We studied the effect of proactive personality and career decision-making self-efficacy on career adaptability under employment pressure among 810 Chinese graduate students. Participants completed the Proactive Personality Scale, the Career Adapt-Abilities ScaleInternational Form 2.0, the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Employment Pressure Scale. The results showed: (a) proactive personality affected career adaptability, (b) career decision-making self-efficacy played a mediating role in that relationship, (c) employment pressure moderated the mediating effect on the relationship in (a), and (d) students with a highly proactive personality were more inclined to be influenced by the negative effects of employment pressure than were those with a less proactive personality when forming career decision-making self-efficacy.

In constructivist approaches to research on career adaptability it has been conceptualized that the development of one’s career is formed from the interplay between the individual and the environment. In this study we utilized structural equation modeling analysis of longitudinal data obtained from 145 Chinese undergraduate students to examine the effects of social support and career decision-making self-efficacy on career adaptability. Our results provided important evidence regarding the effects of career decision-making self-efficacy, which functions as a significant mediator of the effects of social support on career adaptability. We provide integrative conclusions for explaining the relationships between the environment, the individual, and the individual’s career outcome, and have enriched constructivist theories of careers, providing implications for counseling and practice.

Researchers have found that compared with other existing conditions (e.g., pleasantness), information relevant to survival produced a higher rate of retrieval; this effect is known as the survival processing advantage (SPA). Previous experiments have examined that the advantage of memory can be extended to some different types of visual pictorial material, such as pictures and short video clips, but there were some arguments for whether face stimulus could be seen as a boundary condition of SPA. The current work explores whether there is a mnemonic advantage to different trustworthiness of face for human adaptation. In two experiments, we manipulated the facial trustworthiness (untrustworthy, neutral, and trustworthy), which is believed to provide information regarding survival decisions. Participants were asked to predict their avoidance or approach response tendency, when encountering strangers (represented by three classified faces of trustworthiness) in a survival scenario and the control scenario. The final surprise memory tests revealed that it was better to recognize both the trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces, when the task was related to survival. Experiment 1 demonstrated the existence of a SPA in the bipolarity of facial untrustworthiness and trustworthiness. In Experiment 2, we replicated the SPA of trustworthy and untrustworthy face recognitions using a matched design, where we found this kind of memory benefits only in recognition tasks but not in source memory tasks. These results extend the generality of SPAs to face domain.

We used a subliminal priming procedure to explore whether or not the intensity of identity salience facilitates the advantage of memory in distinguishing between the strength of the group-reference effect and that of the self-reference effect. In Experiment 1 (N = 124), participants were primed with in-group, out-group, or combined salience conditions before encoding adjectives with reference to the in-group and out-group, and were then subsequently given a surprise free-recall test. These results showed that the intensity of social identity could predict the memory advantage of group-reference tasks; moreover, the memory effect of group-reference tasks was strongest in the combined salience condition compared with in-group or out-group salience alone. In Experiment 2 (N = 81), we used different referential conditions and found that the intensity of social identity changed with identity salience and was a possible cause of differences between the intensity of the group-reference effect and that of the self-reference effect.