The nature of anchoring errors in clinical judgments was clarified. Study 1 tested if gender mediates the occurrence of anchoring errors. Judgments from 103 undergraduate psychology students evidenced neither anchoring errors nor gender differences. Given the inability to replicate Friedlander and Stockman's (1983) study, two rival hypotheses were advanced: the adjustment hypothesis (practitioners adjust appropriately their clinical judgments after receiving new client information) and the adjustment mitigation hypothesis (initial anchoring effects are mitigated by an adjustment effect). The judgments from 157 psychologists in Study 2 affirmed the adjustment and mitigation hypotheses over the anchoring hypothesis alone. The mitigation process appears adaptable in clinical judgments.

In this archival study the authors sought to determine the relationship, if any, between counseling outcomes and the topical focus in career counseling. Twenty-two counselors saw 46 adult clients at a community-based clinic for an average of eight sessions. Counseling outcome and topical focus (the extent to which the actual content of counseling sessions reflected relatively more vocationally or personally focused topics) were assessed from follow-up questionnaires to former career clients and from trained raters' evaluations of the counselors' written progress notes. Results showed that, from the counselors' perspective, outcomes were better when the focus of the sessions was relatively more vocational than personal and when relatively more interviews were held. Client satisfaction, on the other hand, was predictable only from the counselor's level of experience. Satisfaction with occupational status was not associated with any of the client, counselor, or treatment factors. Discussion focuses on the contribution of the results to career counseling practice and on the feasibility and validity of retrospective, archival research.

Three explanations for the differential impact of verbal and nonverbal cues on perceptions of counselor expertness, attractiveness, and trustworthiness were tested in this study: (a) cue availability (abundance of nonverbal cues over verbal ones), (b) vividness (concreteness and imagery-provoking nature of nonverbal cues), and (c) salience-vividness (an interaction between the vividness of the cues and the level of arousal of the perceiver). The results suggest that (a) cue availability is not a compelling explanation for the power of nonverbal communications, (b) vividness accounts for differential cue effectiveness with certain dependent variables, and (c) salience is not a prerequisite for the vividness effect to occur.

The article by Twohey and Volker (1993) provides a useful point of departure for discussing gender bias in supervision and for offering suggestions for supervisors.