A Review of North American Selection Procedures: Canada and the United States of America

This article reviews North American selection procedures used to make employment decisions (hiring, promotion, training, layoff and demotion) within public and private organizations in Canada and the United States of America. We present the conclusions of several surveys of selection practices including those conducted by the International Personnel Management Association and the American Management Association. We summarize the literature on assessment centers, biodata, computerized assessment, education and experience criteria, individual assessment, education and experience criteria, individual assessment, integrity testing, interviews, job knowledge tests, physical and psychomotor tests and written tests. We also describe selection procedures being used for a variety of occupations from Air Traffic Controller to Telephone Operator. We conclude by describing future trends in personnel assessment in North America and predict greater collaborative research efforts between our two countries.     

The nature of feared outcome representations in children

The present study investigated the way in which feared outcomes are organized in long-term memory in children and adolescents. A list of items relating to threatening outcomes, originally generated by children, was given to an additional 560 children (aged 6 to 16) and rated for the degree to which they worried about each. Factor analysis revealed two interpretable factors of feared outcomes. The first factor centered on concerns about physical harm while the second factor centered on social consequences that children and adolescents worry about. The two factors were consistent across gender, age, and clinical status. A scale involving the maximally discriminating items showed good internal consistency and test-retest reliability.The authors would like to thank Paula Barrett, Mark Dadds and the people from the Child Anxiety Project for access to anxious children.     

Strength of Subordinates’ Upward Influence Tactics and Gender Congruency Effects1

An empirical investigation with 117 superior-subordinate dyads examines the moderating effects of subordinate gender on the relationships between the strength of upward influence tactics and three outcome variables: performance ratings, psychosocial mentoring functions, and career-related mentoring functions. The results support predictions that men who employ stronger upward influence tactics obtain higher performance ratings and more career-related mentoring functions, and women who employ weaker upward influence tactics obtain more psychosocial mentoring functions. Implications of the findings for theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

The role of visual imagery in the enhanced cognitive interview: guided questioning techniques and individual differences

The cognitive interview utilises mnemonics and other techniques to facilitate obtaining information from victims and witnesses. Research has indicated superior recall to standard police interviews. However, there has been minimal research regarding the role of individual differences. One area that has generated spirited theoretical debate is imagery ability, as guided imagery questioning is an important part of the enhanced cognitive interview. Imagery is also arguably an integral part of several mnemonics employed in the technique. The present study investigated the role of individual differences in imagery ability, as well as the effect of explicit instructions to image, on recall performance. Participants completed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ), witnessed a film of a simulated crime, and were interviewed using the cognitive interview or a structured interview. While recall in the cognitive interview was superior, VVIQ scores had little relationship with recall of information. Further, recall elicited by guided imagery differed only minimally from that obtained using standard questioning in the structured interview. These results suggested that the relaxation and rapport building common to questioning in both interview conditions may evoke spontaneous imagery that is comparable to explicit instructions to image, regardless of individuals' inherent imagery ability. Future directions are discussed, including research focused on individual differences and a practical emphasis on context reinstatement and social facilitative techniques. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Memory for vocal tempo and pitch

Two experiments examined the ability to remember the vocal tempo and pitch of different individuals, and the way this information is encoded into the cognitive system. In both studies, participants engaged in an initial familiarisation phase while attending was systematically directed towards different aspects of speakers’ voices. Afterwards, they received a tempo or pitch recognition task. Experiment 1 showed that tempo and pitch are both incidentally encoded into memory at levels comparable to intentional learning, and no performance deficit occurs with divided attending. Experiment 2 examined the ability to recognise pitch or tempo when the two dimensions co-varied and found that the presence of one influenced the other: performance was best when both dimensions were positively correlated with one another. As a set, these findings indicate that pitch and tempo are automatically processed in a holistic, integral fashion [Garner, W. R. (1974). The processing of information and structure. Potomac, MD: Erlbaum.] which has a number of cognitive implications.     

Subjective Well-Being in Cities: A Multidimensional Concept of Individual, Social and Cultural Variables

Subjective indicators of well-being have been proposed as guides for development policy since development is not limited to material wealth (Veenhoven, Social Indicators Research, 58:33–45 2002; Diener, Journal of Happiness Studies 7:4–397 2006). Development studies have suffered from a materialistic bias (Easterlin, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 27:35–47 1995). The paper presents a comparative cross-cultural investigation of domains of subjective well-being (SWB) and a global measure of Satisfaction with Life as a Whole (SWLS) in three cities: Bogotá-Colombia; Belo-Horizonte-Brazil and Toronto-Canada. The Personal and National Wellbeing Indexes (PWI and NWI) developed by the International Wellbeing Group (IWG, Cummins, Social Indicators Research 38:303–328 1996; Cummins et al., Social Indicators Network News 69:8 2002) as well as the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS, Diener et al., Journal of Personality Assessment 49:71–75 1985) were applied and successfully validated at the city level. The cities chosen have similar democratic institutions but different cultures and different “objective” indicators of development. Significant differences across cities as well as significant interaction effects were found for the subjective well-being indexes and demographic variables. Based on these results, we propose that NWI may be seen as a contextual antecedent of PWI, consistent with our view that individual evaluations of SWB may be determined by dispositional factors (top-down), context (bottom-up domains) and cultural values. The validation of the subjective well-being indexes in diverse cultural contexts is an important contribution in a field that has been mainly dominated by European, American and Australian samples.     

An analysis of age differences in perceptual speed

Tests of the generalized slowing hypothesis have demonstrated the strong predictive power of tests of perceptual comparison speed in accounting for age differences across a range of cognitive domains. The goals of this study were to determine whether short-term memory (STM) and perceptual demands contribute to age differences on two commonly used tests of perceptual comparison speed, the letter and pattern comparison tests, and to test whether these task components account for unique variance in predicting age differences in working memory and reasoning. Results showed that, after controlling for visual contrast sensitivity and a general slowing factor, age differences increased with increases in both STM load and perceptual degradation. Only STM load, however, accounted for a significant portion of the relationship of age with higher level cognition. We concluded that perceptual comparison tests are dependent on multiple age-sensitive abilities, not all of which are related to age differences in higher level cognition.