An Assessment of the Perceived Relevance of the CACREP Standards

This study examined the extent to which the 1988 Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) Standards were judged by counselor educators as relevant to the preparation of counselors. A majority of the 102 institutional representatives, regardless of whether they represented CACREP-accredited or nonaccredited programs that offered a master's degree only or a master's degree and doctorate and had few or many faculty members, judged the CACREP Standards to be crucial or important to accreditation. Respondents' judgments of the relevance of the CACREP Standards, however, differed significantly (p<.05) by numerical size of program faculty and by whether the program was CACREP-accredited or non-CACREP-accredited.     

Multiple Overt Incest as Family Defense Against Loss

A case report of father-daughter incest is presented that illustrates the way in which overt incest can function as a multi-determined familial defense against separation and loss. The case is further distinguished by: (a) multiple incest and (b) family therapy — an approach infrequently described in the literature on this problem. The authors have adopted the psychodynamic view that incest expresses the collective psychopathology of all the family members as well as their common adaptational capacities. Specifically, we have attempted to demonstrate that separation anxiety was a shared dread in this family and that incest defended against this painful prospect.     

Partly versus Completely Out of Your Mind: Effects of Incubation and Distraction on Resolving Fixation

Incubation has long been proposed as a mechanism in creative problem solving (Wallas, 1926). A new trial‐by‐trial method for observing incubation effects was used to compare the forgetting fixation hypothesis with the conscious work hypothesis. Two experiments examined the effects of incubation on initially unsolved Remote Associates Test (RAT) problems. Following exposure to misleading clues designed to induce initial fixation on RAT problems, versus no clues, participants were retested on problems either immediately after their first attempt (no‐incubation), or after a 40‐second incubation period. Resolution of initially unsolved RAT problems (fixated versus non‐fixated) was examined as a function of complete interruption (Experiment 1) or partial distraction (Experiment 2). An incubation effect, that is, better resolution of initially unsolved problems retested after a delay rather than retesting immediately, was seen only in Experiment 1, in which unsolved problems were completely removed from sight. Furthermore, an incubation effect was found only for initially fixated problems, and not for problems that were not accompanied by misleading clues. The results are consistent with the forgetting fixation hypothesis (Smith & Blankenship, 1989), which states that putting unsolved problems completely out of mind allows initial fixation to dissipate, and the results indicate that the opportunity for some conscious work during incubation periods may not be optimal for resolving fixation.     

RECRUITERS' USE OF GPA IN INITIAL SCREENING DECISIONS: HIGHER GPAs DON'T ALWAYS MAKE THE CUT

The relationship between college grade point average (GPA) and recruiters' initial screening decisions was examined using data from 548 job postings in a college recruitment program. Results indicate that in-major grade point average (GPA) is more strongly associated with screening decisions ( p = 0.18, SD_P = 0.200) than is overall GPA ( p = 0.06, SD_P = 0.187), but the magnitudes of the relationships varied across decision sets including a larger number of negative values than would be expected from sampling error alone. Subsequent examination of the bivariate data identified 6 different plot types suggesting that recruiters use a variety of GPA decision rules to initially screen applicants in college recruiting. The most common data plots found in 42% of the decision sets suggests that recruiters do not use GPA in screening decisions. But a surprising 81 of 548 decision sets indicated recruiters selected against applicants with high GPAs. Evidence that organizations recruiting for the same job produced different plot types suggests that the use of GPA data in initial screening decisions may be idiosyncratic to individual recruiters.     

EFFECT OF TEMPORARY CONTRACTS ON PERCEIVED WORK CHARACTERISTICS AND JOB STRAIN: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY

This longitudinal study investigates differences in perceived work characteristics and job strain as a function of employment status. The study examines the effects of a change from involuntary temporary to permanent status ( N = 75) compared to staying permanent ( N = 257), as well as comparing temporary contract and permanent contract employees at Time 1 and a second-wave comparison that included new temporary contract employees ( N = 92) and new permanent contract employees ( N = 34). Results suggest that temporary employment status is associated with negative and positive consequences. On the negative side, temporary status reduced perceptions of job security and participative decision making, which had deleterious effects on job strain. On the other hand, temporary employees had fewer strain-inducing role demands (in particular, lower role overload). The net effect was that temporary employees had lower job strain, which analyses suggested was due to indirect effects of the lower role demands.     

Consumers Need Information: Supplementing Teleosemantics with an Input Condition

The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour's having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new 'infotel-semantics' adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition.