Annual review of psychology
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This chapter reviews personnel selection research from 1995 through 1999. Areas covered are job analysis; performance criteria; cognitive ability and personality predictors; interview, assessment center, and biodata assessment methods; measurement issues; meta-analysis and validity generalization; evaluation of selection systems in terms of differential prediction, adverse impact, utility, and applicant reactions; emerging topics on team selection and cross-cultural issues; and finally professional, legal, and ethical standards. Three major themes are revealed: (a) Better taxonomies produce better selection decisions; (b) The nature and analyses of work behavior are changing, influencing personnel selection practices; (c) The field of personality research is healthy, as new measurement methods, personality constructs, and compound constructs of well-known traits are being researched and applied to personnel selection.
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Three areas of high-level scene perception research are reviewed. The first concerns the role of eye movements in scene perception, focusing on the influence of ongoing cognitive processing on the position and duration of fixations in a scene. The second concerns the nature of the scene representation that is retained across a saccade and other brief time intervals during ongoing scene perception. Finally, we review research on the relationship between scene and object identification, focusing particularly on whether the meaning of a scene influences the identification of constituent objects.
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The study of giftedness has practical origins. High-level performance intrigues people. Theoretically, the study of giftedness is related to the psychology of individual differences and has focused on the constructs of intelligence, creativity, and motivation. ⋯ Although broadened definitions of giftedness have emerged, the most extensive body of research available for review concentrates on intellectual giftedness. The varying definitions of giftedness and the impact of social context and diversity on the development of talent pose significant challenges for the field. Finally, the study of exceptionally advanced performance provides insight into basic psychological processes and the school contexts that develop talents in children and youth.
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For many decades, research in judgment and decision making has examined behavioral violations of rational choice theory. In that framework, rationality is expressed as a single correct decision shared by experimenters and subjects that satisfies internal coherence within a set of preferences and beliefs. Outside of psychology, social scientists are now debating the need to modify rational choice theory with behavioral assumptions. ⋯ When rules are ambiguous, people look for reasons to guide their decisions. They may also let their emotions take charge. This chapter presents recent research on judgment and decision making from traditional and alternative frameworks.
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Research on relationships between anxiety and depression has proceeded at a rapid pace since the 1980s. The similarities and differences between these two conditions, as well as many of the important features of the comorbidity of these disorders, are well understood. The genotypic structure of anxiety and depression is also fairly well documented. ⋯ Sophisticated phenotypic models have also emerged, with data converging on an integrative hierarchical model of mood and anxiety disorders in which each individual syndrome contains both a common and a unique component. Finally, considerable progress has been made in understanding cognitive aspects of these disorders. This work has focused on both the cognitive content of anxiety and depression and on the effects that anxiety and depression have on information processing for mood-congruent material.