Choosing How to Choose: Institutional Pressures Affecting the Adoption of Personnel Selection Procedures

The gap between science and practice in personnel selection is an ongoing concern of human resource management. This paper takes Oliver's framework of organizations' strategic responses to institutional pressures as a basis for outlining the diverse economic and social demands that facilitate or inhibit the application of scientifically recommended selection procedures. Faced with a complex network of multiple requirements, practitioners make more diverse choices in response to any of these pressures than has previously been acknowledged in the scientific literature. Implications for the science‐practitioner gap are discussed.     

人类行为遗传学的伦理问题

行为遗传学是试图定位与行为特性有关的特殊基因或基因组及了解基因与环境之间复杂关系的一种研究.行为遗传学是研究正常范围内的非病理变化,与人类疾病遗传学存在差异.行为遗传学研究面临许多伦理学问题,诸如,智力的遗传性,基因能否决定一切,生物社会学与人类文化评估,生命伦理学与行为遗传学的关系等,因此,对行为遗传学研究结果的阐述必须十分谨慎.     

Maternal insightfulness and preschoolers' emotion and behavior problems: Reciprocal influences in a therapeutic preschool program

Mothers' insightfulness, which involves understanding the motives underlying the child's behavior in a complete, open, and accepting way, was examined both at the beginning and at the end of a therapeutic preschool program for preschoolers using the Insightfulness Assessment (Oppenheim & Koren‐Karie, 2002). The goal of the study was to examine the links between improvement in mothers' insightfulness and reduction in children's behavior problems. Thirty‐two children referred to a therapeutic preschool program for a range of behavioral and emotional problems and their mothers participated in the study. Results showed that mothers who shifted from noninsightfulness before treatment to insightfulness after treatment had children whose behavior problems decreased whereas mothers who did not make such gains had children whose behavior problems increased. The social skills of all children improved during treatment. The possible mechanisms linking the gains of mothers and children are discussed within the framework of attachment theory.     

AQS security scores: What do they represent? A study in construct validation

In a sample of 129 Dutch 15‐month‐old infants, attachment security was assessed both with the Attachment Q‐Set (AQS; Waters, 1995) and with a short version of Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall's (1978) Strange Situation (SSS). Infants classified as secure using the SSS had significantly higher AQS scores than insecure and disorganized infants in particular. At the AQS item level, disorganized infants were described as significantly more noncompliant, fussy, and angry relative to secure infants. When security as assessed using the SSS was controlled, the observed quality of parental interactive behavior, parental ego‐resilience, high levels of infant task orientation and pleasure, and low levels of infant anger proneness were found to explain significant and unique portions of the variance in the AQS security scores. The apparently unfavorable set of characteristics associated with low AQS security scores suggests such scores to predict later developmental problems. ©2004 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Ethnic Match and Treatment Outcomes for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Center Clients

This study investigated the effects of client ethnicity and client‐counselor ethnic match on treatment outcomes (i.e., GAF‐difference [from the Global Assessment of Functioning Axis V rating of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, American Psychiatric Association, 1994] and client visitation) of 1,946 child and adolescent community mental health center clients. After controlling for 7 other variables, no differences were observed after adjustment among client ethnicities, age groups, or ethnic match on the GAF‐difference dependent measure. Ethnically matched African American child and adolescent clients had fewer mental health visits than did their nonmatched counterparts. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Healthy and chronically‐ill children's generalisation of illness to biological and non‐biological categories

Using children's naïve theory of biology as a framework, this study investigated children's developing understanding of illness by examining their generalisation of illness to biological and non‐biological categories. In addition to differences associated with age, the children's health status was investigated for any possible linkwith their understanding. Healthy and chronically‐ill children, aged 4–11 years, were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, according to which exemplar (child, dog or duck) was described as suffering from an imaginary illness. Using a card‐sorting technique, the children assessed whether each entity out of 30 entities (five representatives in each of six categories: humans, mammals, non‐mammals, birds, plants and artifacts) could be afflicted by that illness. The children's generalisations indicated a grasp of the distinctiveness of the various categories, although they seemed less certain about the biological status of plants. Furthermore, the type of exemplar on which the children had been taught influenced their responses. However, the children's reasoning appeared unaffected by their health status and largely unaffected by age or gender. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hierarchy of interactive functions in father‐mother‐baby three‐way games

In developmental research, the family has mainly been studied through dyadic interaction. Three‐way interactions have received less attention, partly because of their complexity. This difficulty may be overcome by distinguishing between four hierarchically embedded functions in three‐way interactions: (1) participation (inclusion of all participants), (2) organization (partners keeping to their roles), (3) focalization (sharing a common focus) and (4) affective contact (being in tune). We document this hierarchical model on a sample of 80 families observed in the Lausanne Trilogue Play situation across four different sites. Hierarchy between functions was demonstrated by means of Guttman scalability coefficient. Given the importance of the child's development in a threesome, the pertinence of this model for family assessment is discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Short-term memory performances during sustained wakefulness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome

Both working and immediate memories were assessed every 4h by specific short-term memory tasks over sustained wakefulness in 12 patients with obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) and 10 healthy controls. Results indicated that OSAHS patients exhibited lower working memory performances than controls on both backward digit span and complex Sternberg tasks. Speed and accuracy on Sternberg tasks were affected by memory load in both groups. However, immediate memory was not impaired in OSAHS patients. Diurnal and nocturnal SaO(2) were correlated with speed and accuracy high-speed memory scanning performance on Sternberg tasks in patients. These results suggest specific working memory deficits associated with OSAHS over sustained wakefulness with a possible deficiency in the central executive responsible for the higher information processing, in addition to a potentially insufficient storage capacity. Among OSAHS patients, working memory ability involved in high-speed memory scanning may be impaired by chronic hypoxemia.     

Are people always more risk averse after disasters? Surveys after a heavy snow‐hit and a major earthquake in China in 2008

China suffered both a heavy snow‐hit and a major earthquake in 2008. To investigate the effects of disasters on risky decision making, opportunity samples were obtained by recruiting residents in both devastated and non‐devastated areas. In a survey (Study 1) conducted shortly after the heavy snow‐hit, we found that people were not always more risk averse after a disaster as previous studies had claimed and that they were inclined to approach an option with ‘low probability associated gain’ and to avoid an option with ‘low probability associated loss’. These findings were replicated in a consecutive survey (Study 2) conducted after the Wenchuan earthquake. It was further found that the popularity of both insurance and lottery, which presumably contributed to overweighing of small probabilities, was detected to have been enhanced with substantial exposure to the earthquake disaster. The implications of these findings for risk education and government policy making were discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.