Emotional Intelligence in Personnel Selection: Applicant reactions,criterion, and incremental validity

In two studies, based on four samples and more than 600 participants, the authors examined applicant reactions, criterion and incremental validity, and differential prediction of emotional intelligence (EI) in personnel selection using the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. The first study examined applicant reactions in terms of face validity and fairness evaluation of the EI test. The second study examined across three samples (salespeople, front‐desk public employees, and hospital chief executive officers) the criterion validity, incremental validity, and differential prediction of EI. Results suggest that the EI test is perceived as a fair selection tool, and is predictive of performance. The EI test has incremental validity over cognitive abilities and personality (big five) when predicting subjective and objective performance criteria. Based on these results, the authors encourage further research on the use of EI in selection settings.     

On convention

Summary If my main criticism of Lewis is sound, we must conclude that there are at least two distinct types of convention: co-ordination conventions and conventions constituting autonomous practices. It is only possible in the case of the former, but not the latter, to specify the agents' structure of preferences, and the problem the convention is there to solve, antecedently and independently of the content of the conventions themselves. Conventions constituting an autonomous practice are constitutive of the point of, and the values inherent in the practice itself and hence they are not explicable in terms of solutions to co-ordination problems. Thus, from the vantage point of practical reasoning, Lewis' theory of conventions is partial and limited. It is superior, however, to the alternative offered by Gilbert, as it provides a good answer, albeit limited in scope, to the question of the normativity of conventions. Gilbert's analysis is more fundamentally flawed. She has failed to undermine Lewis' insight that conventions are arbitrary rules, due to her misconstrual of what arbitrariness consists in. Consequently, Gilbert's analysis of the normativity of social conventions in terms of joint acceptance is doubly inadequate: it fails to distinguish conventions from many other types of rule people follow, and it fails to answer the question of the normativity of conventions in terms of reasons for action.In the course of this discussion, I have side-stepped all the difficult questions concerning the conventionality of language, judging them to be far too complex issues to be dealt with within the confines of this article. I do hope, however, that an awareness of the distinction between co-ordination conventions and conventions of autonomous practices, will facilitate the arguments over the conventionality of language as well.I am indebted to Timothy Williamson and Joseph Raz with whom I have discussed these matters at length, and I am grateful for their invaluable comments on a draft of this paper. I am also indebted to Brian Bix, Ruth Gavison, Alon Harel, Edna Ullmann-Margalit, and the editors of Synthese for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

A unified approach to the perception of motion,stereo, and static-flow patterns

This paper presents a unified approach for studying the perception of motion, stereopsis, and static-flow (Glass) patterns. The objective is to address the same issues across these “modalities.” To this end, a new class of stimuli and procedures were developed, the key feature of which is the incorporation of a forced-choice competition paradigm into the random-dot stimuli paradigm that has traditionally been used in these modalities. The two competing percepts that are pitted against each other are opposite directions for motion, near/far depth planes for stereopsis, and orthogonal global patterns for Glass patterns. The differences in qualitative predictions for competing hypotheses are generally well pronounced, and the results provide clear evidence for deciding between alternative hypotheses. This approach has been used to confirm that covariance is the preferred metric for eliciting global correlations in all the modalities and to investigate the nature of front-end processes in each modality. It has the potential for neurophysiological studies for both single-cell and neuronal ensemble recording.     

Is Literal Meaning Conventional?

This paper argues that the literal meaning of words in a natural language is less conventional than usually assumed. Conventionality is defined in terms that are relative to reasons; norms that are determined by reasons are not conventions. The paper argues that in most cases, the literal meaning of words—as it applies to their definite extension—is not conventional. Conventional variations of meaning are typically present in borderline cases, of what I call the extension-range of literal meaning. Finally, some putative and one or two genuine exceptions are discussed.     

Studies of socioeconomic and ethnic differences in intelligence in the former Soviet Union in the early twentieth century

This paper reviews the studies of socioeconomic and ethnic and racial differences in intelligence carried out in Russia/USSR during the late 1920s and early 1930s. In these studies the IQs of social classes and of ethnic minorities were tested. These included Tatars (a Caucasoid people), Chuvash and Altai (mixed Caucasoid–Mongoloid peoples), Evenk (a mixed Caucasoid–Arctic people), and Uzbeks (a Central–South Asian people). The results of these studies showed socioeconomic differences of 12 IQ points between the children of white collar and blue collar workers, and that with the exception of the Tartars the ethnic minorities obtained lower IQs than European Russians.     

Anxiety and body satisfaction before and six months after mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery

As breast reconstruction is an important adjunct after mastectomy to regain physical integrity and also to improve affect, the present aim was to evaluate patients' subjective perceptions of body image during the whole breast reconstruction period and to assess the importance of their psychological reaction in terms of negative affectivity. Participants were 62 women, 43 women (M age = 46.4, SD = 9.8) who had had mastectomies and 19 healthy women (M age = 39.9, SD = 13.99). Patients were admitted for surgery at the Hospital S. Orsola in Bologna. Healthy subjects were relatives of the women and students, all with no history of breast pathology. The Body Satisfaction Scale and the State Anxiety Inventory-Y were administered to the two groups before, post, and 6 mo. after surgery. Analysis of scores indicated that during the period of the study, the women with mastectomies reported higher anxiety and also greater dissatisfaction with their body image than the healthy group, even when the breast had been reconstructed. This unexpected finding suggests patients' unrealistic expectations of the breast reconstruction and the surgical outcome.     

Term-Modal Logics

Many powerful logics exist today for reasoning about multi-agent systems, but in most of these it is hard to reason about an infinite or indeterminate number of agents. Also the naming schemes used in the logics often lack expressiveness to name agents in an intuitive way.To obtain a more expressive language for multi-agent reasoning and a better naming scheme for agents, we introduce a family of logics called term-modal logics. A main feature of our logics is the use of modal operators indexed by the terms of the logics. Thus, one can quantify over variables occurring in modal operators. In term-modal logics agents can be represented by terms, and knowledge of agents is expressed with formulas within the scope of modal operators.This gives us a flexible and uniform language for reasoning about the agents themselves and their knowledge. This article gives examples of the expressiveness of the languages and provides sequent-style and tableau-based proof systems for the logics. Furthermore we give proofs of soundness and completeness with respect to the possible world semantics.