Job-seeking behavior: A segment of vocational development

This paper reports two companion studies which establish that there is a significant relationship between an individual's personality characteristics and his pattern of job-seeking behavior. Individuals who are tough-minded, independent and nonneurotic had specified job goals and self-actualized behavior. They were highly successful in obtaining jobs. Individuals who were sensitive, dependent and neurotic had vague goals and passive behavior. They failed to get jobs. Individuals who exhibited a mixture of the cited characteristics and behavior were also exploring career options. They had a modicum of success in obtaining jobs. Job-seeking behavior as a process of vocational development is discussed.     

Imitation as a function of response commonality,serial order,and vicarious punishment

The effects of response commonality, serial order of modeled responses, and vicarious punishment on young boys' recall and acceptance of 20 commodity prefereces of an adult were examined in a 2 (common dimension vs no-common dimension) × 2 (vicarious punishment vs no-vicarious consequences) × 2 (recall or acceptance test) × 5 (response-block) factorial experiment. As predicted, the presence of a common dimension resulted in improved recall of the modeled responses, vicarious punishment was more effective under common dimension than no-common dimension conditions, and a serial order effect for recall of the modeled responses was obtained. The overall pattern of results is discussed in terms of the conceptualization that imitation requires both that the observer (1) has acquired and retained the model's responses and (2) has been placed in circumstances which favor activating this learning into overt performance.     

Adolescent correlates of occupational stability and change

Using Super's Career Pattern Study data, this study investigated the high-school age correlates of occupational stability and change among 148 men between the ages of 25 to 35. Only high-school grades were positively, though weakly, associated with both occupational stability and the degree of vocational progress that resulted from changing fields. In contrast to previous, shorter-term prediction studies, the lack of consistent relationships between high-school age correlates and adult occupational stability and change was probably due to the overriding effects of intervening events and experiences occurring between the high-school years and adulthood.     

Relationships between college performance and success as an Army officer

This study investigated the relationships between both academic and nonacademic indices of college success and four indices of occupational success of Army officers. Subjects were 103 U.S. Military Academy graduates from the Class of 1962. Criteria were gathered 6 and 10 years after graduation, and multiple regression results indicated that three of the four criteria were significantly predicted. Results also showed that a leadership rating received the most weight in the equations, and that academic grades can contribute significantly to the prediction of officer success. Grades in physical education and tactics received nonsignificant weights in all but one case.     

Belief in a just world and trust

Three studies examined the relationship between belief in a just world and level of trust. Results showed that subjects with a high level of belief in a just world were (a) less suspicious with regard to deception in a social-psychological experiment, (b) less suspicious with regard to the promise of a free gift, and (c) less suspicious with regard to the government's position on several public issues. The same studies also examined the relationships among belief in internal-external control, authoritarianism, and level of trust. In some but not all cases, belief in internal control and high level of authoritarianism were related to more trusting attitudes. It was suggested that the relationship between internality (as measured by the I-E Scale) and trust was mediated by the construct of belief in a just world.     

Development of depth perception mediated by motion parallax in unidimensional projections of rotation in depth.

Motion parallax is a composite of five transformations demonstrated to be effective in adult judgments of rotation direction in polar motion projections of a horizontal row of dots rotating in depth. The effectiveness of these transformations as a function of age was tested by presenting six such motion projections to first graders (age = 6 years), seventh graders (age = 13 years), and college students (age = 19 years). Identical age functions were obtained for judged rotation direction from the four motion projections representing (1) Velocity, corresponding to the traditional definition of motion parallax as differential velocity, (2) Velocity plus differences between ratios of instantaneous displacement to instantaneous acceleration for dots on the near and far sides of the rotation axis ($\text{D}\text{A}$ Difference), (3) Velocity, $\text{D}\text{A}$ Difference, and a gradient across the row of $\text{D}\text{A}$ ratios, and (4) all transformations. First graders, unable to use horizontal transformations, performed at chance on these four projections, while older students made correct judgments. Order, separated from Velocity for the first time, resulted in chance performance at all ages, while Direction, also separated from Velocity for the first time, resulted in veridical judgments in only 4 of 24 college students.     

Alleviating forgetting of active shock-avoidance by apparently unrelated food presentations

A series of four experiments investigated why forgetting of an active shock-avoidance response was reduced when an apparently unrelated appetitive experience occurred both prior to avoidance training and during the retention interval between training and testing. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated the reliability of the phenomenon and found that a sufficient condition for the effect was the presentation of food from a pellet dispenser (not an operant response per se). Experiment 3 demonstrated that the effect was not the result of enhanced activity. Experiment 4 showed that forgetting was still reduced when the appetitive experience occurred only prior to active avoidance or only during the retention interval. The results are discussed in regard to the reinstatement of the reinforcer representation.