Employability: A psycho-social construct, its dimensions, and applications

We examine the idea that an individual’s employability subsumes a host of person-centered constructs needed to deal effectively with the career-related changes occurring in today’s economy. We argue that employability represents a form of work specific (pro)active adaptability that consists of three dimensions—career identity, personal adaptability, and social and human capital. Reciprocal relationships among these dimensions are also discussed. The impact of employability on organizational behavior is illustrated through applications to the research literatures on job loss and job search.     

The Effects of Feedback and Reflection on the Questioning Style of Untrained Interviewers in Simulated Child Sexual Abuse Interviews

We provided immediate and detailed feedback in a training paradigm in which simulated interviews with computer‐generated avatars were used to improve interviewers' questioning style. Fifty‐nine untrained student/interviewers conducted eight interviews each and were randomly assigned to a control, feedback or feedback and reflection group. Compared to the control group, the groups receiving feedback used a higher percentage of recommended questions and retrieved more relevant details while using a lower percentage of not recommended questions and retrieved less wrong details. Only the groups that received feedback reached a reliable change in the proportion of recommended questions. The reflection intervention proposed in the present study did not enhance training effects above and beyond feedback in the present sample. The present study replicated previous findings regarding the role of feedback in improving the quality of investigative interviews, however, failing to show an effect of reflection. Further studies on different reflection tasks are suggested.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimental setting affects the performance of guppies in a numerical discrimination task

A recent study found that guppies (Poecilia reticulata) can be trained to discriminate 4 versus 5 objects, a numerical discrimination typically achieved only by some mammals and birds. In that study, guppies were required to discriminate between two patches of small objects on the bottom of the tank that they could remove to find a food reward. It is not clear whether this species possesses exceptional numerical accuracy compared with the other ectothermic vertebrates or whether its remarkable performance was due to a specific predisposition to discriminate between differences in the quality of patches while foraging. To disentangle these possibilities, we trained guppies to the same numerical discriminations with a more conventional two-choice discrimination task. Stimuli were sets of dots presented on a computer screen, and the subjects received a food reward upon approaching the set with the larger numerosity. Though the cognitive problem was identical in the two experiments, the change in the experimental setting led to a much poorer performance as most fish failed even the 2 versus 3 discrimination. In four additional experiments, we varied the duration of the decision time, the type of stimuli, the length of training, and whether correction was allowed in order to identify the factors responsible for the difference. None of these parameters succeeded in increasing the performance to the level of the previous study, although the group trained with three-dimensional stimuli learned the easiest numerical task. We suggest that the different results with the two experimental settings might be due to constraints on learning and that guppies might be prepared to accurately estimate patch quality during foraging but not to learn an abstract stimulus–reward association.     

Improving left spatial neglect through music scale playing

The study assessed whether the auditory reference provided by a music scale could improve spatial exploration of a standard musical instrument keyboard in right‐brain‐damaged patients with left spatial neglect. As performing music scales involves the production of predictable successive pitches, the expectation of the subsequent note may facilitate patients to explore a larger extension of space in the left affected side, during the production of music scales from right to left. Eleven right‐brain‐damaged stroke patients with left spatial neglect, 12 patients without neglect, and 12 age‐matched healthy participants played descending scales on a music keyboard. In a counterbalanced design, the participants' exploratory performance was assessed while producing scales in three feedback conditions: With congruent sound, no‐sound, or random sound feedback provided by the keyboard. The number of keys played and the timing of key press were recorded. Spatial exploration by patients with left neglect was superior with congruent sound feedback, compared to both Silence and Random sound conditions. Both the congruent and incongruent sound conditions were associated with a greater deceleration in all groups. The frame provided by the music scale improves exploration of the left side of space, contralateral to the right hemisphere, damaged in patients with left neglect. Performing a scale with congruent sounds may trigger at some extent preserved auditory and spatial multisensory representations of successive sounds, thus influencing the time course of space scanning, and ultimately resulting in a more extensive spatial exploration. These findings offer new perspectives also for the rehabilitation of the disorder.     

Recognition of partly occluded objects by fish

The ability to visually complete partly occluded objects (so-called “amodal completion”) has been documented in mammals and birds. Here, we report the first evidence of such a perceptual ability in a fish species. Fish (Xenotoca eiseni) were trained to discriminate between a complete and an amputated disk. Thereafter, the fish performed test trials in which hexagonal polygons were either exactly juxtaposed or only placed close to the missing sectors of the disk in order to produce or not produce the impression (to a human observer) of an occlusion of the missing sectors of the disk by the polygon. In another experiment, fish were first trained to discriminate between hexagonal polygons that were either exactly juxtaposed or only placed close to the missing sectors of a disk, and then tested for choice between a complete and an amputated disk. In both experiments, fish behaved as if they were experiencing visual completion of the partly occluded stimuli. These findings suggest that the ability to visually complete partly occluded objects may be widespread among vertebrates, possibly inherited in mammals, birds and fish from early vertebrate ancestors.     

"I need to talk about it": a qualitative analysis of trauma-exposed women's reasons for treatment choice

A significant proportion of individuals suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder do not seek or receive effective treatment. Understanding the reasons why an individual chooses to seek treatment or prefers one treatment to another is a critical step to improve treatment seeking. To begin to understand these reasons, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the reasons women gave for choosing a cognitive-behavioral treatment, prolonged exposure (PE), or a pharmacological treatment, sertraline (SER). A community sample of women with trauma histories were asked to view standardized rationales, to choose among PE, SER, or no treatment, and to give 5 reasons for their choice. Women indicated that they were more likely to prefer the psychotherapy to the medication. Across reasons given, the most commonly cited reason for treatment preference highlighted why or how the treatment worked (e.g., I need to talk about it); and this reason emerged as the strongest predictor of preference for PE. Understanding this role of perceived treatment mechanism may aid clinicians and public health policy officials to identify and address help-seeking barriers regarding treatment.     

Children's scale errors: A by‐product of lexical development?

Scale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U‐shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re‐examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18–30 months (N = 125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence.     

Pigeons (Columba livia) associate time intervals with symbols in a touch screen task: evidence for ordinality but not summation

The present experiments examined whether pigeons can sum symbols that are associated with various temporal consequences in a touch screen apparatus. Pigeons were trained to discriminate between two visual symbols that were associated with 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 s either of delay to 4 s of hopper access (delay group) or duration of hopper access (reward group). In Experiment 1, the pigeons in both groups learned to select the symbol associated with the more favorable outcome, and they successfully transferred this discrimination to novel symbol pairs. However, when tested with 2 pairs of symbols associated with different summed durations, they responded on the basis of a simple response rule rather than the sum of the symbol pair. In Experiment 2, the reward group was presented with four symbols at once and was allowed to successively choose one symbol at a time. All pigeons chose the symbols in order from largest to smallest. This indicates that pigeons formed an ordered representation of symbols associated with different time intervals, even though they did not sum the symbols.