Does interview anxiety predict job performance and does it influence the predictive validity of interviews?

Interview anxiety is negatively related to interview performance; however, its relation to job performance is unknown. It could correlate negatively with job performance, and it could moderate the interview performance–job performance relation. In a sample of applicants for Residence Assistant positions, interview anxiety had near‐zero correlations with job performance, rated by supervisors and supervisees. It moderated the relation between interview performance and supervisor‐rated facilitating peer and team performance, such that interview performance did not predict this job performance component for anxious applicants. The moderation was not found for supervisor‐rated task proficiency, or for supervisee ratings of either job performance component, suggesting that the impact of interview anxiety depends on rater source and which job performance component is rated.     

Recognition memory and prefrontal cortex: dissociating recollection and familiarity processes using rTMS

Recognition memory can be supported by both the assessment of the familiarity of an item and by the recollection of the context in which an item was encountered. The neural substrates of these memory processes are controversial. To address these issues we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) of healthy subjects performing a remember/know task. rTMS disrupted familiarity judgments when applied before encoding of stimuli over both right and left DLPFC. rTMS disrupted recollection when applied before encoding of stimuli over the right DLPFC. These findings suggest that the DLPFC plays a critical role in recognition memory based on familiarity as well as recollection.     

For whom the mind wanders, and when: an experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life

An experience-sampling study of 124 undergraduates, pretested on complex memory-span tasks, examined the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and the experience of mind wandering in daily life. Over 7 days, personal digital assistants signaled subjects eight times daily to report immediately whether their thoughts had wandered from their current activity, and to describe their psychological and physical context. WMC moderated the relation between mind wandering and activities' cognitive demand. During challenging activities requiring concentration and effort, higher-WMC subjects maintained on-task thoughts better, and mind-wandered less, than did lower-WMC subjects. The results were therefore consistent with theories of WMC emphasizing the role of executive attention and control processes in determining individual differences and their cognitive consequences.     

Self-awareness, self-evaluation, and creativity

The present research examined when self-evaluation influences creativity. Based on objective self-awareness theory, the authors predicted that feeling able to improve would buffer against the detrimental effects of self-evaluation on creativity. Two experiments manipulated self-evaluation (varying self-awareness, Study 1; providing objective performance standards, Study 2) and perceived ability to improve potential failure on the creativity task. Self-evaluation reduced creativity (generating remote associates, finding unusual uses for a knife) in both experiments, but only when people did not expect to improve. When people felt able to improve, self-evaluation did not affect creativity. Connections between self-motives, creativity, and defensiveness are discussed.     

Processing correlates of lexical semantic complexity

This paper explores how verb meanings that differ in semantic complexity are processed and represented. In particular, we compare eventive verbs, which denote causally structured events, with stative verbs, which denote facts without causal structure. We predicted that the conceptually more complex eventive verbs should take longer to process than stative verbs. Two experiments, a lexical decision task and a self-paced reading study, confirmed this prediction. The findings suggest that (a) semantic complexity is reflected in processing time, (b) processing verb meanings involves activating properties of the event structure beyond participants' roles, and (c) more generally, lexical event structures, which subsume thematic roles, may mediate between syntactic knowledge and semantic interpretation.     

Personality is associated with perceived health and functional status in older primary care patients

Using data collected on 265 primary care medical patients 60 years of age and older, the authors examined the personality bases of subjective health (perceived health, functional status) after controlling for observer-rated depression and medical burden. Four hypotheses were tested: High Neuroticism is associated with poorer perceived health, low Extraversion is associated with poorer perceived health, low Openness to Experience is associated with worse functional status, and age moderates the relationships between personality and subjective health. Findings supported the notion that personality is associated with subjective health; moreover, this effect appeared to grow more pronounced with increasing age. This study underscores the conceptual and heuristic value of examining moderators of the links between personality variables and health.     

Responding to deviance: target exclusion and differential devaluation

Two studies explored responses to ingroup deviance. Group-defining opinions of prowar Republicans (Study 1) and prolife Christians (Study 2) were challenged by either an ingroup or outgroup deviate. Participants evaluated the deviate and structured the boundaries of their ingroup in counterbalanced order. Of importance, boundary structuring allowed participants to exclude deviates from the ingroup. Consistent with previous research, ingroup deviates were devalued relative to out-group deviates, but only when target evaluation was participants' first response option. Participants excluded deviates from the boundaries of their ingroup irrespective of measure order, and doing so eliminated differential devaluation when exclusion was participants' first response option. Exclusion decreased liking for outgroup deviates in Study 1 and increased liking for ingroup deviates in Study 2. The findings suggest that devaluation is an attempt to exclude deviates from the ingroup and that doing so reduces the threat otherwise experienced.     

Difference in sensorimotor adaptation to horizontal and vertical mirror distortions during ballistic arm movements

When learning a novel motor task, the sensorimotor system must develop new strategies to efficiently control the limb(s) involved, and this adaptation appears to be developed through the construction of a behavioral map known as an 'internal model'. A common method to uncover the mechanisms of adaptation and reorganization processes is to expose the system to new environmental conditions, typically by introducing visual or mechanical distortions. The present study investigated the adaptation mechanisms of the human sensorimotor system to horizontal and vertical mirror distortions (HMD and VMD) during the execution of fast goal-directed arm movements. Mirror distortions (MDs) were created by means of virtual visual feedback on a computer screen while the movement was executed on a graphics tablet. Twenty healthy adult participants were recruited and assigned to one of two groups of 10 people each. Tests were divided in two subsequent blocks of five trials. The first block consisted of trials with no mirror distortion (NMD), while the second block was recorded when exposing one group to HMD and the other to VMD. Both MDs resulted in kinematic changes: during the tests with the MDs the participants did not reach the performance level found at the NMD test. Motor performance during HMD appeared to be globally better than during VMD and the adaptation process to VMD appeared to be slower than to HMD, but data interpretation was hampered by large within-participant and between-participant variability. In-depth analyses of the data revealed that most of the motor performance information was contained in the direction of movement. The data supported the idea that the internal model for HMD was already partially built.