The issue of credit-card debt among college students has received increasing attention. This study explored factors hypothesized to be causes and effects of credit-card debt in 448 students on five college campuses. Students reported an average of $1,035 (SD 5 $1,849) in debt, including students without credit cards or credit-card debt. Lack of financial knowledge, age, number of credit cards, delay of gratification, and attitudes toward credit-card use were related to debt. Sensation seeking, materialism, the Student Attitude Toward Debt scale, gender, and grade point average were not unique predictors of debt. Students reporting greater debt reported greater stress and decreased financial well being. Results highlight the need for comprehensive financial literacy education among college students.Credit-card debt among college students has become an increasing concern in recent years. Newspapers and magazines cover the topic on a regular basis, and legislators seek ways to stem the tide of indebted students. Although there is a great deal of data indicating that students are in debt, little is known about why students fall into debt. The present study explores the relative weight of personality factors, attitudes toward money and possessions, and financial knowledge as predictors of credit-card debt among college students.

The validity of individuals' self-assessments is compared with other assessment procedures commonly used in psychological evaluation. Comparisons are made in the prediction of all criteria that have been investigated: intellectual achievement, vocational choice, job performance, therapy outcome, adjustment following hospitalization, and peer ratings. Self-assessments are at least as predictive of these criteria as are other assessment methods against which they have been pitted. Limitations of this conclusion and its implications for current psychological evaluation procedures are examined. It is argued that greater attention should be given to self-assessments and to the evaluation procedures that may enhance their predictive validity. Steps are outlined for deciding when self-assessment should be used, and suggestions are offered as to how the validity of self-judgments might be maximized.

This article reports the development and validation of the College Life Alcohol Salience Scale (CLASS), which assesses college students' beliefs about the centrality of alcohol to the college experience. Developed using procedures designed to increase its ecological validity, the CLASS was administered to three samples of college students (total N = 571). Its unidimensional factor structure was first established via exploratory factor analysis and parallel analysis on one sample and then verified via confirmatory factor analysis on a separate sample. Scores on the CLASS were predictably related to a nomological network of drinking and personality variables and it provided incremental validity in accounting for drinking frequency and amount, when added to drinking motive scores. The importance of assessing and developing interventions to target the types of beliefs measured by the CLASS is discussed.

We conducted four studies to explore people's self-prediction processes. Study I examined the types of information people report using when making self-predictions. Five categories of information were determined. Studies 2 and 3 examined the relation between the use of different categories of information and self-prediction accuracy. Using correlational and experimental methodologies, these two studies demonstrated the utility of attending to personal base rate and personal disposition information in formulating accurate self-predictions. Individual differences in accuracy as a function of public and private self-consciousness were also evident. Study 4 found that more certain selfpredictions, as well as predictions that were distinct from what was expected for the average individual, were more accurate. Overall, the findings suggest the importance of attending to individuating information in formulating accurate self-predictions.The traditional model of psychological assessment emphasizes the use of trained evaluators to formulate predictions about a person on the basis of testing data, historical information, and clinical judgment. To date, however, there has been much controversy and debate over the utility of efforts in the fields of personality and clinical psychology aimed at developing

This article reports two studies that examined the convergent and discriminant validity of the Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). Using samples of college students and prison inmates, need for cognition scores were found to be positively associated with measures of self-esteem, masculine sex role attitudes, absorption, and private self-consciousness. Modest negative associations between need for cognition and measures of public self-consciousness and social anxiety were also uncovered. Need for cognition scores were generally unrelated to measures of feminine and androgynous sex role attitudes, shyness, sociability, and loneliness. These findings add further evidence supporting the construct validity of the Need for Cognition Scale and expand our understanding of the construct of need for cognition.