disease effects and should be taken into account when disease effects are investigated. Finally, we propose strategies to avoid or minimize this critical confound.     

Comparing the effects of generating questions,testing, and restudying on students' long-term recall in university learning

We compared the long-term effects of generating questions by learners with answering questions (i.e., testing) and restudying in the context of a university lecture. In contrast to previous studies, students were not prepared for the learning strategies, learning content was experimentally controlled, and effects on factual and transfer knowledge were examined. Students' overall recall performance after one week profited from generating questions and testing but not from restudying. When analyzing the effects on both knowledge types separately, traditional analyses revealed that only factual knowledge appeared to benefit from testing. However, additional Bayesian analyses suggested that generating questions and testing similarly benefit factual and transfer knowledge compared with restudying. The generation of questions thus seems to be another powerful learning strategy, yielding similar effects as testing on long-term retention of coherent learning content in educational contexts, and these effects emerge for factual and transfer knowledge.     

Abusive Supervision from an Integrated Self‐Control Perspective

We investigate the relationship between supervisors’ irritation and follower perceptions of abusive supervision. Based on the integrated self‐control framework, we propose a positive relationship between supervisor irritation and abusive supervision. Moreover, we propose this relationship to be buffered by supervisors’ self‐control capacities and by external monitoring of the supervisor by upper management. We tested our hypotheses in a two‐source survey study with 96 supervisor‐follower dyads. Our results show a positive relationship between supervisor irritation and abusive supervision and an interaction between supervisor irritation and supervisor self‐control. The interaction pattern revealed a positive relationship between supervisor irritation and abusive supervision if supervisor self‐control is low. We also found an interaction between supervisor irritation and external monitoring in predicting active but not passive forms of abusive supervision. Our findings underline the role of self‐control processes in explaining abusive supervision.     

Psychotherapeuten und Internet

Background

Communication is part and parcel of every interaction. This raises the question of the role of modern media in mental health care. The aim of this explorative study was to investigate the use of modern media in the clinical practice.

Material and methodology

In an Internet survey 234 psychotherapists from Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) were surveyed about the extent to which they integrate new media in the practice and their opinion about this integration. For this purpose a questionnaire was developed based on the questionnaire of Wangberg et al. (2007).

Results

Most of the psychotherapists already use e-mails as well as mobile communication to contact their patients. The main reason for choosing this modern way of communication is the possibility to simplify the management of formal issues. Psychotherapists were indifferent about the idea of web-based counseling.

Conclusion

Forms of digital media are used as an addition to conventional ways of therapeutic communication but face-to-face interaction cannot be replaced completely which is also indicated by the fact that professionals still highly value personal contact.     

How Inspecting a Picture Affects Processing of Text in Multimedia Learning

We investigated how a picture fosters learning from text, both with self‐paced presentation and with short presentation before text. In an experiment, participants (N = 114) learned about the structure and functioning of a pulley system in one of six conditions: text only, picture presentation for 150 milliseconds, 600 milliseconds, or 2 seconds, or self‐paced before text, or self‐paced concurrent presentation of text and picture. Presenting the picture for self‐paced study time, both before and concurrently with text, fostered recall and comprehension and sped up text processing compared with presenting text only. Moreover, even inspecting the picture for only 600 milliseconds or 2 seconds improved comprehension and yielded faster reading of subsequent text about the spatial structure of the system compared with text only. These findings suggest that pictures, even if attended for a short time only, may yield a spatial mental scaffold that allows for the integration with verbal information, thereby fostering comprehension. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.