Cognitive Ability Testing in the Workplace: Modern Approaches and Methods

Dear Colleagues, 

Despite the increasing importance of cognitive abilities in the modern world of work and increasing dissatisfaction with the status quo of cognitive ability assessment, the ways in which cognitive abilities are conceptualized and measured in workplace applications have changed very little over the past century (Scherbaum et al., 2012). Many other fields (e.g., clinical and cognitive psychology, developmental and educational research, neurosciences) have made considerable progress in understanding cognitive ability constructs, their role in the modern world, and how they can be measured (Goldstein et al., 2009; Scherbaum et al., 2015). Additionally, evolutions in technology have created new possibilities for measuring individual differences. However, these innovations have not substantially influenced the conceptualization and measurement of cognitive abilities in the workplace. As a result, an opportunity to better understand, measure, and use cognitive abilities in the workplace is being missed (Ployhart & Holtz, 2008). The goal of this Special Issue is to feature innovative research applying modern theories of cognitive ability, analytical approaches, and measurement methods to workplace applications, demonstrating the value of adopting modern thinking and approaches for tackling the so-called validity/diversity dilemma.

Goldstein, Harold W., Scherbaum, Charles A. and Yusko, Kenneth (2009). Adverse impact and measuring cognitive ability. In Adverse Impact: Implications for Organizational Staffing and High Stakes Testing. Edited by James Outtz. New York: Psychology Press, pp. 95–134.

Ployhart, Robert E., and Brian C. Holtz. (2008). The diversity–validity dilemma: Strategies for reducing racioethnic and sex subgroup differences and adverse impact in selection. Personnel Psychology, 61: 153–172.

Scherbaum, Charles A., Harold W. Goldstein, Kenneth P. Yusko, Rachel Ryan, and Paul J. Hanges. (2012). Intelligence 2.0: Reestablishing a Research Program on g in I-O Psychology. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice 5: 128–148.

Scherbaum, Charles, Harold Goldstein, Rachel Ryan, Paul Agnello, Ken Yusko, and Paul Hanges (2015). New Developments in Intelligence Theory and Assessment: Implications for Personnel Selection. In Employee Recruitment, Selection, and Assessment. Contemporary Issues for Theory and Practice. Edited by Nikolaou, Ioannis and Janneke K. Oostrom. London: Psychology Press-Taylor & Francis. Vol. 5, pp. 128–148. 

Dr. Charles Scherbaum
Prof. Dr. Harold Goldstein
Dr. Annie Kato
Guest Editors
Yuliya Cheban
Guest Editor Assistant

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• cognitive ability
• validity/diversity trade-off
• assessment
• testing
• measurement
• selection
• industrial-organizational psychology

Title: Measuring Emotional Intelligence Unobtrusively and Objectively: An Eye-Tracking and Machine Learning Approach

Abstract: Emotional intelligence—one of the second stratum factors of intelligence—plays a critical role from frontline services to executive leadership in the workplace. It predicts job performance beyond general mental ability and Five-Factor personality traits. Yet the measurement of emotional intelligence has been long critiqued for serious unresolved issues, including unreliability and bias inherited from the self-report nature. Leveraging psychophysiology and machine learning models, the current study examined a novel approach to unobtrusively and objectively measuring emotional intelligence. Specifically, we exposed 50 participants to images of 1) four emotional faces (neutral, happy, anger, and fear; randomly arranged), and 2) twelve face-crowds with varying ratios of happy-to-angry faces. We recorded participants’ eye movements with a high-end eye-tracker and processed the eye-tracking data with the gazepath technology to extract hundreds of eye movement features, which were then fed into machine learning models to predict the emotional intelligence scores. Our results showed that this approach was able to achieve high predictive accuracy. In addition, we found this approach was particularly powerful for measuring two facets of emotional intelligence: self-emotion appraisal and other-emotion appraisal. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.