ADVANCING BACKWARDS

The proposal of Friman, Hayes, and Wilson (1998) that the concept of emotion be incorporated into behavior analysis is questioned. Their proposal is undermined by the problem of the verification of private events by others. A focus on private events, as exemplified by the proposal of Friman et al., can lead to a reversion to notions of agency and the autonomous individual. Also, the anchoring of hypothetical constructs to the behavioral data language is ill advised.     

The Influence of Holland's Vocational Interests on Work-Family Conflict: An Exploratory Analysis

Drawing on a sample of 438 working professionals from various organizations across the central United States, the authors investigated the relationship between Holland's (1959, 1997) RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) model and employee perceptions of work-family conflict. Results revealed that the RIASEC model contributed unique variance in predicting work-family conflict beyond demographic characteristics and the Big Five personality constructs. The RIASEC interests were found to be associated with different dimensions of work-family conflict. These results signal that vocational interests may influence not only work-related attitudes and behaviors (e.g., job satisfaction, performance), but also one's ability to balance work and family demands.     

Why Don't People Change? What Stops Them from Changing? An Integrative Commentary on the Special Issue on Resistance

This commentary discusses the four papers from the vantage point of a cognitive-developmental view. Psychotherapeutic change involving changes in core cognitive structures is seen as threatening an individual's personal sense of identity as well as security and safety needs. Core cognitive constructs are laid down early via the principle of covariation of events and form the basis of our tacit knowledge base. Subsequent changes in this tacit knowledge is difficult because the core cognitive constructs act like a mental filter to screen in confirming data and screen out disconfirming data. Ambiguous stimuli tend to be interpreted on the basis of preexisting cognitive constructs, even when the match between event and interpretation is not ideal. Several suggestions are given for increasing the probability of changes occurring in core cognitive constructs.     

Positive affect facilitates task switching in the dimensional change card sort task: Implications for the shifting aspect of executive function

Using the modified Dimensional Change Card Sort task, we examined the influence of positive affect on task switching by inspecting various markers for the costs, including restart cost, switch cost and mixing cost. Given that the executive-control processes that underlie switching performance—i.e., inhibition or shifting—are distinct from the component processes that underlie non-switching performance—i.e., stimulus evaluation, resource allocation or response execution—we hypothesised that if positive affect facilitates task switching via executive-control processes, rather than via component processes, positive affect would reduce both switch and restart costs, but not mixing cost, because both switch and restart costs rely on executive processes, while mixing cost imposes only minimal demands on executive processes. We found beneficial effects of positive affect on both restart and switch costs, but not on mixing costs. These results suggest that positive affect improves switching abilities via executive processes rather than via component processes.     

Marketing of Professional Counselors: A Q‐Sort Study of Best Practices

This quantitative Q‐sort research was designed to evaluate representations of counselor qualifications and to determine which configurations account for the variance in consumer preference and selection. The sample consisted of 161 graduate and undergraduate students in a regional university in Texas. An iterative inverse factor analysis produced 3 distinct factors that accounted for 65.85% of the variance in the data, explaining a majority of the differences in how consumers perceive counselor credentials.     

Attention as a cueing function during kindergarten children's dimensional change task performance

The purpose of this experiment is to test whether shift flexibility in kindergarten children is a joint function of rule‐usage and inhibition of attention. Sixty‐six children were given either a distraction or facilitation condition in a computerized version of the dimensional change card sort task. In the distraction condition, the background of the post‐shift matching stimulus was inconsistent with the relevant matching dimension. In the facilitation condition, the background of the post‐shift matching stimulus was consistent with the relevant matching dimension. Results revealed that children made few errors in the standard version of the shift task, thereby supporting Cognitive complexity and control theory's contention that 5‐year‐old children shift easily across dimensions due to their use of higher‐order setting rules to solve contradictions. The proportion of errors increased however in the distraction condition suggesting that attention to the background interfered with children's ability to shift between dimensions. Therefore, these data provide evidence that refocusing attention to dimensions along with rule‐use processes affect shift flexibility and argue for the inclusion of both factors into theoretical accounts of shift performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Empowerment Theory: Clarifying the Nature of Higher-Order Multidimensional Constructs

Development of empowerment theory has focused on defining the construct at different levels of analysis, presenting new frameworks or dimensions, and explaining relationships between empowerment-related processes and outcomes. Less studied, and less conceptually developed, is the nature of empowerment as a higher-order multidimensional construct. One critical issue is whether empowerment is conceptualized as a superordinate construct (i.e., empowerment is manifested by its dimensions), an aggregate construct (i.e., empowerment is formed by its dimensions), or rather as a set of distinct constructs. To date, researchers have presented superordinate models without careful consideration of the relationships between dimensions and the higher-order construct of empowerment. Empirical studies can yield very different results, however, depending on the conceptualization of a construct. This paper represents the first attempt to address this issue systematically in empowerment theory. It is argued that superordinate models of empowerment are misspecified and research that tests alternative models at different levels of analysis is needed to advance theory, research, and practice in this area. Recommendations for future work are discussed.     

Sorting Out Support for Democracy: A Q‐Method Study

Support for democracy is crucial to democratic stability. Yet the nature and range of democratic belief systems, and whether these belief systems are idiosyncratic to specific individuals and polities or are more general, remain largely unknown. Such unknowns complicate an already daunting measurement task. Extant survey‐based measures are fraught with validity problems and say little about the democratic beliefs individuals most strongly hold or reject. To address these problems, this study blends focus groups, interviews, and Q‐sort methodology to examine patterns of subjective, behavioral renderings of democratic support profiles. It finds seven shared profiles of beliefs concerning democracy, alternative regimes, and political and civil freedoms across Chile and Argentina. Their resemblance to democratic belief systems found with other methods bolsters their validity and generalizability. The analyses reveal the relative weight of each orientation within each belief profile and their intensity across profiles. In so doing, they identify which items are crucial for within‐ and across‐case comparisons. Altogether, these insights should inform survey‐based approaches to detecting and describing the democratic support profiles latent in the polity.     

Book reviews

This paper begins with a critical evaluation of British counselling psychology's aspirations for a scientific basis and considers some of the consequences in terms of theoretical assumptions and research practice. Through identifying certain empirical, theoretical and ideological problems inherent in the dominant tradition of quantifying inferred cognitive constructs (using the example of trainee self-talk), an alternative framework of discursive psychology is simultaneously introduced. the argument is made for a discursive study of storied meanings by trainee counselling psychologists about themselves and their work. This would potentially address two pivotal research areas. First, it affords both a personal and yet socially embedded framework for an increased understanding and more sensitive evaluation of the training process (with its acquisition of skills, knowledge, experience, competencies, etc.). Second, it offers an alternative approach to the problematic area of understanding unique and generic interactions between practitioners and their preferred psychological model(s) of therapy, thus challenging the theoretical and research cul-de-sac of competing modernist visions of purism, eclecticism and integration. Extending from these observations two research possibilities are suggested.