Tali Kleiman

Dysfunctional Thinking and Difficulties in Career Decision Making.

The present study examined the relationships between two measures of career readiness and difficulties—the Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI) and the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ)—as well as the relations between these measures and the individual’s degree of decidedness regarding his or her career plans. A total of 192 university students enrolled in a career-planning class filled out both questionnaires. As hypothesized, the two measures overlapped significantly. There was a highly significant correlation (corrected for attenuation) between the total scores of the questionnaires (r= .82), but the correlations between the questionnaires’ subscales varied between –.03 and .83. Both the CTI and the CDDQ distinguish among individuals at different stages of the career decision-making process. As hypothesized, participants with a higher degree of decidedness reported lower levels of difficulties. Implications of the unique features of each of the measures for career-related interventions and further research are discussed.

Perceived Benefits of Using an Internet-based Interactive Career Planning System.

Abstract Making Better Career Decisions (MBCD) is an Internet-based interactive career planning system designed to help deliberating individuals. The present research examined the benefits of a dialogue with MBCD, by analyzing 712 users’ perceptions of its contribution to their career decision-making process, and locating variables associated with these perceptions. A pre-dialogue and a post-dialogue questionnaire were used to collect the users’ perceptions of its benefits and measure the change in the degree of decidedness. Perceived benefit was derived from participants’ ratings of the degree of progress they had made in their career decision-making process, whether they had learned about additional factors to be considered and their career-related preferences, as well as their ratings of the quality of the list of “promising” career alternatives presented to them during their dialogue with MBCD. This composite perceived benefit was found to be positively associated with the users’ decidedness at the completion of the dialogue with MBCD. Users’ satisfaction with the length and variety of their personal “promising alternatives” list was associated with a higher perceived benefit.

Challenges of Internet-Based Assessment: Measuring Career Decision-Making Difficulties

Abstract Features of users’ responses to the Hebrew (N - 10,000) and English (N = 510) Internet versions of the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (I Gati. M. Krausz. & S, II. Osipow. 1996) were examined The results indicated that in the proper setting. Internet versions produce reliable and valid scores.

The control-freak mind: stereotypical biases are eliminated following conflict-activated cognitive control.

Numerous daily situations require control for successful goal attainment. An important question is whether control can adjust across situations, to create control readiness from one situation to the next. Using trial to trial control adjustment paradigms, previous research generally suggested that control adjustments are domain specific. However, this research typically used neutral stimuli (e.g., single letters) devoid of personally and socially relevant goals. We propose that personal relevance may be an important modulator of control adjustment and, hence, that personally relevant control tasks can benefit from control readiness, even if it is produced by a different task. In 2 experiments we test whether control over the expression of stereotypes, a highly meaningful and desirable goal for many, can benefit from control readiness evoked by a neutral unrelated Flanker task. Results suggest that stereotype-driven behavior is modulated by independently activated control and that personal relevance may facilitate control adjustments across domains.

Neural mechanisms of proactive and reactive cognitive control in social anxiety.

Social anxiety--the fear of social embarrassment and negative evaluation by others--ranks among peoples worst fears, and it is often thought to impair task performance. We investigated the neurocognitive processes through which trait social anxiety relates to task performance, proposing a model of the joint contributions of reactive control, theoretically associated with conflict monitoring and activity of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and proactive control, theoretically associated with top-down regulation and activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Participants varying in their degree of trait social anxiety completed the Eriksen flanker task while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. Task-related left dlPFC activity was indexed by relative left prefrontal EEG (inverse alpha), and conflict-related dACC activity was indexed by the N2r component of the event-related potential. Stronger activity in both regions predicted better response control, and greater social anxiety was associated with worse response control. Furthermore, for all participants, greater left prefrontal EEG activity predicted better behavioral control, but for high social anxiety participants only, greater N2r responses also predicted behavioral control. This pattern suggests that low social anxiety individuals engaged a proactive control process, driven by dlPFC activity, whereas high social anxiety individuals relied additionally on a reactive control process, driven by conflict-related dACC activity. These findings support a model of control that involves different patterns of interplay between proactive and reactive strategies and may help to explain self-regulatory impairments in social anxiety.

Social learning across psychological distance.

While those we learn from are often close to us, more and more our learning environments are shifting to include more distant and dissimilar others. The question we examine in 5 studies is how whom we learn from influences what we learn and how what we learn influences from whom we choose to learn it. In Study 1, we show that social learning, in and of itself, promotes higher level (more abstract) learning than does learning based on ones own direct experience. In Studies 2 and 3, we show that when people learn from and emulate others, they tend to do so at a higher level when learning from a distant model than from a near model. Studies 4 and 5 show that thinking about learning at a higher (compared to a lower) level leads individuals to expand the range of others that they will consider learning from. Study 6 shows that when given an actual choice, people prefer to learn low-level information from near sources and high-level information from distant sources. These results demonstrate a basic link between level of learning and psychological distance in social learning processes.

Positive Consequences of Conflict on Decision Making: When a Conflict Mindset Facilitates Choice

Much research has shown that conflict is aversive and leads to increased choice deferral. In contrast, we have proposed that conflict can be beneficial. Specifically, exposure to nonconscious goal conflict can activate a mindset (a set of cognitive procedures) that facilitates the systematic processing of information without triggering the associated costs, such as negative affect and stress. In a conflict mindset, people should be better able to make tradeoffs and resolve choice conflict. We tested this proposition in 4 experiments, and demonstrated that priming conflicting goals before a decision increases choice in domains unrelated to the primed conflict. We further demonstrated that increased choice occurs because people in a conflict mindset process choice information more systematically, and we rule out several alternative explanations for the results.

When conflicts are good: nonconscious goal conflicts reduce confirmatory thinking.

In this article, we argue that nonconscious goal conflicts are accompanied by a mindset that has wide-ranging implications for reasoning and thinking in content areas that are not part of the conflict itself. Specifically, we propose that nonconscious goal conflicts induce a mode of processing information that increases the likelihood of approaching an issue from opposing perspectives. This hypothesis is examined by investigating the effects of nonconscious goal conflicts on confirmatory thinking, that is, a way of thinking that narrowly focuses on confirmation rather than on broader examination of information. In 5 experiments, we show that nonconscious goal conflicts significantly reduce confirmatory hypothesis testing (Experiments 1 through 3) and anchoring (Experiments 4 and 5). We further show that these effects result from a goal conflict by rejecting explanations based on priming of semantic opposites, and priming of multiple goals that do not conflict (Experiments 2 and 3), and by examining decision times as a conflict process variable (Experiment 5). Using various probes, we show that these changes in confirmatory judgments are not accompanied by changes in conflict phenomenology. Together, these results suggest that nonconscious goal conflicts attenuate the robust confirmatory thinking strategy that characterizes human thinking in numerous domains.

Power effects on cognitive control: Turning conflict into action

Power is known to promote effective goal pursuit, especially when it requires one to overcome distractions or bias. We proposed that this effect involves the ability to engage and implement cognitive control. In Study 1, we demonstrated that power enhances behavioral performance on a response conflict task and that it does so by enhancing controlled processing rather than by reducing automatic processing. In Study 2, we used an event-related potential index of anterior cingulate activity to test whether power effects on control were due to enhanced conflict sensitivity or action implementation. Power did not significantly affect neural sensitivity to conflict; rather, high power was associated with a stronger link between conflict processing and intended action, relative to low power. These findings suggest a new perspective on how social factors can affect controlled processing and offer new evidence regarding the transition between conflict detection and the implementation of action control.

Cognitive control modulates attention to food cues: Support for the control readiness model of self-control

Self-control in ones food choices often depends on the regulation of attention toward healthy choices and away from temptations. We tested whether selective attention to food cues can be modulated by a newly developed proactive self-control mechanism-control readiness-whereby control activated in one domain can facilitate control in another domain. In two studies, we elicited the activation of control using a color-naming Stroop task and tested its effect on attention to food cues in a subsequent, unrelated task. We found that control readiness modulates both overt attention, which involves shifts in eye gaze (Study 1), and covert attention, which involves shift in mental attention without shifting in eye gaze (Study 2). We further demonstrated that individuals for whom tempting food cues signal a self-control problem (operationalized by relatively higher BMI) were especially likely to benefit from control readiness. We discuss the theoretical contributions of the control readiness model and the implications of our findings for enhancing proactive self-control to overcome temptation in food choices.