On Making and Keeping Promises

Do the conditions under which promises are made determine whether they ought to be kept? Philosophers have placed a number of conditions on promising which, they hold, must be met in order to make promise-keeping obligatory. In so doing, they have distinguished valid promises from invalid promises and justified promises from promises that are not justified. Considering such conditions, one by one, we argue that they are mistaken. In the first place, the conditions they lay down are not necessary for either valid or justified promise-making. In the second place, promises need not meet such conditions in order to create moral obligations. In general, such analyses of promising fail because they suffer from a confusion between promise-making and promise-keeping. Philosophers have wrongly supposed that obligations to keep promises are dependent upon, or derivable from, the quality of the promises themselves, at the time they are made, instead of focusing on conditions that must be satisfied at the time when promises are supposed to be kept. It is not the quality of a promise that determines an obligation to keep it but the rightness or wrongness of performing the promised act.     

Computerized Career Information and Guidance Systems: Caveat Emptor

Computerized career information and guidance systems, although now commonplace, have received little psychometric scrutiny. The authors argue for examining these systems in the same way in which paper and pencil instruments are assessed. Consideration is also given to issues related to programming, technical-service problems, and staffing.     

Creating a Career Hotline for Rural Residents

The authors describe a career information hotline for rural and farm residents affected by the farm crisis as one way a university career center and extension division can make their resources more generally available to residents. The rural crisis is real, but a crisis brings opportunities. There are opportunities to provide needed services and help ease the personal cost for families and reduce the declining quality of life in rural communities. (Heffernan & Heffernan, 1985, p. 17)     

Neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion and mouth opening: Methodological aspects and evidence of early individual differences

The present work examines imitation of mouth opening and tongue protrusion in 32 full-term infants at three different occasions: When the infants are two to three days, three weeks, and three months old. The analysis focuses (1) on individual differences in imitative behaviour and (2) on how to operationalize the infants' responses. The overall group analysis revealed that imitation of tongue protrusion was statistically significant for both two- to three-day-old and three-week-old infants but not when the children had become three months old. No statistically significant effect was observed for imitation of mouth opening. Two different imitation indexes were constructed in order to assess individual differences in early imitative behaviour. Results show that short-term stability in imitative tendencies exists between the first and second observation. The results further reveal that methodological factors must be seriously considered when studying neonatal imitation: the overall imitation found for tongue protrusion is demonstrated to be dependent on how the infants' responses are coded.     

Assessment Strategies for Students With Disabilities

Remedial strategies for children and adolescents with disabilities should have their roots in assessment. In this article the authors discuss improvements in assessment approaches, including new standards for psychological testing, updated and renormed cognitive assessments, and vocational assessments with increased ecological validity. The combined efforts of school psychologists, rehabilitation counselors, vocational evaluators, psychologists, and school counselors have yielded progress in the technical qualities of assessment and utilization. Through comprehensive and functional assessment, students with disabilities should find the transition from school to work with greater success.     

Counseling Native Americans

This article addresses the issues facing White counselors in providing services to Native Americans, whose values differ significantly from the dominant culture's. Native Americans have been consistently threatened with cultural assimilation. Previously published recommendations to counselors are reviewed and the relevance and possible uses of traditional Native American healing practices are discussed. One such practice, the vision quest, is described in detail. Counselors need to learn culturally relevant metaphors in order to promote healing and change and, in effect, must themselves undergo an acculturation process.     

New Careers Model Revisited: The Importance of Mentoring

The authors report a study that suggests the career paths of workers on short-term federal projects may be enhanced as a result of developing a relationship with a mentor through such projects.     

PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK EFFECTS IN TRAINING: THE ROLE OF PERCEIVED CONTROLLABILITY

A field experiment with 86 employees tested whether performance feedback that attributes past performance to factors within trainees' control would result in heightened software efficacy, goal commitment, positive mood, and learning, compared to feedback that attributes past performance to factors outside trainees' control. In addition, we assessed whether the use of feedback would produce a Galatea effect, or gain in trainees' performance that is the result of a boost in their self-efficacy. The results show that trainees who received feedback that attributed their performance to factors within their control had higher software efficacy. Software efficacy was positively related to learning (both declarative knowledge and compilation). Contrary to our expectations, feedback did not influence goal commitment or positive mood. Further, a statistically significant Galatea effect was not obtained; however, feedback that attributes performance to factors outside trainees' control was related to a decrease in software efficacy.