Effects Of Need For Cognitive Closure And Anticipated Regret On College Students' Career Decision-making Progress

Career decision-making is one of the most important decision for a college student graduating from school and stepping into society. The quality of such decision is crucially important. To college students who the first time to make a career decision while facing with the changes and uncertainty of social environment, it concerns their future social status, economic status and life style to improve the quality of their decision and find a proper job with the massive amounts of career information.To society, it has great significance for constructing a human resources powerful nation and promoting the coordinated development of education and economic to well arrange the graduates' employment.Through consulting literatures and combining with the practical situation, we found that individual differences(such as achievement motivation, emotional intelligence, career decision-making self-efficacy)and emotional factor(such as positive and negative emotions, anxiety, fear and so on) have effects on the decision making process. As need for cognitive closure(abbr. NFC) and anticipated regret(abbr. AR) are perceived as very important factors in the decision field which affect the quality of decision-making, we discussed the effects of these two variables on the process of career decision-making in this study. Knowing decision-making characteristics of different NFC levels of college students can help them understand themselves correctly, improve their self cognitive control function, and reduce decision-making biases. And investigating the effects mechanism of NFCC and AR on the career decision-making process, it can help employment directors to guide college students to give actively career exploration, in turn to improve their self and environment cognition level, and prompt to establish career goals and clear the future development direction. Thus, we hoped to make some suggestions to help improve the quality of graduate college students' career decision-making.Measurement and experimental research methods were used and junior assubjects in this study, experiment 1 with 205 subjects, experiment 2 with 206 subjects.Firstly we measured the students' NFC level with NFC scale and selected subjects scored the top 27% as high NFC group, scored the lowest 27% as low NFC group.And then we designed two separate experiments according to the ways of AR priming,experiment 1 with question priming and experiment 2 with results feedback priming.Take 2(high NFC, low NFC) x 2(no AR priming, AR priming) of two-factors of between-subjects design, using information display board technology, we examined the effects of NFC and AR on college students' career decision-making process.The results showed that:(1) NFCC had significantly effects on college students' career decision-making process. Compared with low NFCC college students, high NFCC college students' decision-making time is shorter, career information search number was less, search depth was lower and search patterns was less alternative-based;(2) AR had significantly effects on college students' career decision-making process. Compared with college students under no AR priming condition, students under AR priming condition their decision-making time was longer, career information search number was more, search depth was higher;(3) There were interaction effects between NFCC and AR on the college students' career decision-making process. Under the condition of no AR priming,there existed significant differences on the decision-making process between high and low NFCC college students, the high NFCC college students'(compared with low NFCC ones) decision-making time was shorter, career information search number was less, search depth was lower; Under the condition of AR priming, no significant differences were found between high and low NFCC college students, both their decision-making time were long, search number were many, search depth were high.