Dr. Sabiha Alam Choudhury is currently working as the Head of Department of Psychology and Counselling at School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Assam Don Bosco University, Tapesia, India.
Her research areas are Positive Psychology, Counselling & Psychotherapy, and Marriage and Family Counselling. |
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Learn about the negative effects of screen time with Dr Marlena Kruger
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Researchers Calculate Acquiring A Language Requires Learning 1.5 Megabytes Of Data, With Implications For Psychological Theory
By Emma Young
How do we acquire our native language? Are the basics of language and grammar innate, as nativists argue? Or, as empiricists propose, is language something we must learn entirely from scratch?
This debate has a long history. To get at an answer, it’s worth setting the theories aside and instead looking at just how much information must be learned in order to speak a language with adult proficiency, argue Francis Mollica at the University of Rochester, US, and Steven Piantadosi at the University of California, Berkeley. If the amount is vast, for instance, this could indicate that it’s impracticable for it all to be learned without sophisticated innate language mechanisms. In their new paper, published in Royal Society Open Science, Mollica and Piantadosi present results suggesting that some language-specific knowledge could be innate – but probably not the kind of syntactic knowledge (the grammatical rules underlying correct word order) that nativists have tended to argue in favour of. Indeed, their work suggests that the long-running focus on whether syntax is learned or innate has been misplaced.
Mollica and Piantadosi worked out “back-of-the-envelope” upper, lower and “best guess” estimates of how much information we have to absorb in order to acquire various aspects of language — to identify phonemes (units of sound), word-forms, and lexical semantics (the meaning of words and the relationships between them), as well as syntax, for example.
The maths that they used to do this is complex. (If you’re fond of equations that span a page-width, you should definitely check theirs out.) But their fundamental approach is to compute the number of “bits” required to specify an outcome — learning the meaning of a word, for example — “from a plausible space of logically possible alternatives”.
Using this approach, they estimate that storing essential knowledge about phonemes takes up only about 750 bits (a bit is a binary unit of information used in computing; 8 million bits is equivalent to 1 megabyte). However, a typical adult vocabulary of about 40,000 words involves perhaps about 400,000 bits of lexical knowledge. Storing information about what all these words mean is more demanding: the researchers’ best guess is somewhere in the region of 12,000,000 bits. A language-learner would also need to store about 80,000 bits of information about word frequency, they suggest.
Next, Mollica and Piantadosi turned to syntax. “Syntax has traditionally been the battleground for debates about how much information is built-in versus learned,” they write. “In the face of massively incompatible and experimentally under-determined syntactic theories, we aim here to study the question in a way that is as independent as possible.” In fact, they estimate that we need to store only a very small amount of data about syntax — perhaps only 667 bits. According to these estimates, having innate knowledge of syntax wouldn’t be especially helpful, as acquiring it is relatively undemanding.
Syntactic knowledge may not require a huge amount of knowledge but the total amount of language-related information that must be stored by a proficient language speaker is massive: around 1.5 megabytes. If correct, this would mean that up until the age of 18, a child would have to remember, on average, 1000 to 2000 bits of information every day. The researchers’ very lowest estimate is that reaching adult language proficiency would require that a child learn 120 bits per day.
“To put our lower estimate in perspective, each day for 18 years a child must wake up and remember, perfectly and for the rest of their life, an amount of information equivalent to the information in this sequence:
0110100001101001011001000110010001100101011011100110000101100011
01100011011011110111001001100100011010010110111101101110”
Such a “remarkable feat of cognition” suggests that language acquisition is grounded in “remarkably sophisticated mechanisms for learning, memory and inference,” the pair comment.
These are ballpark-type figures, they stress. But, even so, they argue that their estimates suggest that neither the nativist nor the empiricist approach provides a viable account of how we come to represent lexical semantics (word meanings) – which their work indicates is overwhelmingly the biggest language mountain to conquer.
“Our results suggest that if any language-specific knowledge is innate, it is most likely for helping tackle the immense challenge of learning lexical semantics, rather than other domains with learnability problems that require orders of magnitude less information,” Mollica and Piantadosi conclude.
—Humans store about 1.5 megabytes of information during language acquisition
Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest
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Is It True That It’s More Painful To Come Second Rather Than Third? New Insights From The 2016 Olympics
By guest blogger Bradley Busch
To win a medal of any kind at the Olympic Games takes years of training, hard work and sacrifice. Standing on an Olympic podium is widely regarded as the pinnacle of an athlete’s career. Nonetheless, only one athlete can win gold, leaving the two runner-up medallists to ponder what might have been. Intriguingly a seminal study from the 1992 Olympic Games suggested that this counterfactual thinking was especially painful for silver medallists, who appeared visibly less happy than bronze medallists. The researchers speculated that this may have been because of the different counterfactual thinking they engaged in, with bronze medallists being happy that they didn’t come fourth while silver medallists felt sad that they didn’t win gold.
However, subsequent research based on the 2000 Olympic Games did not replicate this finding: this time silver medallists were found to be happier than bronze medallists. To further muddy the waters, a study from the 2004 Games was consistent with the seminal research, finding that straight after competition, gold and bronze medallists were more likely to smile than silver medallists, with these smiles being larger and more intense.
Now further insight into the psychology of coming second or third comes via Mark Allen, Sarah Knipler and Amy Chan of the University of Wollongong, who have released their findings based on the 2016 Olympic Games. These latest results, published in Journal of Sports Sciences, again challenge that initial eye-grabbing result that suggested bronze medallists are happier than silver medallists, but they support the idea that the nature of counterfactual thinking differs depending on whether athletes come second or third.
In the first study, the researchers had 20 participants rate how happy 486 Olympic medallists looked whilst standing on the podium. The participants based their judgments on full headshot photos of each athlete, deliberately cropped so that they could not see which medal the athletes had won.
Participants rated gold medal athletes as being significantly happier than those who won either silver or bronze. They rated bronze medallists as marginally happier than silver medallists, though by such a small margin that it is “likely to be trivial or negligible”, according to Allen and his team.
In their second study, the researchers explored how much counterfactual thinking the different athletes did by having participants analyse the media interviews of 192 silver and bronze medallists. They explored frequency (i.e. how much they dwelt on “what if…” scenarios), direction (i.e. what things could have gone better vs. what things could have been worse) and reference (i.e. reflecting on what they could have done differently vs. what their opponent could have done differently).
They found that silver medallists engaged more frequently in counterfactual thinking than bronze medallists, and that this was likely to be directed towards how the event could have gone better. Interestingly, both silver and bronze medallists primarily focused on their own performance, but silver medallists more often than bronze medallists also spent time talking about how their opponents had performed.
This study provides updated evidence that suggests that gold medallists are happiest on the podium and that no meaningful difference exists in happiness levels between silver and bronze medallists. However, the thought process and reflections between second and third-placed athletes do seem to vary, with silver medallists being more preoccupied by thoughts of how things could have been better and what would have happened if their opponents had behaved differently. These thought processes may act as a defence mechanism in order to protect their self-esteem and self-image. By reflecting on external factors, such as their opponent’s behaviour, it provides a shield to hide behind and deflect personal criticism away from any shortcomings of their own individual performance.
This study builds on previous research by using a larger sample size, blinding the participants to the outcome of the athletes’ medals, and by using equivalence tests to supplement standard statistical methods (such tests help identify whether a statistically significant finding is actually meaningful). That being said, the researchers note several important limitations, such as that some athletes were so well known that the participants probably knew what medal they had earned.
Other limitations include only using static photos of the athletes posing for the media on top of the podium. If that was to be broadened out to include either video footage or full body shots, this may be beneficial as evidence suggests that body language may be a better indicator of emotions than facial expressions.
This research makes a valuable contribution given the mixed findings previously reported. Furthermore, it may inform sports psychologists and coaches who work with athletes that have finished second or third in major competitions, helping them to provide appropriately tailored support.
—Happiness and counterfactual thinking at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games
Image: RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – AUGUST 21, 2016: Nikola Karabatic of France (C) reacts on the podium during the medal ceremony for Men’s Handball after winning the silver medal following the Men’s Gold Medal Match between Denmark and France on Day 16 of the Rio Olympic Games. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
Post written by Bradley Busch (@Inner_Drive) for the BPS Research Digest. Bradley is a registered psychologist and director of InnerDrive. He has worked with Premiership and International footballers and is the author of Release Your InnerDrive
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More Guidelines & Research Out on Kids’ Screen Time – How Should Parents Respond?
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization released new guidelines recommending no screen time at all for children under 2 and no more than one hour for children between the ages of two and four. These are similar to recommendations published by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 2016 for that age group. For older […]
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Could Your Immune System Be Making You Impulsive?
By Emma Young
You can have £10 today or £12 next week. Which do you go for?
Being able to forego a reward now in favour of gaining something better later is known to be important in determining all kinds of desirable outcomes in life, including greater educational attainment, social functioning and health.
However, choosing to delay gratification won’t always be the best option. If you’re in desperate circumstances – you badly need money to buy food, for example – taking the £10 today could be sensible. But this isn’t necessarily an entirely conscious judgment – there may be biological systems that automatically shift your decision-making priorities according to what is most likely to enhance your survival. A new open-access study published in Scientific Reports provides evidence that having raised levels of inflammation in your body, which is generally caused by the immune system’s response to infection or injury, can skew your judgment to focus more on present rewards, and on instant gratification. If further research backs this up, there could be wide-ranging implications not only for understanding why some people are more impulsive than others, but even for treating substance abuse.
Jeffrey Gassen and colleagues at the Texas Christian University, US, reasoned that inflammation should enhance a person’s desire for immediately available resources, as the body’s response to sickness requires extra energy, and, for a sick person, their future is less certain. To explore whether this is actually the case, they recruited 159 healthy, non-obese, young college students who abstained from behaviours that can cause an acute increase in inflammation, such as smoking, exercise, sex and drinking alcohol, for two days prior to the study.
The participants completed a widely-used impulsiveness scale, an instant gratification inventory, as well as two behavioural assessments – one of which explored their preferences for smaller and immediate vs. larger, delayed rewards. The participants also reported their body mass index, physical activity levels, smoking, alcohol consumption, sleep quality, stress and other variables (all of which relate to having a greater focus on the present, to inflammation levels, or both).
The participants then gave blood samples, which were checked for levels of three pro-inflammatory cytokines (proteins that indicate greater inflammation). The researchers found that participants with higher levels of inflammation also tended to have a style of decision-making characterised by impulsivity, a focus on the present, and an inability to delay gratification.
This analysis alone of course cannot indicate the direction of the relationship. Might it rather be the case that harmful, present-focused behaviours were driving higher levels of inflammation? The researchers explored this possibility by looking to see whether particular behaviours – usual levels of smoking, alcohol intake and risky sexual behaviours, for instance – predicted greater inflammation. But none did.
This might sound surprising (as smoking, for example, has been clearly associated with inflammation in past studies). But these participants were chosen on purpose to be healthy and young. They were also instructed to avoid such behaviours for 48 hours prior to the study, in theory to make it easier to isolate any effects of inflammation on decision-making.
All in all, “these results suggest that the activities of the immune system may play an important role in shaping decision-making preferences,” Gassen and his colleagues write. In doing so, they add “…to the growing body of research demonstrating that the internal, physiological condition of the body plays an important role in modulating decision-making and behaviour.”
If further experimental work can firm up this link, there could be “exciting new possibilities” for treating substance abuse disorders, the researchers suggest, and there could be implications for people who have experienced early life stress, who are known to be more prone to inflammation. Drug-based or behavioural interventions targeted at reducing circulating levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines might possibly “sever the link between an individual’s propensity to inflammation and undesirable behaviours, improving outcomes for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
As the researchers themselves point out, clearly a lot more work has to be done. But as they also note, this study was on healthy young people, with relatively low levels of inflammation. People with chronic illness or obesity have persistently high levels and the activity of their immune system may then have an even greater effect on the way that they behave and even think.
Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest
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The benefits of conscious deep breathing with Dr Ela Manga
If we stick with conscious deep breathing for a while, the way we feel, think and behave in response to...
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Why Do People With Depression Like Listening To Sad Music?
By We all know the powerful effect that music can have on mood. You might be feeling rather chirpy, but then a tear-jerker comes on the car radio and you arrive home feeling morose (conversely, of course, happy tunes can lift our spirits). For most of us, these effects are not a big deal. But what if you are living with depression? Now the implications become more serious. And, according to a provocative study published a few years ago, far from seeking out uplifting music, people diagnosed with depression are notably more inclined than healthy controls to choose to listen to sad music (and look at sad images). The controversial implication is that depressed people deliberately act in ways that are likely to maintain their low mood. Now a study in the journal Emotion has replicated this finding, but the researchers also present evidence suggesting depressed people are not seeking to maintain their negative feelings, but rather that they find sad music calming and even uplifting.
“The current study is the most definitive to date in probing depression-related preferences for sad music using different tasks, and the reasons for these preferences,” write the team at the University of South Florida, led by Sunkyung Yoon.
The research involved 38 female undergrads diagnosed with depression and 38 non-depressed female undergrad controls. The first part of the study was a replication attempt using the same materials as the 2015 paper that found depressed people preferred sad music. The participants listened to 30-second excerpts of sad (“Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber” and “Rakavot” by Avi Balili), happy and neutral music, and stated which they would prefer to listen to again in the future. Successfully replicating the earlier research, Yoon and his team found that their depressed participants were more likely to choose the sad music clips.
However, unlike in that earlier research, Yoon’s team also asked their participants why they made the choices they did. The majority of the participants with depression who favoured sad music said that they did so because it was relaxing, calming or soothing.
The second part of the study used new music samples: 84 pairs of 10-second clips of instrumental film music, contrasting happy, sad, fear-inducing, neutral, and also high and low energy tracks. In each case the same participants as before indicated which music they’d prefer to listen to again later. They also heard all the samples again at the end and stated what effect they had on their emotions. The researchers found again that people with depression had a far greater preference than controls for sad, low-energy music (but not fear-inducing music). Critically, though, when they heard these clips again, they reported that they made them feel more happiness and less sadness, contradicting the provocative idea that depressed people are seeking to perpetuate their low mood.
This study is unable to speak to why depressed people find low-energy, sad music uplifting, although common sense suggests that if you are feeling down, then a fast-paced, happy clappy tune might be irritating and inappropriate, whereas a more soothing, serious tune could be comforting. Further clues come from another recent study that investigated why (non-depressed) people generally like listening to sad music when they’re feeling down – for instance, some participants said the sad music acted like a supportive friend.
The new research involved only a small sample of female undergrads, and it only looked at emotional effects over a short time frame. Yoon and his colleagues acknowledge more research is needed to find out why exactly depressed people favour sad music. For now though, the new findings suggest that this preference “… may reflect a desire for calming emotional experience rather than a desire to augment sad feelings.”
—Why Do Depressed People Prefer Sad Music?
Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest
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Can vacations live up to their reputation?
Especially in the time before summer, people look forward to the beginning of their summer vacations. On the one hand, holidays are an integral part of life of our society and primarily provide relaxation and recovery. On the other hand, recent research shows that vacation effects fade-out quite quickly after returning to work. As such, this raises an important question: Are vacations overvalued or even superfluous? What do we know about this phenomenon and what needs to be further investigated? Vacations are considered to be the nicest time of the year as they are associated with leisure...View more here.
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The work-life balance: How to be productive without being a workaholic
Advancing technology and fast-paced modern lifestyles make it difficult to unplug. Here are some suggestions for maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
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Are Female And Male Brains Fundamentally Different? An Expert Pours Cold Water On Recent Claims That A Brain-Scan Study of Foetuses Proves They Are
By guest blogger Gina Rippon
In case you hadn’t noticed, there is an ongoing debate about the existence of differences between women’s and men’s brains, and the extent to which these might be linked to biological or to cultural factors. In this debate, a real game-changer of a study would involve the identification of clear-cut sex differences in foetal brains: that is, in brains that have not yet been exposed to all the different expectations and experiences that the world might offer. A recent open-access study published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience by Muriah Wheelock at the University of Washington and her colleagues, including senior researcher Moriah Thomason at New York University School of Medicine, claims to have done just that, hailed by the researchers themselves as “confirmation that sexual dimorphism in functional brain systems emerges during human gestation” and in various ways by the popular press as, for example, The Times of London’s headline: “Proof at last: women and men are born to be different”.
Does this study live up to the claims made by its authors and, more excitedly, those passing the message on? I think not.
The study is certainly heroic in methodological terms, comprising a challenging recruitment and scanning strategy to capture “resting state” data (brain activity during rest rather than during an active task) from over 100 prenatal participants. As well as not having direct access to their participants, the experimenters had to devise extraordinarily complex ways of controlling for their movement – a challenge for any brain scan study, but particularly those hoping to measure connectivity. This involved the researchers identifying the “stillest” periods in each 12-24 minute foetal resting state scan, and then performing subsequent re-alignment and readjustments (or, effectively, cutting and pasting of each of lowest movement epochs together for analysis). We are told that 40 per cent of the acquired data had to be discarded in this process (something that should be borne in mind in assessing the validity and reliability of the data).
Having identified 197 regions of interest (ROIs) in these foetal brain images, the researchers looked at how the activity in each region was correlated with the activity in all the others (a stronger correlation is taken as a sign of greater connectivity), resulting in an analysis of 19,306 connections or pairings between regions. The researchers then used an innovative method to identify significant clusterings in the data, to see if there were any networks or “hubs” of connectivity. It should be noted that the correlations were calculated separately for the males and females and that an uncorrected p-threshold of 0.05 was applied to the resulting correlations, both rather questionable statistical practices when working with data sets such as these.
Early versions of the overall methodological approach used here have previously been reported by the same research team , providing fascinating insights into the formation of neural connectivity systems in utero and how these change with gestational age. The basis for the current paper is a much bigger data set than they used previously, which could have continued to develop these insights. Sadly, and rather inexplicably, their focus here is on differences in connectivity between female and male foetuses. This is unfortunate, not because identifying prenatal sex differences in the brain is not a crucial process in this debate, but because this data set just does not lend itself to this kind of “hunt-the-difference” agenda.
One problem is that, of the 118 participants whose data survived all of the necessary exclusion criteria, 48 were female and 70 were male. This imbalance, together with the skewed distribution of several other demographic factors, such as gestational age when the scans took place, meant that the researchers had to use what are known as “nonparametric statistics” for many of their comparisons. This form of analysis, as well as lacking power, precludes the kind of multivariate analysis which would have allowed the researchers to consider multiple factors at once. For example, there was no way of simultaneously testing the relative contributions of differences in gestational age and differences in foetal sex to different types of network pairs (connections between different brain regions).
A related problem is the wide age range of the participants: from 25 weeks to 39 gestational weeks. That 14 week period covers a time of dramatic cortical development, especially the formation of cortical networks – a 25 week-old brain will be very different from a 39 week-old one. Although the researchers treated gestational age as a continuous variable, there is a query as to the comparability of the male and female groups with respect to this measure. In the age window 36-40 weeks (very near full-term), there were 35 males compared with only 17 females. Even with appropriate statistical controls, this could well have skewed the findings.
Related to this, there are concerns about the “normalisation” process carried out on each scan. This allows group analysis of images from different participants by “warping” them to a standard template so that locations on each image “line up” for comparison. What to select for a standard template is a tricky question for relatively comparable adult scans; here the researchers selected a 32-week foetal brain template, which could well have been inappropriate for any of the individual scans they were processing.
False impressions:
It is also important to note what was NOT reported in this study. The researchers’ focus was almost entirely on the sex differences they found, with little comment on evidence of the sex similarities. In one of their figures, for example, the researchers illustrate 136 possible sex by connectivity comparisons, of which only 3 showed a statistically significant difference between the sexes. And remember that, overall, there were connections between over 19,000 possible regions to consider.
The researchers use the term “sexual dimorphism” or “dimorphism” more than half a dozen times, including in that powerful statement from their abstract that I quoted at the start of my blog post. But their data do NOT demonstrate a dimorphic state – as well as the much greater incidence of no differences between the groups, we have no way of assessing just how different (or not) the connectivity pathways were. As so many of the sex-linked comparisons were based merely on contrasting the number of significant correlations between brain regions for males and females – for instance, one of the figures in the paper shows significant connectivity between 5 pairs of brain networks in female foetuses, as opposed to significant connectivity between 2 different brain networks in males – we have no idea of the effect size (the practical meaning) of any differences, nor the extent of overlap between the two groups.
Any studies focussing on sex differences in the brain have the potential to help explain gender gaps, not only in behaviour, personality and preferences, but also in differences in the occurrence of physical and mental health problems. Studies such as this could be invaluable for understanding the typical and atypical developmental trajectories which may lead to such gaps. But, equally, studies such as this can contribute to stereotypical essentialist beliefs that there are innate, fixed and inevitable sex differences in the brain (and therefore in behaviour and preferences). This can have significant downstream consequences for how society comes to understand, explain and even sustain these very gender gaps.
The data in this study offer an exciting and innovative look at the development of functional brain networks in the human brain, using complex and revelatory analyses. They do not offer confirmation of sexual dimorphism in human brain networks in utero and the authors of the study should not, I believe, be making this claim.
—Sex differences in functional connectivity during fetal brain development
Post written by Gina Rippon (@ginarippon1) for the BPS Research Digest. Gina is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. She is a past-President of the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience and, in 2015, was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the British Science Association. Her research involves state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as dyslexia and autism. She also investigates the use of neuroscience techniques to explore social processes such as gender stereotyping and stereotype threat. In her new book The Gendered Brain (Bodley Head), she challenges the idea that there are two sorts of “hardwired brains”, male and female, and offers a 21st century model for better understanding of how brains get to be different.
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Living for likes: The negative effects of social media
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[CROSS-POST] I-O Psychologists’ Passion Projects: Increasing Fairness for Job Seekers with Criminal Records
This blog post is cross-posted from APA’s Psych Learning Curve, a blog run by APA’s Education Directorate where psychology and education connect.
By Julia Golubovich, PhD
We continue our exploration of the field of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s Division 14. If you’ve read our recent blogs, you already know that I-O Psychology is the study of behavior in the workplace. I-O Psychologists frequently help businesses better hire, motivate, and retain employees, but they can apply their skills in many other ways.
In this second blog of a new series, we continue interviewing I-O Psychologists about their passion projects to show you how these individuals are applying their training to make a difference in human or animal lives. The first post explored the how an I-O psychologist helped the animal fostering program.
Meet Dr. Ann Marie Ryan, a Professor in Michigan State University’s Psychology Department. She received her Ph.D. in I-O Psychology from the University of Illinois in 1987, and has since become one of the most knowledgeable, productive, and respected professionals in the field. In addition to teaching, Ann Marie consults for organizations and leads a diversity research lab of graduate and undergraduate students. Ann Marie and her lab study populations that are underrepresented in workplaces. They investigate such groups’ identity management and inclusion at work with the goal of promoting workplace diversity.
One of the underrepresented populations Ann Marie and her students have been researching are individuals with criminal records. Consider this: more than 60 million adults in the U.S. are estimated to have criminal records, and 73% of employers conduct criminal background checks as part of their selection processes.
Fearing further criminal activity, or even just poor work ethic or interpersonal skills, employers are often apprehensive about hiring individuals with criminal records. The stigma these individuals carry makes it difficult for them to get good jobs, find their footing as productive members of society, and stay on paths that don’t involve any further criminal activity.
Ann Marie’s team is conducting a set of research studies to find out which impression management strategies can best help job applicants with criminal records manage their stigma, and how an employer can best judge the job-relevance of a given applicant’s criminal record. They’re attending to both job applicants’ and employers’ perspectives to find mutually beneficial solutions.
Juliya: How did you get involved in research looking at the experiences of individuals with criminal records when applying for jobs? What about this topic caught your interest?
Ann Marie: Since the beginning of my career, I have been interested in fairness in selection practices, so in some ways, this is not a new interest. However, this specific topic caught my interest a few years ago when the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), state laws, and other factors started to home in on the fact that the way criminal records are used to screen job applicants carries racial disparities in our criminal justice system into the employment sector as well.
I became even more interested through serving on expert panels where organizations were trying to make systematic judgments regarding how specific offenses relate to specific jobs. How the expertise of our field in job analysis and validation of selection procedures could be brought to bear more directly on those processes was interesting to me, particularly because it’s not a straightforward application.
Juliya: Thinking about this program of research, can you tell me a little about your process of formulating research questions and methods of studying them?
Ann Marie: Some questions arose directly from conversations with a number of different individuals in practice who just directly told me, “We need research on this,” as well as from attending SIOP conference sessions where the presenters discussed EEOC guidance on the topic.
Specific studies arose within our research team where my graduate students were already interested in issues of identity management in hiring contexts, and that led to extensions specifically to those with criminal records. This fit with our general research stream on providing tangible advice for those who may face stigmatization in hiring processes.
Other studies arose directly from my experience trying to make judgments about the job relatedness of offenses for specific jobs on expert panels, as well as using that same judgment task as an exercise in my undergraduate classes. Seeing the wide variability in how people considered information like the type of offense and time since conviction made me realize that this was an area where research could really help suggest best practices in these types of judgment contexts.
Juliya: When working with current or former I-O Psychology graduate students on this research, how do you see your and their respective roles?
Ann Marie: Research collaborations always involve some negotiation of roles. This is not just about who does what task, but also about when to obtain input and when to move forward autonomously. That also varies somewhat depending on the specific nature of the research study, the expertise required for different aspects of the research process, and individual comfort levels.
Juliya: In what ways is the lens that an I-O Psychologist brings to this type of research different than how researchers in other fields might study the experiences of individuals with criminal records?
Ann Marie: The employment of those with criminal records has been a focus of research for those in criminal justice, sociology, and other areas for some time. The value of the I-O lens, in my view, is specifically in our knowledge of employee selection and what makes for valid and fair procedures. We have expertise that allows for both an applicant and an employer perspective on hiring processes.
Juliya: What kind of practical outcomes do you hope to see from this program of research?
Ann Marie: I hope that some of our research on how applicants with criminal records can navigate the interviewing process is helpful for those seeking employment and/or designing reentry programs. I hope that our research on how to determine the job-relatedness of a criminal record spurs the conversation and innovation in practice needed to enhance the fairness and acceptability of practices in this area.
Juliya: Is there anything else you’d like to share to convey the importance of research on individuals with criminal records or to highlight more generally the impact I-O Psychologists can make?
Ann Marie: I think this type of research illustrates to undergraduates why research on employee selection continues to be critical – employment is a key factor in reducing recidivism, but it is also a key factor in addressing a broader set of social ills. I-O Psychologists who work in the area of improving employee selection processes can have a major impact on the economic and personal welfare of many people.
Want to learn more about the field of I-O psychology? Read our recent blog posts for an overview, to find out other ways I-O psychologists have given back to society, and to discover your dream job in the field.
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Darkness All Around: Humor, Personality, and Creativity
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Cognitive Behavioral Treatment for Insomnia (CBTi) Defined
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Sustainable Wisdom: Indigenous Style
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Living in a Digital World with a Stone Age Brain
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Entitled? Lack Empathy? Research Shows There Are Benefits
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Am I at risk for Alzheimer’s Disease?
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The Big Decisions: education, career, marriage, kids
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How to Write an APA Paper
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When "Best Friends Forever" Suddenly Aren't
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Grandchildren Who Never Call
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My Grandchildren Never Call
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A Non-Medication Treatment for Insomnia
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Is Too Much Screen Time Bad?
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An Engineer-Turned-Corporate Leader Shares 3 Top Skills
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Psilocybin, Sublime Awe, and Flow Made “Oneness” My Religion
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Unhappiness, Sadness, Sorrow: A Meditation, Part 2
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Personality Typology and the Secret to Knowing a Person
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When Your Relationship has Ended, How to Start Rebuilding
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Wishful Thinking, Human Nature and Defense
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Remembering Avicii: A Mental Health Tribute
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Ever Known a “Control Freak”?
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Use This Phrase to Power Up Progress
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What Are Introverts Like As Children? 7 Characteristics
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Dead in the line of duty? What comes next for the families?
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What to Ask About
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Parenting in the Age of School Shootings
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Using AI to Unravel the Complexity of Collective Behavior
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Relationships: The Curse & Cure of Becoming More You
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The Science Of Habits
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8 Great Books About Finding Your Callings
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Social Versus Material Values
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Want to Maintain Total Cerebral Brain Volume? Keep Walking!
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6 Ways to Manage Multiple Emotions
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Science, Free Will and Existentialism
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The New Math for Narcissists
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Break-Up Recovery 101: How to Heal from Heartbreak
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Technology and Sleep
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Dysfunctional Family Role: Black Sheep
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5 Tips for Coping with a Narcissistic Family Member
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Alone in a House Where Nobody Talked
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Whose Fault Is It?
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Why So Certain?
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Look for the Humor, Look for the Humanity
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Beware of the Three Poisons for Relationships
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10 Useful Questions
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The Cultural Dimensions of Dreaming
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Momma Cows, Vegan Ranchers, and the Liberated Range
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Yale Neuroscientists Partially Revive Pig Brains After Death
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How mindfulness can reshape negative thought patterns
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Posttraumatic Growth
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How to Know When It’s More than Just “Spring Cleaning”
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How and App Helped me Cope with the Death of My Beloved Dog
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A Great Adventure Into the Unknown
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Losing the Plot
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...Late Bloomers
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Ectopic Embryos: Pregnancy in the Wrong Place
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David Draiman and the Demon That Unites Us
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Learning About Attention from Magic
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Does the Hook-Up Culture Signal the End of Marriage?
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Signs of Serious Relationship Problems
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Sanjay Gupta on Managing Stress and Work-Life Balance
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Behavioral Styles Come Between Us:
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How to Have Better Arguments with Your Romantic Partner
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48 tips from pro coaches to in-training coaches
Here is some of the feedback we got from a group of local and international coaches during a Twitter Talk SACAP hosted during International Coaching Week.
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