Discriminating among educational majors and career aspirations in Taiwanese undergraduates: The contribution of personality and self-efficacy.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Big Five personality factors, measured by the NEO Personality Inventory Five-Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992), and vocational confidence across Holland's hexagon, measured by the Skills Confidence Inventory (SCI; Betz, Borgen, & Harmon, 2005), were useful in discriminating among educational majors and career aspirations for 312 Taiwanese university students. The Big Five and confidence, in combination, significantly differentiated among 4 college majors and 7 career aspirations in a Taiwanese university sample. Big Five Agreeableness and SCI Realistic, Investigative, and Conventional confidence emerged as most salient in the discrimination. Differences by sex, major, and career aspiration were mostly consistent with social cognitive career theory, Holland's theory, and prior U.S. research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Acculturative stress, perfectionism, years in the United States, and depression among Chinese international students.

The present study examined whether maladaptive perfectionism (i.e., discrepancy between expectations and performance) and length of time in the United States moderated the association between acculturative stress and depression. Data were collected through online surveys from 189 Chinese international students from China and Taiwan attending a midwestern university. Results from a hierarchical regression showed that there were significant main effects of acculturative stress and maladaptive perfectionism on depression, no significant two-way interactions, and a significant three-way interaction, indicating that acculturative stress, maladaptive perfectionism, and length of time in the United States interacted to predict depression. Low maladaptive perfectionism buffered the effect of acculturative stress on depression only for those who had been in the United States for a relatively longer period of time. Implications for counseling and future research directions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perfectionism and negative mood: The mediating roles of validation from others versus self.

This study examined a model in which the need for reassurance from others and the capacity for self-reinforcement mediated the relationships between two dimensions of perfectionism (evaluative concerns [EC] perfectionism and personal standards [PS] perfectionism) and anxiety and depression. Results from structural equation modeling of data from 295 college students from a large midwestern university indicated that the need for reassurance from others and the capacity for self-reinforcement fully mediated the relationship between EC perfectionism and anxiety as well as partially mediated the relationships between PS perfectionism and anxiety and depression. Moreover, 41% of the variance in anxiety and 50% of the variance in depression was explained by EC perfectionism, PS perfectionism, the need for reassurance from others, and/or the capacity for self-reinforcement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)