Career Decision Ambiguity Tolerance Scale: Construction and initial validations

The Career Decision Ambiguity Tolerance Scale (CDAT) measures individual evaluations of and responses to ambiguity encountered in career decision making. It was developed and initially validated through two studies of college students. An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis consistently showed a three-factor structure for career decision ambiguity tolerance, consisting of preference, tolerance, and aversion. In addition to support for construct validity and subscale reliabilities, the findings also support the scale's incremental validity in predicting career indecision, career decision-making self-efficacy, and career adaptability over and beyond general ambiguity tolerance. The theoretical meaning and practical application of the CDAT were discussed along with its limitations and suggestions for future research.     

Early predictors of career development: A 10-year follow-up study

This paper presents empirical findings from a 10-year longitudinal study of the educational and occupational socialization of 445 participants who were about 7 years old when first tested, and about 17 years old at the fourth time of measurement. In addition to collecting psychological measurements from the participants, behavioral reports were collected from significant others, specifically parents and teachers. Findings demonstrated that the life/career evolution of the participants can be understood only when taking into account the dynamic interaction between the unique personal characteristics of individuality of each person and the psychosocial theatre within which the person’s development takes place. Using the life-span, life-space framework of Super, and the Developmental-Contextual model from Vondracek, different emerging early predictors with unique impact on the process of educational and occupational socialization were identified, especially with respect to the probability of dropping out of school. Results in terms of gender, parental influences, psychological characteristics, and social context are discussed with regard to their potential implications for psychological interventions in schools, families, and occupational settings, as well as with regard to personal counseling in what concerns the management of life circumstances and behavioral ecosystems.     

An imprecise goal programming approach for modeling design team's preferences in quality function deployment planning process

The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an approach that facilitates designing product by analyzing and projecting the Customer's Needs (CNs) in the Engineering Characteristics (ECs) of a product. The aim of QFD planning process is to determine the target levels for ECs of a product that achieve high level of overall customers' satisfaction. However, integrating design team's preferences in this preliminary stage of product design could make the design more realistic and could also avoid unfeasibility in posterior phases of the product development processes. Moreover, this process is performed within an imprecise environment, and more than one factor must be taken into account in determining targets levels of ECs; especially, the limited resources and increased market competition. This paper presents an imprecise goal programming approach to determine the best aspiration levels of ECs in QFD planning process. Based on benchmarking data of ECs, the concept of satisfaction functions will be utilized to integrate explicitly the design team's preferences and incorporate the competitive analysis of target market into the modelling and solution processes. In addition, the relationships linking CNs and ECs and the ECs to each other are integrated by functional relationships. The proposed approach will be illustrated through an example of product development of an emulsification dynamite packing machine. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Career adaptability,calling and the professional competence of social work students in China: A career construction perspective

Based on career construction theory, the current research examined individual and contextual predictors for the professional competence of Chinese undergraduates majoring in social work (N = 270). Results showed that career concern and career curiosity predicted social work students' professional competence, with these relations mediated by the calling in social work. It was also found that the positive effect of calling on professional competence was stronger among students who perceived a lower level of career-oriented learning environment. The corresponding moderated mediation model was supported such that the indirect effects of career concern and career curiosity on professional competence were stronger among students who perceived a lower level of career-oriented learning environment. These findings carry implications for research on career construction theory, as well as career education and career counseling practices.     

Effects of deprivation on engagement in preferred activities by persons with developmental disabilities

This study examined the effects of deprivation on engagement in activities for 3 adult men with developmental disabilities. First, an assessment was conducted to identify a high- and a low-preference activity for each participant. Second, the high-preference activity was made available following three amounts of deprivation of the activity (15 min, 2 hr, and 1 to 4 days); the low-preference activity was made available following the schedule of deprivation that produced the highest level of engagement by each participant in the high-preference activity. The results were that 1 to 4 days of deprivation produced the highest average amounts of engagement in the high-preference activity for each participant; this amount of deprivation did not produce high engagement in the low-preference activities. Third, the deprivation procedures and results were replicated when high-preference activities were presented by teachers during the participants' daily activities when their engagement had been quite low.     

Early tutoring and adult reproductive behaviour in female domestic canary (Serinus canaria)

We studied the effect of early tutoring on the subsequent sexual preferences and reproductive activity of female domestic canaries (Serinus canaria). Young female canaries were exposed during the first 4 months of life to songs of either domestic or wild canaries. When adult, these females were again exposed to domestic or wild songs. In the first experiment, the sexual responses of the females to unfamiliar domestic and wild songs were quantified with the copulation solicitation display (CSD) assay. In the second experiment, the same females were tested again with modified tutoring songs. In the third experiment, song stimulation of nest-building and egg-laying was studied. Domestic-strain-tutored females gave more CSDs to domestic than to wild songs. In contrast, wild-strain-tutored females showed no sexual preference. We propose that the sexual preference of adult domestic-strain-tutored female canaries for domestic songs is the consequence of learning and categorisation processes. The discrepancy between the results of the domestic-strain-tutored females and those of the wild-strain-tutored females suggests that female canaries have a predisposition to learn songs of their own strain rather than songs of an alien strain. In the third experiment nest-building and egg-laying activities appeared to be unaffected by early tutoring conditions: there was no significant differential effect of the different tutoring and exposure conditions on nest-building and egg-laying scores. Mate attraction and stimulation of females’ reproductive activity appear to be two separate functions of male song, which may have been shaped by different evolutionary constraints. Received: 24 July 1999 / Accepted after revision: 22 February 2000     

Possible olfaction-based mechanisms in human kin recognition and inbreeding avoidance

Three studies explored kin recognition through olfaction. In Study I, adults (N=22) were tested for ability to identify the odors of themselves; their mother; their father; a sister; a brother; a familiar, unrelated individual; and a stranger. Acquaintances were identified as accurately as biological kin, implicating an association mechanism. However, biological kin were often confused, implicating phenotypic matching. Same-sex kin were confused more than opposite-sex kin, but mainly when same-sex kin had odors of similar intensity. Study II implicated phenotypic matching. Mothers (N=18) could identify their biological children but not their stepchildren. The preadolescent children (N=37) identified their full siblings but not half-siblings or stepsiblings. Thus, olfactory cues may help mediate favoritism of blood relatives. In Study III, mutual olfactory aversion occurred only in the father-daughter and brother-sister nuclear family relationships. Recognition occurred between opposite-sex siblings but not same-sex siblings. Thus, olfaction may help mediate the development of incest avoidance during childhood (the Westermarck effect).     

The Affect System: Architecture and Operating Characteristics

The affect system refers to the functional components involved in appetitive and aversive information processing. We review evidence suggesting that affect is not a unitary faculty but rather is composed of a number of distinct processes. Physical limitations constrain behavioral expressions and incline behavioral predispositions toward a bipolar (good-bad, approach-withdraw) organization, but this organization appears to be the consequence of multiple operations, including the activation of positivity (appetition) and the activation of negativity (aversion), at earlier affective processing stages. The partial segregation of positive and negative affective processing afforded evolution the opportunity to sculpt distinctive activation functions for these affective components and allows their coactivation. Coactivation, in turn, cultivates the exploration of novel environments and the pursuit of seemingly hospitable events while fostering vigilance for and rapid retreats from hostile developments.     

Gender differences in optimism,loss aversion and attitudes towards risk

Systematic differences in the attitudes of men and women towards risk is well established. In this paper, we investigate the joint role of two prominent psychological characteristics in explaining this difference. Our starting point is that risk assessments can be thought of, in general terms, to combine beliefs about the probability of negative outcomes occurring with a subjective valuation of how painful that negative outcome would be. Exploiting large-scale panel data from the United Kingdom, we find that gender differences in financial optimism and financial loss aversion – the stronger psychological response to monetary losses than monetary gains – explain a substantial proportion of the parallel gender difference in willingness to take risks. This result prevails even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits, suggesting that the prominent psychological characteristics capture different aspects of behaviour than the Big Five.