Screening Job Applicants: The Impact of Physical Attractiveness and Application Quality

The present study investigated the impact of physical attractiveness and résuméquality on the evaluation of job applicants in the screening phase of the selection process. One hundred and eighty participants were asked to imagine they were a recruiting officer and to screen an application for the position of graduate trainee manager. Participants read a job advertisement and one of two versions of a curriculum vitae, which differed in quality. Attached to the front page of each curriculum vitae was a passport-sized head-and-shoulders photograph of either an average or an attractive female. A control condition with no attached photograph was also included. Participants judged the likelihood with which they would offer an interview to the applicant, the quality of the application, and the likely starting salary they would offer the applicant. Results indicated that attractiveness had no impact when the quality of the application was high but that attractiveness was an advantage when the application was mediocre. When the résumé quality was average the attractive applicant was evaluated more positively than the control, no photograph, applicant; an attractive photograph boosted the evaluation of a mediocre application. Results are discussed in terms of discrimination and implications for the field of human resource management.     

The perils of learning to move while speaking: One-sided interference between speech and visuomotor adaptation

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Our understanding of the adaptive processes that shape sensorimotor behavior is largely derived from studying isolated movements. Studies of visuomotor...     

Role of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex in mediating behavioral control-induced reduction of later conditioned fear

A prior experience of behavioral control over a stressor interferes with subsequent Pavlovian fear conditioning, and this effect is dependent on the activation of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (mPFCv) at the time of the initial experience with control. It is unknown whether mPFCv activity is necessary during fear learning and/or testing for this interference to occur. One week following controllable stress, the infralimbic cortex (IL) was temporarily inactivated either before fear learning or later testing. Inactivation of the IL before the test for conditioned fear, but not before conditioning, blocked the fear reducing effects of prior controllable stress. This suggests that the experience with control interferes with the expression of fear behavior and not the learning of the association, and that the mPFCv is needed to regulate conditioned fear behavior.     

An auditory cue-depreciation effect.

An experiment is reported in which subjects first heard a list of words and then tried to identify these same words from degraded utterances. Paralleling previous findings in the visual modality, the probability of identifying a given utterance was reduced when the utterance was immediately preceded by other, more degraded, utterances of the same word. A second experiment replicated this "cue-depreciation effect" and in addition found the effect to be weakened, if not eliminated, when the target word was not included in the initial list or when the test was delayed by two days.     

Processing mode causally influences emotional reactivity: distinct effects of abstract versus concrete construal on emotional response

Three studies are reported showing that emotional responses to stress can be modified by systematic prior practice in adopting particular processing modes. Participants were induced to think about positive and negative scenarios in a mode either characteristic of or inconsistent with the abstract-evaluative mind-set observed in depressive rumination, via explicit instructions (Experiments 1 and 2) and via implicit induction of interpretative biases (Experiment 3), before being exposed to a failure experience. In all three studies, participants trained into the mode antithetical to depressive rumination demonstrated less emotional reactivity following failure than participants trained into the mode consistent with depressive rumination. These findings provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that processing mode modifies emotional reactivity and support the processing-mode theory of rumination.