Reality Monitoring for Sexual Abuse Memories

The reality monitoring model of Johnson and Raye proposes that the phenomenal characteristics of memories for real and imagined events are utilized in reality monitoring judgements. This study examined the reality monitoring strategies utilized by subjects when remembering sexual abuse, and compared them with the strategies utilized for other types of events. Thirty-one subjects described how they knew that four different autobiographical events (a sexual abuse experience, another unrelated trauma experience, a social occasion, and an imagined event) had, or had not, happened. Sexual abuse experiences were found to elicit a unique reality monitoring response profile. This profile suggests that the characteristics of memory for sexual abuse may be more vivid than other memories. In addition, the profile for sexual abuse shows fewer contextual supporting memories than other real memories, and more psychological reasoning responses. The finding that emotional rehearsal can cause fading of perceptual detail was not found to hold for the long-term autobiographical memories that were the object of this study. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EXPLORING OPTIONS FOR SUPPORTING TEST USE IN SITUATIONS PRECLUDING LOCAL VALIDATION

This paper examines some of the options available to practitioners interested in supporting the use of selection measures in an organization, including test transportability, validity generalization (VG), and synthetic validation, reviewing some of the advantages, disadvantages and requirements of each approach. Results of four unpublished, proprietary validation studies are reported which compare validity estimates provided by the job component validation (JCV; a type of synthetic validation) routine inherent in the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ) with observed validity coefficients for a variety of criterion measures. We then examine the accuracy of the JCV procedure in predicting validity coefficients for 51 clerical classifications extracted from an existing PAQ job evaluation database of a large utility company. Predicted JCVs are compared to mean observed validity coefficients for five DOT clerical categories provided by Pearlman, Schmidt, and Hunter (1980). The VG and JCV methods provided highly similar and converging estimates of the validity of cognitive ability tests for predicting performance in clerical occupations. Implications for practice are discussed, particularly the need to use multiple, converging lines of evidence to support test use.     

EFFECTS OF HANDICAP AND JOB CHARACTERISTICS ON SELECTION EVALUATIONS

An experiment was conducted using 211 upper division and graduate business administration students who evaluated hypothetical job applicants. The applicant was either an amputee, an epileptic, or "normal." The job either involved public contact or it did not; and, it either involved supervisory responsibilities or it did not. Generally, handicapped applicants were evaluated no differently than normal applicants. Epileptic applicants, however, were expected to establish better relationships with clients and customers as well as with other employees than were normal applicants. Further, amputees were offered a smaller salary than normals. Implications for future research and unfair discrimination are discussed.     

ANIMAL TALES: OBSERVATIONS OF THE EMOTIONS IN AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1890–1940

In nineteenth‐century science, the emotions played a crucial role in explaining the social behavior of animals and human beings. Beginning in the 1890s, however, the first American psychologists, resolutely parsimonious in method, dismissed affective experience as intellectually imprecise. Yet in practice, feelings continued to influence at least one research setting: animal experiments. Laboratory reports, although focused on learning, became a repository of informal observations about the animals’ temperaments and moods. When American psychologists began to reexamine the emotions between the world wars, they drew on this empirical legacy in animal studies. They also devised a conceptual approach to emotion consistent with their expectation of experimental precision.     

RATER SOURCE EFFECTS ARE ALIVE AND WELL AFTER ALL

Recent research has questioned the importance of rater perspective effects on multisource performance ratings (MSPRs). Although making a valuable contribution, we hypothesize that this research has obscured evidence for systematic rater source effects as a result of misspecified models of the structure of multisource performance ratings and inappropriate analytic methods. Accordingly, this study provides a reexamination of the impact of rater source on multisource performance ratings by presenting a set of confirmatory factor analyses of two large samples of multisource performance rating data in which source effects are modeled in the form of second-order factors. Hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis of both samples revealed that the structure of multisource performance ratings can be characterized by general performance, dimensional performance, idiosyncratic rater, and source factors, and that source factors explain (much) more variance in multisource performance ratings whereas general performance explains (much) less variance than was previously believed. These results reinforce the value of collecting performance data from raters occupying different organizational levels and have important implications for research and practice.