Although undergraduate students value preparing themselves for careers that have personal meaning, relatively little curricular attention has been paid to facilitating this goal. In this article, we present a targeted review of the literature on career exploration as a basis for an approach to integrate it into the core undergraduate…

Although engineering programs are growing in popularity, attrition rates are very high. As such, there is a need to explore possible factors as to why some students succeed in engineering and other do not. This study is the first of its kind to explore whether and to what extent vocational personality traits and general personality types correlate…

In this article, the separate literatures of a neurobiologically based approach system and vocational interests are reviewed and integrated into a social neuroscientific model of the processes underlying interests, based upon the idea of selective approach motivation. The authors propose that vocational interests describe the types of stimuli that…

Interests, personality, and values figure prominently in work motivation, yet little research has examined the combined influence of these factors on vocational behavior. The present study therefore examined relationships among these variables in a sample of 282 medical students (169 women, 113 men) who responded to the Strong Interest Inventory,…

The purpose of this study is to examine the differences between groups of psychology students and groups of psychology professionals based on the personality trait of Extraversion, and its facets, as measured by the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992). Previous applications of the NEO PI-R have focused on…

A study of 323 gifted adolescents explored the convergence of vocational interests and personality as measured by the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) and NEO Personality Inventory-Revised. The strongest convergence occurred at more specific levels--the 30 facet levels of NEO and 11 primary scales of MPQ. Convergence of Holland's…

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…