Life goal development, educational attainment, and occupational outcomes: A 12-year, multisample longitudinal study.

Life goals play a major role in shaping people's lives and careers. Although life goals have prior documented associations with occupational and other life outcomes, no prior studies have investigated associations between life goal and occupational outcomes. Using two representative samples of Icelandic youth (Sample 1: = 485, Sample 2: = 1,339), followed across 12 years from adolescence to young adulthood, we examined life goal development and associations with educational attainment and a wide range of occupational outcomes.

Job characteristics and personality change in young adulthood: A 12-year longitudinal study and replication.

Objective: Personality changes are related to successfully performing adult occupational roles which require teamwork, duty, and managing stress. However, it is unclear how personality development relates to specific job characteristics that vary across occupations.

Method: We investigated whether 151 objective job characteristics, derived from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), were associated with personality levels and changes in a 12-year longitudinal sample followed over the school to work transition.

Interest-Ability Profiles: An Integrative Approach to Knowledge Acquisition.

Cognitive abilities and interests both play an important role in guiding knowledge acquisition, but most previous studies have examined them separately. The current study used a large and representative dataset to integrate interests and abilities using a person-centered approach that examines how distinct profiles of interests and abilities relate to individual strengths and weaknesses in knowledge. Two key findings emerged.

Vocational interests and adverse impact: How attraction and selection on vocational interests relate to adverse impact potential.

The current research proposes to incorporate vocational interests into the study of adverse impact (i.e., differential hiring/selection rates between minority and majority groups in employment settings).

Comparing physiological responses during cognitive tests in virtual environments vs. in identical real-world environments.

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) are increasingly used to evaluate human responses to design variables. VEs provide a tremendous capacity to isolate and readily adjust specific features of an architectural or product design. They also allow researchers to safely and effectively measure performance factors and physiological responses.

Using Posterior EEG Theta Band to Assess the Effects of Architectural Designs on Landmark Recognition in an Urban Setting.

The process of urban landmark-based navigation has proven to be difficult to study in a rigorous fashion, primarily due to confounding variables and the problem of obtaining reliable data in real-world contexts. The development of high-resolution, immersive virtual reality technologies has opened exciting new possibilities for gathering data on human wayfinding that could not otherwise be readily obtained. We developed a research platform using a virtual environment and electroencephalography (EEG) to better understand the neural processes associated with landmark usage and recognition during urban navigation tasks.

Personality Changes Predict Early Career Outcomes: Discovery and Replication in 12-Year Longitudinal Studies.

In this research, we examined whether personality changes from adolescence to young adulthood predicted five early career outcomes: degree attainment, income, occupational prestige, career satisfaction, and job satisfaction. The study used two representative samples of Icelandic youth (Sample 1: = 485, Sample 2: = 1,290) and measured personality traits over 12 years (ages ~17 to 29 years). Results revealed that certain patterns of personality growth predicted career outcomes over and above adolescent trait levels and crystallized ability.

Stability and change in vocational interests after graduation from high school: A six-wave longitudinal study.

Vocational interests shape major life decisions and predict major life outcomes. Therefore, it is important to understand how vocational interests develop in young adulthood, a time when young people begin to make their own life decisions. In the present study, we investigated stability and change in vocational interests across a time span of 10 years, including the transition from high school to postsecondary education and the transition into the labor market.

How accurate are interest inventories? A quantitative review of career choice hit rates.

Vocational interests have a rich history throughout the last century of psychological research, playing an influential role in fields such as personality, development, education, counseling, and organizational psychology. Yet interest measures are typically developed with the goal of matching people to careers, and there has never been a quantitative review of interests and career choice. The present meta-analysis examines the validity of interest inventories for predicting educational choices and occupational membership.

Adaptive vocational interest diagnostic: Informing and improving the job assignment process.

The history of vocational interests shows that these measures have great promise for use in job assignment, suggesting that individuals will be more satisfied and successful in their job when they are doing work that interests them. Recent research has provided empirical support for these predictions and demonstrated that the match between an individual's interests and his or her work activities is positively related to job performance and negatively related to attrition. Building on these positive empirical findings, the U.

My body, your emotions: Viscerosomatic modulation of facial expression discrimination.

Interoception reflects the ability to observe one's innermost bodily states. Here, we assessed whether interoceptive accuracy (IA) is related to the empathic ability to discriminate others' emotions. Participants (N = 111) completed a heartbeat tracking task, as well as an emotional go/no-go task with fearful and disgusted faces.

Developmental structure of personality and interests: A four-wave, 8-year longitudinal study.

Personality traits and vocational interests capture different aspects of human individuality that intersect in certain ways. In this longitudinal study, we examined developmental relations between the Big 5 traits and RIASEC vocational interests over 4 timepoints from late adolescence to young adulthood (age 16-24) in a sample of Icelandic youth (N = 485) well-representative of the total student population. Results showed that interests and personality traits were similarly stable over time, but showed different patterns of mean-level change.

Toward a dimensional model of vocational interests.

Growing evidence on the predictive validity of vocational interests for job performance calls for greater consideration of interest assessment in organizations. However, a consensus on the fundamental dimensions of interests that are aligned with the contemporary world of work is still lacking. In the current research, we developed an organizing framework of vocational interests and empirically validated an 8-dimension model (SETPOINT: Health Science, Creative xpression, echnology, eople, rganization, nfluence, ature, and hings).

Normative changes in interests from adolescence to adulthood: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies.

Vocational interests predict a variety of important outcomes and are among the most widely applied individual difference constructs in psychology and education. Despite over 90 years of research, little is known about the longitudinal development of interests. In this meta-analysis, the authors investigate normative changes in interests through adolescence and young adulthood.

All STEM fields are not created equal: People and things interests explain gender disparities across STEM fields.

The degree of women's underrepresentation varies by STEM fields. Women are now overrepresented in social sciences, yet only constitute a fraction of the engineering workforce. In the current study, we investigated the gender differences in interests as an explanation for the differential distribution of women across sub-disciplines of STEM as well as the overall underrepresentation of women in STEM fields.

Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of Over 60 Years of Research.

Despite early claims that vocational interests could be used to distinguish successful workers and superior students from their peers, interest measures are generally ignored in the employee selection literature. Nevertheless, theoretical descriptions of vocational interests from vocational and educational psychology have proposed that interest constructs should be related to performance and persistence in work and academic settings. Moreover, on the basis of Holland's (1959, 1997) theoretical predictions, congruence indices, which quantify the degree of similarity or person-environment fit between individuals and their occupations, should be more strongly related to performance than interest scores alone.

People--things and data--ideas: bipolar dimensions?

We examined a longstanding assumption in vocational psychology that people-things and data-ideas are bipolar dimensions. Two minimal criteria for bipolarity were proposed and examined across 3 studies: (a) The correlation between opposite interest types should be negative; (b) after correcting for systematic responding, the correlation should be greater than -.40.

Holland in Iceland revisited: an emic approach to evaluating U.S. vocational interest models.

An emic approach was used to test the structural validity and applicability of Holland's (1997) RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) model in Iceland. Archival data from the development of the Icelandic Interest Inventory (Einarsdóttir & Rounds, 2007) were used in the present investigation. The data included an indigenous pool of occupations and work-task items representing Iceland's world of work that had been administered to a sample of 597 upper secondary school students.

Men and things, women and people: a meta-analysis of sex differences in interests.

The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.

Fitting measurement models to vocational interest data: are dominance models ideal?

In this study, the authors examined the item response process underlying 3 vocational interest inventories: the Occupational Preference Inventory (C.-P. Deng, P.

The attitudes toward massage (ATOM) scale: reliability, validity, and associated findings.

Despite the key role of attitudes in guiding behavior, no systematic examination of attitudes toward massage has been conducted and no standard assessments have been created. We developed the attitudes toward massage (ATOM) scale, a nine-item measure of an overall attitude toward massage that includes two distinct subscales assessing the attitudes of Massage as Healthful and Massage as Pleasant. These subscales are reliable (alpha>.

The stability of vocational interests from early adolescence to middle adulthood: a quantitative review of longitudinal studies.

The present meta-analysis examined the stability of vocational interests from early adolescence (age 12) to middle adulthood (age 40). Stability was represented by rank-order and profile correlations. Interest stability remained unchanged during much of adolescence and increased dramatically during the college years (age 18-21.