Vocational behavior and career development, 1980: A review

Papers were reviewed in the sections where their major findings seemed to have the most important implications. Since it typically was not possible to do justice to individual studies in a few lines of summary, readers are referred to the specific articles of their interest for further information regarding other findings.As has been the case in the past several years, the number of studies related to vocational behavior and career development appears to be expanding, along with perceptions of what is relevant to the field. As greater emphasis is placed on the working life of individuals after initial occupational choices are made, researchers on vocational behavior and career development will increasingly find it necessary to synthesize research findings from the areas of industrial/organizational psychology, organizational sociology, and organizational behavior and theory. This factor may suggest greater collaboration among researchers across these fields in the future. In any event, the broadening base of relevant research, while challenging, also is an exciting development with rich potential for increased knowledge of vocational behavior.As Walsh mentioned in his review of 1978 literature, there is a vital need for more work of a longitudinal nature. We see some increase this year, but we are too frequently forced to draw conclusions regarding long-term vocational development from studies which are mainly crosssectional and correlational in nature.Among the research directions of note this year is the increasing emphasis on information processing/decision-making frameworks as a means of studying the vocation development process. Other trends were the growing concern with the relationship between work and nonwork, interest in recruitment processes, and the emphasis on situational as well as individual factors in predicting vocational behavior.     

Individual and organizational correlates of promotion refusal

Individual and organizational correlates of employees who refuse seniority-based promotions in union lines of progression are examined. The sample consisted of 313 production employees of a large manufacturing complex. Correlational and discriminant analyses revealed that age, being female, and number of employees in the department related positively to promotion refusal, while years of education and pay showed a negative relationship. Of these variables, years of education was the strongest predictor. Potential explanations for the results relate to stress avoidance, perceived inabilities, and equity theory. Areas for future research are suggested.     

Sensitivity of 5- and 7-month-old infants to pictorial depth information

An Ames (1951, Psychological Monographs, 65(1, Whole No. 324)) static trapezoidal window, under monocular view, was used to test young infants' responsiveness to pictorial depth. When adults view this display monocularly with the smaller side of the window rotated toward them, they report that the orientation of the display becomes ambiguous: When the head is moved, the window may appear to be in the fronto-parallel plane or either side may appear closer. The 7-month-olds we tested appeared to experience a similar ambiguity; they reached to the near side of the rotated trapezoidal window with significantly less consistency or directedness than infants in a control group tested with a rotated object that lacked pictorial depth information. When 5-month-olds were tested, however, they reached with equal consistency to the closer side of the trapezoidal window and of the control display, apparently uninfluenced by the pictorial depth information available in the trapezoidal window. Thus, sensitivity to the pictorial information for depth that is present in the trapezoidal window appears to develop after the age of 22 weeks.     

Attention to important versus trivial tasks and salience of fatigue-related symptoms for coronary prone individuals

The present study tested the hypothesis that individuals with the Type A coronary prone behavior pattern focus their attention more on important tasks, and less on trivial tasks than do Type B's. The study used a paradigm in which some subjects worked on math problems (important task) and rated intervening mood items (trivial task), whereas others rated mood items they were to memorize (important task) and worked on intervening math problems (trivial task). All subjects were later tested on recall of mood items. Results indicated that Type A's performed better on math problems and recalled more fatigue-related mood items when the task was important than when it was trivial; for Type B subjects, there was no difference in the number of math problems solved correctly or number of mood items recalled between important and trivial task conditions. Moreover, Type A's reported greater fatigue when mood recall was the important task than when math was the important task, whereas fatigue ratings of Type B's did not differ across these conditions. The findings suggest that Type A's suppress their attention to fatigue-related symptoms only when symptoms are not the objects of focus.     

The lexicon and sentence generation in aphasia

The experiment tested a prediction, derived from the lexicalist model of grammar (J. Bresnan 1978, in M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. A. Miller (Eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 1–59), that difficulty in accessing a verb from the lexicon should impair the generation of the associated to-complement clause while not significantly affecting the generation of word-independent constructions such as questions. Four aphasic subjects with word-finding difficulties but relatively high BDAE ratings on grammatical ability were examined. A modified story completion paradigm was used to elicit the favored constructions. Consistent with the hypothesis, all subjects showed greater difficulty in generating to-complements.     

Syntactic influences on stuttering in young child stutterers

This study examined the location and rate of stuttering in the spontaneous speech of nine young stutterers (4.0–6.6 yr) in relation to certain aspects of syntax. It was designed to answer the following questions: Is there more stuttering at clause onset (boundary) than at other points in the clause? Does the type of clause influence rate of stuttering? Is there more stuttering on complex than on simple sentences? The syntactic analysis defined 10 clause types (seven pertaining to complex sentences and three pertaining to simple sentences); clause boundaries (taking into account “filler” words occuring in such positions); and hierarchical constituent structure within sentences. Stuttering was found with significantly greater frequency at clause boundaries than at internal (nonboundary) positions of clauses. This was apparent for nine of the 10 clause types, the exception being complement clauses. The word “and” at the beginning of simple and complex sentences provoked a high rate of stuttering. The hierarchical structure within the clause did not influence the location of stuttering, and sentence complexity was not a factor in the rate of stuttering.