Effects of Individual Differences on the Perceived Job Relatedness of a Cognitive Ability Test and a Multimedia Situational Judgment Test

Although there is a growing number of publications concerning applicant reactions to different selection instruments, the relationships between individual differences and applicant reactions have largely remained unexplored. The aim of the present study was to examine the effects of several testing‐related and general individual differences (anxiety, self‐evaluations, and personality) on the most commonly studied dimension of applicant reactions, namely the perceived job relatedness of selection instruments. Participants were 153 psychology students, who completed a cognitive ability test and a multimedia situational judgment test as part of their educational program. Our results indicated that computer anxiety negatively affected perceived job relatedness and core self‐evaluations, subjective well‐being, agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness to experience positively affected perceived job relatedness. Openness to experience was the most consistent predictor of perceived job relatedness. The results of our study suggest that certain individuals may be more predisposed to react positively to selection instruments. Therefore, we concluded that the nature of the applicant pool should be carefully considered when designing interventions to improve applicant reactions.     

Psychological individual differences as predictors of refugees’ local language proficiency

Learning the local language is important for the successful integration of immigrants. Previous research has identified a number of sociodemographic factors that are associated with the effectiveness of local language acquisition among immigrants, but little is known about the influence of psychological differences on immigrants’ local language acquisition. In the present research, individual differences in general mental ability (GMA), work search intention, and personality traits Conscientiousness and Openness were studied among recently arrived Syrian (n = 1054) and Eritrean (n = 500) refugees in the Netherlands. The results revealed that in addition to the effects of age of arrival, local length of stay, premigration educational attainment, and psychological distress, GMA and work search intention were positively associated with refugees’ local language proficiency. Additionally, work search intention was found to strengthen the effect of GMA on local language proficiency. No positive linear effects were observed for Conscientiousness and Openness. Some evidence was found for curvilinear relationships between psychological predictors and local language proficiency. Implications are discussed.     

Conditionals and inferential connections: toward a new semantics*

Abstract

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts.