The effects of didactic classroom instruction versus field exposure on career maturity

This study tested two types of career training (field exposure and didactic classroom) to determine which is more effective in bringing about the development of career maturity. Forty-six first-year Upward Bound students were assigned to either a field exposure or a didactic group by the use of a stratified random assignment technique. A pretest/post-test design was utilized with the Career Maturity Inventory as the data-collecting instrument. The data were analyzed by analysis of covariance. The results of the study indicate that field exposure career training is an effective method to increase career maturity.     

Human reasoning: Some possible effects of availability

This paper discusses some possible ways in which the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973) may mediate subjects' responses to experimental ‘reasoning’ tasks. A brief review of some effects of availability in other areas is given and then the application of availability to reasoning data is considered with respect to problems employing both ‘thematic’ and ‘abstract’ content.In the case of thematic content, it is argued, with reference to a variety of studies, that to produce a differential effect (to abstract content), the content must provide available cues, resulting from the subjects' experience. Differential effects of content are thus interpreted as differential effects of availability. When abstract content is used, there are cues available from the experimental situation itself, and it is shown that several known error tendencies readily lend themselves to an explanation in terms of availability.In the final section, it is pointed out that a focus on available cues, rather than logical structure, provides a psychological, rather than logical, approach to human reasoning. It is argued that a bias may be psychologically, although not logically, optimal in that it may often produce correct responses in ‘real life’. Accordingly, the possible real life utility of availability is considered, and several ways in which the bias may lead to usually correct decisions are discussed. Given this, it is argued that availability is an effective heuristic and that observed biases on a range of experimental tasks may thus be interpreted as resulting from the application of a behavior that is optimal within the limits of human cognition. However, it is concluded that limitations in both deterministic and probabilistic problem solving may lead to a consistent, but erroneous, view of the world.     

Backward conditioning as an extinction procedure

In two conditioned suppression experiments, rats received Pavlovian forward defense conditioning in which tonal conditioned stimuli (CSs) terminated with the onset of scrambled grid shock unconditioned stimuli (USs). After this experience, the rats then received a Pavlovian backward conditioning procedure in which the same USs now terminated with the onset of the same CSs. Although the two experiments differed greatly in terms of CS and US parameters, number of forward and backward pairings, and in terms of the general techniques used to establish and measure the Pavlovian conditioned response (CR), the results of both experiments agreed in showing that backward conditioning can indeed weaken a CR based on forward pairings. The results also show that, under some conditions, the backward procedure can be at least as effective in weakening an established CR as the traditional CS-alone extinction procedure; but, under other conditions, the backward procedure is less effective and leads to more spontaneous recovery than the CS-alone procedure.     

Young children's free responses to anomalous commands

Twelve children, 21–34 months old, six in R. Brown's Stage I and six in Stages II and III, responded to commands varying in length, grammaticality, and meaning. All of the children responded significantly less often when the commands were situationally anomalous and/or ungrammatical. Results failed to replicate the results of E. Shipley, E. Smith, and L. Gleitman (Language, 1969, 44, 332–342) and J. Wetstone and B. Friedlander (Child Development, 1973, 44, 743–750). The results also suggest that young children rely heavily upon situational cues in their earliest comprehension of adult speech, and this supports arguments made by J. Strohner and K. Nelson (Child Development, 45, 567–576) and R. Chapman and J. Miller (Journal of Speech and Hearing, 1975, 18, 355–371). Since subjects rely upon nonlinguistic cues to respond appropriately, syntactic competence cannot be inferred from apparent comprehension.     

Stroop interference in the left and right visual fields

The Stroop Color-Word test was employed to study the amount of interference in naming colors when stimuli were presented in either visual field. It was hypothesized that more Stroop interference would occur in the dominant hemisphere. The subjects were 24 right-handed college students, between 18 and 25 years old. There were three conditions in each visual field: Interference, Reading, and Naming. Each slide was presented for 150 msec preceded by a fixation dot. Subjects were asked to verbally report as fast and as accurately as they could either the color words or the color names, depending upon the conditions. Reaction times and error rates were analyzed. As expected, significantly higher error rates were obtained when color words were presented in the right visual field under the Stroop interference condition. Under this same condition, reaction time analysis yielded no significant differences between hemispheres.     

Androgyny and traditional versus nontraditional major choice among college freshmen

The present study investigated the relationship of psychological androgyny to career choice among college freshmen. Women in home economics and engineering and men in engineering (N = 231) completed the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and rating scales of satisfaction with and certainty of college major and intended occupation. As a group, women in engineering scored in a more androgynous direction than did either men in engineering or women in home economics. Among sex-typed subjects, more women in engineering scored in a masculine sex-typed category than did women in home economics. Men and women in engineering did not differ on satisfaction and certainty ratings of major or career; however, feminine-typed women were significantly less satisfied with and tended to be less certain of their choice of major than other women in engineering.     

Traits,processes, and the purpose of templates

The template method proposed by D. J. Bem and D. C. Funder 1978, Psychological Review, 85, 485–501) can have two separate purposes. First, template-behavior pairs can be used as a type of explanation in which situational influences are incorporated within a trait theory. Second, template matching can be used as a method for evaluating process theories. Recent discussion (D. J. Bem, 1983; Psychological Review, 90, 390–393; D. C. Funder, 1983; Psychological Review, 90, 283–289; W. Mischel & P. K. Peake, 1982, Psychological Review, 89, 730–755) confuses these two purposes. If used as a type of explanation, then templates can be criticized on the grounds of blunt empiricism; but if templates are used as a method for evaluating process theories, then process theorists should welcome this new technique.