Quitters would not prosper: Examining the relationship between online assessment performance and assessment attrition behavior

Hiring managers are often hesitant to implement online assessments over concerns that higher‐quality candidates are more likely to quit lengthy assessment batteries than lower‐quality candidates. In this paper, we present the results of two studies that collectively challenge this assumption. In Study 1, data from 327,517 job‐seekers spanning eight hiring contexts showed that assessment performance was negatively associated with subsequent assessment attrition behavior. In Study 2, we replicated this pattern of effects in two additional samples comprising 1,844,604 applicants for hourly associate positions, and 18,937 applicants for nursing positions. Collectively, these findings suggest that some degree of attrition may ultimately benefit, rather than harm, organizations using prehire assessments.     

Fathers’ Dosage in Community-based Programs for Low-income Fathers

Community-based programs for low-income fathers often struggle to get fathers to attend services and activities. This paper reviews the literature examining approaches to measuring dosage in fatherhood programs, rates of dosage, influences on dosage, and the associations between dosage and fathers’ outcomes. Studies were limited to programs that conducted randomized control trials, quasi-experimental studies, and one-group pretest/post-test designs. Although most programs report low or moderate dosage levels, some programs achieve high levels of fathers’ participation in parenting, coparenting, and economic security classes. Few studies examined dosage in relation to father outcomes. All but one of seven studies reporting effects showed that higher dose levels had positive associations with outcomes such as engagement with children, parenting satisfaction and self-efficacy, perception of coparenting quality, payment of child support, and earnings from work. This paper discusses future directions for studying father's dosage in fatherhood programs.     

EARSHOT: A Minimal Neural Network Model of Incremental Human Speech Recognition

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many-to-many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side-stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real-world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two-layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short-term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human-like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR.     

Psychoanalytic goals,therapeutic action,and the analyst's tension

The author draws a distinction between the goals of psychoanalysis and its therapeutic action. Goals are consciously (or at least preconsciously) held by the analyst, and can be clearly articulated. Ideas about the mechanism of therapeutic action, in contrast, are hypothetical constructs, and cannot be completely spelled out. This is bound to leave analysts in a state of tension; we are certain about what we are trying to do, but what we are actually accomplishing is elusive. This tension may be optimal for the analyst, because attention must be paid simultaneously to the idiosyncratic relationship in the dyad and to the broader purposes of the analytic engagement.     

Equality in hiring permanent resident foreign nationals in the United States: when loyalty is the question, but not the issue

Permanent resident foreign nationals, who have been legally admitted to the United States, have the right to work. However, when deciding the constitutionality of a state statute that requires citizenship for a public domain job, the rights of permanent residents to seek gainful employment are balanced against the rights of state governments to ensure that important sovereign functions are entrusted only to their citizens. Several important Supreme Court decisions have been 5/4 split decisions because of this tension and dissenting judges have countered that the majority rulings were based on presumptions, and not facts, that citizens are more loyal than permanent residents. The judges have also disagreed about the level, within a civil service hierarchy, below which a citizenship requirement is unconstitutional. This article reviews United States court decisions for relevant issues and solutions, and shows how empirical studies in the area of human resource management can help resolve the issues that have caused the dissent. The analysis will be useful to legal and human resource professionals in the U.S. and other countries affected by surging global migration.     

Joyce's Argument with Himself/Or, Reading Joyce's Inside Narrative

James Joyce's argument with himself about where he should practice his art and with what literary tradition he should identify—Irish, British, or European—is represented by several of the characters and episodes in his short story The Dead.In the main character, Gabriel Conroy, Joyce represented the conflicts that he himself experienced. But in many of the minor characters Joyce also reflected parts of his own wishes and fears.In this story, Joyce rejects the possibilities of artistic identification with Ireland and England, and, in the dynamics of the tale, arrives at the understanding that to fulfill his artistic aspirations, he must make an identification with the great European tradition, and also live in Europe; if he stays in Ireland or attempts to be an English author, he will be, as he portrays Gabriel to be, paralyzed, imitative, and a failure as an artist. Joyce himself took the decisive path that Gabriel could not choose.     

The relationship between out-of-school activities and positive youth development: an investigation of the influences of communities and family

There is growing evidence that participation in constructive leisure activities facilitates positive youth development. Empirical evidence also supports the influence of families and communities on positive developmental outcomes for adolescents. This study examined the relationship among attitudes toward family and community, participation in structured out-of-school activities, and pro-social behavior. As predicted, community aspects such as opportunities available and the attitudes the youth held toward the community, as well as their attitude toward family were predictive of activity involvement. Activity involvement, in turn, was predictive of pro-social behavior. Attitude toward family was also predictive of attitude toward the community. Attitude toward community was a direct predictor of the positive developmental outcome of pro-social behavior, although contrary to the original hypothesis, family influences did not have a direct effect on pro-social behavior. Implications for continued practice and change for a variety of sectors in the positive youth development field such as educators and educational institutions, youth-serving organizations, families, and policy makers are discussed, along with recommendations for continued research in this field.