The relationship between vocational interest differentiation and career undecidedness

Fifty-four female and thirty male students over 20 years old were administered the Career Decision Scale and the six occupational scales of the Vocational Preference Inventory in order to test the hypothesis that indecision is negatively related to occupational interest differentiation in an adult population. Interest differentiation did not appear to be a reliable indicator of vocational undecidedness.     

A robust attribution error in the personality domain

The error of inferring dispositional causes for constrained behavior was investigated in the domain of personality. Subjects were randomly assigned to write essays presenting themselves as strongly introverted or extraverted. Within groups, subjects exchanged essays and estimated the actual (self-rated) introversion/extraversion of the writer. The procedure minimized the likelihood of certain factors conducive to correspondent inference, e.g., the low salience of constraint or nonrepresentative sample of dispositions among essay writers. The experiment included an instructional set variable which involved accentuating the situational constraint or reinforcing the subjects' inclination to individuate the writer. In all conditions, a significant pattern of correspondent inference occurred, with attributions aligned to the directionality of the essays. The results, consistent with findings from attitude attribution research, suggest that the direction of the essay provides an initial hypothesis of correspondent inference. Subjects may then use their impression of the essay's extremity as a basis upon which to adjust their attribution in accord with the constraint of the position assignment.     

The Missouri Children's Picture Series: Correlates of the aggression scale in normal fourth-grade males

Missouri Children's Picture Series (MCPS) Aggression scale scores and four more traditional measures of aggression were intercorrelated for 40 normal fourthgrade boys. Results indicated that the MCPS Aggression scale must be viewed as a highly specific instrument which has little if any usefulness in a public school setting. In addition, the failure of the five aggression measures to be interrelated significantly suggests that aggression may be a highly situational response, with children varying in the modality through which they are able to express aggressive feelings and motives.     

Equity,equality, and the protestant ethic: Allocating rewards following fair and unfair competition

Female undergraduates scoring high and low on the Mirels-Garrett Protestant Ethic (PE) Scale divided a fixed reward between themselves and a co-worker following competition on a clerical task. Half the subjects were told that they had either won or lost in fair competition. The remaining subjects were told they had either won or lost because of an error that gave a favorable advantage to one of the performers. When the competition was fair, high PEs distributed the rewards available according to an equity norm, keeping more than half when they won and less than half when they lost. When the competition was unfair, high PEs attempted to reestablish fairness by compensating the performer with the unfair disadvantage. However, low PEs kept approximately half the reward regardless of fairness and regardless of whether they won or lost.     

Construction and validation of a physician career development inventory

The development and psychometric characteristics of the Medical Career Development Inventory (MCDI) are described. The MCDI represents the initial construction of a career maturity measure for a homogeneous population of adults who encounter a common set of vocational development tasks. The inventory is intended to measure both degree of vocational development and readiness to cope with the developmental tasks encountered in a physician's career. The MCDI includes 35 items that address coping behaviors germane to dealing with the vocational tasks constituting the career development continuum of physicians. Initial evaluation of the MCDI's psychometric properties with a sample of 160 student-physicians supported the content validity of the items, construct validity of the scales, and criterion validity of the inventory.     

Self-attention,concept activation,and the causal self

Two experiments examined the relationship between the accessibility of selfreferent information and attributions of causal responsibility to the self. The first study introduced a priming technique, in which subjects used either first-person or third-person terms in a story construction task, to directly access self-referent or other-referent thought. It was found that self-attributions for hypothetical outcomes were greater for those subjects whose earlier stories were focused on the self. The second study, rather than activate self-referent cognition in a general fashion, sought to explicitly prime the notion of a “causal self.” In addition to self-referent or other-referent words, subjects were also given words that evoked notions of either causality or noncausality to be incorporated into their stories. Contingent activation of both “self” and “causal” notions subsequently resulted in greater self-attributions than any other experimental condition. Recall and recognition data from Experiment 2 were generally consistent with the contention that a specific and differentiated component of the self-schema had been accessed. The results of both studies, as well as the novel “self-priming” technique, are discussed in terms of self-awareness theory.