A psychological interview process for career assessment

The authors present a comprehensive four-step process for conducting initial career assessment by interview. The process assesses skills, interests, values, non-work relationships, goals and activities, and psychological aspects such as self-esteem and work attitudes. The interview process is flexible, internally consistent and portable. Step One analyzes the client's work history and includes reasons why such a history may be inadequate. Step Two examines work-related preferences. Step Three investigates lifestyle context, and Step Four produces a summary of all the accumulated interview information, including options the client wishes to avoid. Detailed worksheets accompany the article.This article has been adapted, with permission, from Chapter 3, Promoting Client Self Understanding, in Yost, E. B., and Corbishley, M. A.Career Counseling: A Psychological Approach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987.     

Determinants of satisfaction with specific job facets: A test of Locke's model

Survey results supported Locke's (1969, 1976) contention that facet job satisfaction is a function of three basic determinants: 1) facet amount; 2) wanted amount; and 3) facet importance. We found several three-way interactions that were generally consistent with Locke's model. Specifically, facet satisfaction was highest when employees wanted a large amount of the facet in question, were currently receiving a large amount, and felt that the facet was personally important. Conversely, satisfaction was lowest when employees wanted a large amount of the facet, were currently receiving only a small amount, and felt that the facet was personally important. When job facets were viewed as unimportant to employees, however, the amount of facet desired and currently possessed had little impact on satisfaction. Implications, limitations, and directions for research are discussed.Bob Rice passed away recently. He will be sorely missed.     

Personality, stress, smoking, and genetic predisposition as synergistic risk factors for cancer and coronary heart disease.

Risk factors for cancer have been found in the past to act synergistically in a number of studies. However, these studies were not always designed to test the hypothesis of synergism, and have sometimes failed to equate for important variables, which might influence the results. The present study tests the hypothesis that psychosocial variables and physical ones (personality/stress, smoking, and genetic predisposition) interact in a synergistic fashion in the causation of lung cancer and coronary heart disease (CHD).     

Making choice a routine part of mealtimes for persons with profound mental retardation

Despite increased recognition of the importance of providing routine choice opportunities for persons with severe handicaps, this population continues to experience a typical lack of such opportunities. We evaluated a program for increasing the amount of choices made during routine mealtimes by persons with profound mental retardation and minimal communication skills. The choice provision program, involving systematic presentation of alternative food and drink items in a step-wise fashion during the course of the meal, was implemented with three persons in a residential facility. Results indicated that after implementation of the choice program, all three participants made consistently more choices concerning the foods and beverages they consumed relative to baseline. The choice provision program was conducted without extending the amount of time typically allotted to mealtime within the residential setting. Results are discussed in regard to additional research needed to continue developing means of assisting persons with profound mental retardation to exert control over meaningful events in their lives.     

Teaching minority high school students to recruit helpers to attain personal and educational goals

Recruiting help from mentors and other potential helpers is a promising strategy for helping disadvantaged and minority youths meet their personal and educational goals. Three African-American high school seniors participated in a project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of training procedures that would allow them to ask for help in attaining educational and other personal goals. A behavioral training procedure that included instructional materials, role-play practice, praise, and feedback was used. Targeted skills included goal setting and 30 responses involved in the process of meeting with a potential helper. Role-play situations were used to evaluate participants' help-recruiting skills before and after training. Participants increased their help-recruiting skills from an average of 38% during baseline, to an average of 75% after training. Self-reported measures of goal attainment suggested that the students benefited from the training. Implications for mentoring programs designed to increase minority students' opportunities to reach educational goals were discussed.     

Microsecond resolution timing with Sun workstations

A high-resolution clock is often indispensable for the accurate measurement of millisecond or microsecond resolution intervals, and it is impossible to measure the probability distribution of short intervals without one. This paper describes a microsecond clock for Sun 3 and 4 workstations that we designed, built, and have made publicly available. It also explains how to measure intervals shorter than a computer’s clock resolution, and derives confidence intervals for such measurements.     

Personality,stress, smoking,and genetic predisposition as synergistic risk factors for cancer and coronary heart disease

Risk factors for cancer have been found in the past to act synergistically in a number of studies. However, these studies were not always designed to test the hypothesis of synergism, and have sometimes failed to equate for important variables, which might influence the results. The present study tests the hypothesis that psychosocial variables and physical ones (personality/stress, smoking, and genetic predisposition) interact in a synergistic fashion in the causation of lung cancer and coronary heart disease (CHD).     

Human classical conditioning

Recent reports of failure to obtain blocking in human galvanic skin response (GSR) conditioning, together with our own equivocal results with eyelid conditioning, have motivated us to re-examine the status of the conditioned stimulus (CS) in human conditioning studies. The issues raised by compound stimuli, by contextual cues and occasion setting stimuli, and by cross-modal transfer are considered in the light of data from our laboratories. These data include observations on the interchangeability of stimulus modalities during acquisition, the use of varying information loads embedded in occasion setting displays, the comparison of alternative blocking designs and the analysis of response topography in relation to stimulus variability. They suggested that an adequate account of the CS in human conditioning studies must recognize that it is dynamically processed and reprocessed both during and after acquisition.     

Describing parent-child interaction during exploration: situation definitions and negotiations

A coding scheme based on Wertsch's (1983) extension of Vygotsky's ideas about adult-child interaction in the zone of proximal development was used to analyze parent-child interaction during exploration. Sixty children, 3 to 6 years old, were videotaped while exploring novel objects in 15-min sessions with their mothers and fathers. Clusters of verbal and nonverbal behavior were used to code how participants defined the situation in each 15-s interval of each session in terms of one of nine categories. When parent-child mismatches occurred, the participants' negotiations of an intersubjective definition were coded, and child and parent questions were coded for complexity, complexity and appropriateness of response, and function. Results indicated that parent and child definitions matched almost 80% of the time, usually around exploration by the child with attention of or collaboration by the adult. Fathers tended to be more didactic than mothers.