Psychology Degrees: Employment, Wage, and Career Trajectory Consequences.

Psychology is a very popular undergraduate major. Examining wage data from a range of degree holders reveals much about the expected career trajectories of those with psychology degrees. First, regarding baccalaureates, psychology and other liberal arts graduates-compared with those from certain preprofessional and technical undergraduate programs-generally fall in relatively low tiers of salary levels at both starting and later career points. Salary levels among baccalaureate alumni groups correlate with averaged measures of salary satisfaction, repeated job seeking, and perceptions of underemployment. These patterns seem to stem from the specific occupational categories (job titles) entered by graduates in psychology compared with other graduates, calling into question the employability advantage of so-called generic liberal arts skills. Second, psychology master's degree holders also generally fall in a low tier of salary among their science, engineering, and health counterparts. Third, psychology college faculty (including instructors) fall in low tiers of salary compared with their colleagues from other academic fields. Such broadly based indications of the relative economic disadvantages of psychology degrees have implications for career counseling in the field.

Improved advising ratings in an undergraduate psychology program.

During the late 1990s, the psychology department of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis made investments in its undergraduate advising program in terms of additional professional personnel, a new orientation course, an experimental intrusive advising track, innovative peer activities, and expanded physical facilities. Against this backdrop of innovations, from 1995 to 2001 an exit survey of graduating seniors (N=311) showed improved evaluations of departmental counseling services. Ratings of the obtainability of advising on courses and the quality of course and career advising all showed significant upward shifts over the seven years of study. Regarding a specific innovation, students who completed a 1-hr. orientation course gave higher mean counseling ratings than those not enrolled.

All prompts are created equal, but some prompts are more equal than others.

Scores assigned to college placement essays by a computer program (PEG) showed high agreement with the evaluations of human readers (r =.82). Further, both types of graders tended to assign higher or lower scores to essays written about particular topics. Content analyses by a second program (MCCA) indicated that themes in essays varied in terms of emphasis on "analytic," "emotional," or "practical" dimensions. Human and machine readers tended to give higher scores for analytic and practical themes, and lower scores for those involving emotion. The ranks of mean prompt-related grades were concordant with the ranks of mean analytic and practical content across topics. Such findings call for the refined standardization of prompts for future testing, and the need for care in the evaluation of existing essays.

Humans' perceptions of animal mentality: ascriptions of thinking.

On rating scales, 294 students indicated whether it was reasonable to say that a dog, cat, bird, fish, and school-age child had the capacity for 12 commonplace human mental operations or experiences. Factor analysis of responses identified 2 levels of attributions, simple thinking and complex thinking. The child and all animals were credited with simple thinking, but respondents were much more likely to ascribe complex thinking to the child. (A pilot study with 8 animal-behavior professionals generally replicated these results.) Certain mental categories (e.g., emotion) were judged by students to be simple for all target types; others (e.g., conservation) were judged to be universally complex. Further factoring revealed articulate ascriptions for key mental categories. Play and imagine was seen as simple in the animals but complex for the child, but enumeration and sorting and dream were seen as simple in the child but complex for the animals.

Leap orders in male chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus): longitudinal evidence.

Leap orders in pairs of male chickens were traced in a longitudinal study from near hatching to about 11 weeks of age. Birds were given a series of 39 day-long social separations, each followed by a day-long reunion. Tests for aggression occurred during the first 5 min of reunion. Pecks were frequent early in the test series, but soon diminished; leaps supplanted pecks as the most frequent response at about midseries, and abated in turn. To account for this dual pattern of the waxing and waning of aggressive responses, it was hypothesized that leap orders had formed in midseries, thus obviating further agonistic behavior. Support for the hypothesis was found: Early peck orders did not predict later leap orders, but early leap orders did predict subsequent leap and peck orders.

Early development of aggression in chickens: The relative importance of pecking and leaping.

A longitudinal study (employing a multiple separation technique) of chicks' social behavior over the first postnatal month indicated systematic changes in their mode of physical interactions. During the first week or so, intersubject pecking in same-sex pairs was frequent, and was more likely in birds with a home cage advantage (i.e., a prior resident effect). However, there were no sex differences in any of the forms of social pecking (head, body, or feet of the opponent), and all types showed significant decreases over the period of the study. On the contrary, there was a strong effect for sex on rates of aggressive leaping, with males exhibiting more leaps than females. Further, there was a clear increase in leaping over the first weeks of testing, and something of a decline thereafter. These data suggest that in this species the definitive expression of aggressive or dominance behavior may be leaping. Early social pecking (during a period in which this behavior was at its maximum rate) did not predict the subsequent leaping behavior of individuals, but later "leap orders" were highly associated with later "peck orders".

Components of aggression in chickens and conceptualizations of aggression in general.

A refined analysis of the peck order in chickens was offered as a test of the notion that for this species, different responses such as leaping and various types of pecking need not be interchangeable indexes of aggression. Indeed, tests showed that particular response types of the birds were differentially mediated by organismic or environmental factors. In large cages pecking at the body was most frequent by birds that had a home-cage advantage. Contrarily, rates of aggressive leaping were independent of this environmental influence, with males having an advantage over females. Males showed more head pecking than females, but the profile for this sex difference did not resemble the profile for leaping. Correlational analyses revealed that whereas head pecking between testmates was not matched in frequency, leaping was positively related. Finally, the behavior of birds tested in small cages differed from that of the large-cage subjects. Although there was more head pecking in the small cages, males did not have an edge, and leaping was infrequent. Such results indicate that these responses cannot be viewed as interchangeable indicators of aggression in fowl.

Affiliation and social discrimination produced by brief exposure in day-old domestic chicks.

Discrimination between individual strangers and companions was examined in day-old domestic chicks. In one experiment, pecking rates at companions and strangers were observed in pairwise bouts after 16 hr of cohabitation. The discriminability of strangers and companions was varied by means of pre-hatch colouring. Reliable discriminations between individual strangers and companions emerged as early as the first minute of the encounter. Discriminative cues provided by artificial colouring were found not to be necessary in establishing social discrimination. In a second experiment, undyed chicks were housed in pairs for 1, 4 or 16 hr. Half of the pairs lived in cages that separated companions by a wire screen, and half were housed in undivided cages. Observations of pecking in four-way bouts confirmed previous findings and demonstrated that the opportunity to peck during exposure may be a necessary condition in producing social discrimination. Antecedent conditions that lead to the development of affiliative bonds simultaneously appear to establish social discrimination.