Guiding the Talent and Career Development of the Gifted Individual

The authors highlight challenges that gifted individuals may encounter in their career development and propose a theory‐informed career counseling framework to help guide them through the process. Special consideration is given to issues that may be salient for gifted individuals in career counseling sessions. Uncontrollable factors that might influence their career decision making, including socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexual orientation, are also addressed.     

‘Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is!’: Effects of Streaks on Confidence and Betting in a Binary Choice Task

Human choice under uncertainty is influenced by erroneous beliefs about randomness. In simple binary choice tasks, such as red/black predictions in roulette, long outcome runs (e.g. red, red, red) typically increase the tendency to predict the other outcome (i.e. black), an effect labeled the “gambler's fallacy.” In these settings, participants may also attend to streaks in their predictive performance. Winning and losing streaks are thought to affect decision confidence, although prior work indicates conflicting directions. Over three laboratory experiments involving red/black predictions in a sequential roulette task, we sought to identify the effects of outcome runs and winning/losing streaks upon color predictions, decision confidence and betting behavior. Experiments 1 (n = 40) and 3 (n = 40) obtained trial‐by‐trial confidence ratings, with a win/no win payoff and a no loss/loss payoff, respectively. Experiment 2 (n = 39) obtained a trial‐by‐trial bet amount on an equivalent scale. In each experiment, the gambler's fallacy was observed on choice behavior after color runs and, in experiment 2, on betting behavior after color runs. Feedback streaks exerted no reliable influence on confidence ratings, in either payoff condition. Betting behavior, on the other hand, increased as a function of losing streaks. The increase in betting on losing streaks is interpreted as a manifestation of loss chasing; these data help clarify the psychological mechanisms underlying loss chasing and caution against the use of betting measures (“post‐decision wagering”) as a straightforward index of decision confidence. © 2014 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Affect in Ethical Decision Making: Mood Matters

Ethical decision-making research has centered on Rest’s (1986) framework that represents a rational, nonaffective model for ethical decision making. However, research in human cognition suggesting a “dual-processing” framework, composed of both rational and affective components, has been relatively ignored in the ethical decision-making literature. Examining dual-processing literature, it seems affect might be an important factor in decision making when a person’s mood is congruent with the task or situational context frame. Given that ethical decisions are serious and complex tasks, it is proposed here that inducing a negative affective state might produce mood congruence, reinforce the salience of emotion for ethical decision makers, and lead to differences in decision processing. Evidence is presented documenting differences in the decisions made by ethical decision makers in a negative affective state as compared to those in either a positive or neutral affective state.     

The stability of aspect-based career preferences and of the recommended list of occupations derived from them

Career-related preferences (e.g., team work, independence, length of training, income), which are an elaboration and extension of vocational interests, are one of the cornerstones that guide individuals to promising occupations recommended for further exploration. These preferences are informative and can serve individuals and their career counselors only if they are reliable and stable. Study 1 tested the two-week reliability of 31 career-related preferences of 213 freshman students and the two-year stability of the preferences of 132 of these students. Both the within-aspect preferred levels (e.g., only indoors most preferred, but mostly indoors also acceptable) and the importance of the aspects were elicited. The median within-participant two-week reliability was .85 for preferred levels and .64 for aspect importance; the median two-year stabilities were .75 and .51, respectively. In Study 2, the preferences elicited in Study 1 were used to derive a list of recommended occupations compatible with each participant's preferences at Time 1, Time 2 (2 weeks later), and Time 3 (2 years later), using a compensatory-model-based fit index. The percentage of identical occupations in the lists of the top ten recommended occupations was quite high — 62% for Time 1 and Time 2, and 54% for Time 1 and Time 3. The theoretical and practical implications of the reliability and stability of recommendations based on aspect-based career preferences are discussed.     

Development and Initial Validation of a Scale Measuring the Beliefs of Educators Regarding Response to Intervention

This article presents information on the development and initial validation of the 16-item Response to Intervention (RTI) Beliefs Scale. The scale is designed to measure the extent to which educators working in schools hold beliefs consistent with the tenets of RTI. The authors administered the instrument to 2,430 educators in 62 elementary schools in the fall of 2007 and 2,443 educators in 68 elementary schools in the spring of 2008. Exploratory, single-level confirmatory, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis procedures were used to examine construct validity. Results supported a correlated 3-factor model (Academic Abilities and Performance of Students with Disabilities, Data-Based Decision Making, and Functions of Core and Supplemental Instruction) at both the school and educator levels of analysis. Furthermore, the factor scores derived from the model demonstrated significant, positive relations to RTI implementation. Reliability estimates for two of the three factor scores exceeded.70. Implications for research on educator beliefs and implementation of RTI as well as implications for school psychologists supporting RTI implementation are discussed.     

The interference effect of men's handling of muscular action figures on a lexical decision task

It has been shown in previous work [Action figures and men. Sex Roles 53, 877–885] that male participants who handled extremely muscular action figures had lower body esteem than those who did not handle action figures or a Ken doll. However, the internal mechanisms that dictated this effect are unclear. Therefore, the current study extended this previous work by having male participants handle action figures of varying muscularity and completing a lexical decision task with target words that consisted of both positive and negative body words and feeling words in order to determine if males would be primed to think negatively about their bodies and self or if positive thoughts about their bodies and self would be interfered with. The results show that those participants who handled the extremely muscular action figures responded significantly more slowly to feeling positive words (e.g., content, confident) and marginally more slowly to body positive words (e.g., muscle, bicep) than those who did not handle any action figures. Overall, this suggests that the interference of positive words, not the priming of negative words, is the internal mechanism that produces the decreased body image satisfaction after exposure to muscular stimuli. Implications and future research are discussed.     

Episodic chasing in pathological gamblers using the Iowa gambling task

"Chasing ones losses" is a key symptom among pathological gamblers (PGs). This study focuses on quantitative differences in episodic chasing (i.e., sequences of disadvantageous decisions within a single gambling session) between PGs and non-pathological gamblers (NPGs). We compared 61 PGs and 39 NPGs on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Zuckerman Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS). The PGs showed significantly more chasing and had significantly poorer decision-making strategies than NPGs, particularly among males (F = 4.52, p < 0.05). Random players were significantly less sensation seeking than advantageous and disadvantageous (i.e., chasing) players, but there was no interaction with group or gender. The results suggest that quantifiable within-session gambling behavior holds important implications for detecting underlying vulnerabilities to gambling pathology.