Truth and consequences

In his 1987 paper “Truth or Consequences,” Dan Brock describes a deep conflict between the goals and virtues of philosophical scholarship and public policymaking: whereas the former is concerned with the search for truth, the latter must primarily be concerned with promoting good consequences. When philosophers are engaged in policymaking, he argues, they must shift their primary goal from truth to consequences—but this has both moral and methodological costs. Brock’s argument exemplifies a pessimistic, but not uncommon, view of the possible shape and nature of applied philosophy. The present paper paints a richer and more optimistic picture. It argues that the difference between theoretical philosophy and applied philosophy is not best understood as a choice between truth and consequences. On the contrary, applied philosophers engage in forms of truth-seeking that are properly concerned with consequences—including the consequences of philosophical practice itself.     

Giving voice to the dual-career couple

Changes in the nature of careers, and also of families, mean new challenges for the increasing number of dual-career couples in society. Each couple faces multiple concerns, including two individual careers, a shared relationship and the interdependence among all of these elements. This paper contributes to the counselling literature by reporting two case studies in which a new methodological approach was adopted, intended to make a couple's concerns explicit and provide a platform for further action. Using the holistic model of the intelligent career, a facilitated process was used to elicit first subjective, then inter-subjective career data, enabling the partners to make sense of their individual careers within a context of their shared relationship. The preliminary results suggest the methodology may provide a novel and useful way to give 'voice' to—and in turn facilitate action by—the dual-career couple.     

promoting employability in a “flat” world

T. L. Friedman (2005) described a “flat” world platform where competition and collaboration take place in real time among people all over the planet. Implications exist for people to assume responsibility for managing their own careers and ensuring their own security in a global economy. This article addresses those challenges from both the individual's and the career counselor's perspectives. It proposes the “intelligent career” framework—comprising 3 “ways of knowing” and interdependencies among them—as a helpful basis for effective career development. People can use the framework to navigate their careers in order to develop new skills, develop broader reputations, and in turn sustain employability.     

Evaluation of a Parent‐Based Intervention for At‐Risk Adolescents

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a parent‐based intervention, the Parent Project, among 84 parents of at‐risk youth. Results indicated improvements in child management, family involvement, parent–child affective quality, substance use rules communication, and parental self‐efficacy at a 10‐week follow‐up.     

Ear-catching? Real-world distractibility scores predict susceptibility to auditory attentional capture

Although many of the everyday distractions that we encounter are auditory, most research on distractor processing to date has focused on the visual domain. A common measure of everyday distractibility is the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ; Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald, & Parkes British Journal of Clinical Psychology 21: 1–16, 1982), which has previously been successfully linked with performance on controlled visual-attention tasks (e.g., Forster & Lavie Psychological Science 18: 377–381, 2007; Kanai, Dong, Bahrami, & Rees Journal of Neuroscience 31: 6620–6626, 2011; Tipper & Baylis Personality and Individual Differences 8: 667–675, 1987), such that high scorers tend to display greater distractor interference than do low scorers. We examined whether the same relationship would hold in hearing. Participants performed an auditory attentional-capture task, by responding to a target sound while ignoring an irrelevant singleton distractor (presented on half of the trials). We found that CFQ score successfully predicted distractor interference, since participants who reported being more distractible in everyday life produced more errors in the presence of the irrelevant singleton than did low scorers on the CFQ. This finding is the first to demonstrate a relationship between auditory distractor interference and everyday distractibility, and it confirms that performance on this type of laboratory-based attentional-capture task can successfully be related to behavior outside the laboratory.     

Families created through surrogacy: mother-child relationships and children's psychological adjustment at age 7

Each year, an increasing number of children are born through surrogacy and thus lack a genetic and/or gestational link with their mother. This study examined the impact of surrogacy on mother-child relationships and children's psychological adjustment. Assessments of maternal positivity, maternal negativity, mother-child interaction, and child adjustment were administered to 32 surrogacy, 32 egg donation, and 54 natural conception families with a 7-year-old child. No differences were found for maternal negativity, maternal positivity, or child adjustment, although the surrogacy and egg donation families showed less positive mother-child interaction than the natural conception families. The findings suggest that both surrogacy and egg donation families function well in the early school years.