Effective professionals engaged in reflective practice: A response to Kidd et al.

Training for careers guidance is undergoing rapid and radical change. The Employment Department's January 1995 invitation to bid for pilot programmes for work-based, competency training represents a sharp contrast to the off-the-job academic training which has, for the past 20 years, been located in higher education. An informed debate and well-founded empirical findings would contribute to the constructive management of these changes. However, Kidd et al.'s (1994) research on careers officers' use of theory in guidance interviews is criticised as being seriously flawed. Questions are posed regarding their conceptual framework, several aspects of their methodology, and their apparent lack of awareness of directly relevant theory and research.     

Panic disorder: A product of classical conditioning

Contrary to the common view that all panic attacks have a single etiology, it is shown that a distinction must be made between initial attacks, for which there are many causes, and recurrent attacks (panic disorder) which have a common basis. Most initial panic attacks are attributable to the physiological effects of hyperventilation resulting from severe and prolonged anxiety. It has been claimed that the attacks are due to such symptoms as dyspnea, tachycardia and dizziness being misattributed to deadly illness or incipient insanity. We reject this view on several grounds, and in particular because of a pilot study that showed that such attributions follow the onset of panic. Apart from some biological cases, the common initial panic is an unconditioned response to a bizarre stimulus complex produced by excessive hyperventilation, and panic disorder is the result of contiguous stimuli, especially endogenous stimuli, being conditioned to the elicited anxiety. Treatment accords with principles of conditioning.     

Psychological type and conceptions of empathy in experienced counsellors

Definitions of empathy vary widely. One explanation is that the different conceptions reflect personality differences. We investigated this idea with a sample of fifteen experienced counsellor, using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to measure aspects of personality and semistructured interviews to measure conceptions and reported practice of empathy. Counsellors who preferred sensing were found to make more references to empathy as a state and intuitive types to process. Those who preferred thinking and judging had a more active conception and reported practice, while feeling and perceiving types referred to a passive approach. Further relationships predicted by Myer-Briggs theory, between preference for thinking and cognitive empathy, and feeling and affective empathy, were close to statistical significance. Therefore, different psychological types do seem to define empathy differently. Implications for counselling theory, practice and training and education are discussed.     

Psychological type and conceptions of empathy in experienced counsellors: Qualitative results

Different conceptions of empathy appear to be explained by psychological type theory. For example, counsellors who prefer 'thinking' to 'feeling' and 'judging' to 'perceiving' have an active conception and reported practice while feeling and perceiving types refer to a passive approach. This paper reports qualitative data on conceptions of empathy in counsellors and relates them to psychological type. Four categories and 30 themes were identified. The categories were: definitions of empathy; operationalizing empathy; what influences empathy; and empathic communication. Twenty of the themes were related to the psychological types of the participants. Implications of these findings for the concept of empathy, for counsellor education and training, and for research are briefly discussed.     

The Temporal Consistency of Personality Effects: Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

Personality traits have been posited to function as stable influences on political attitudes and behavior. Although personality traits themselves exhibit high levels of temporal stability, it is not yet known whether the effects of these traits are marked by comparable temporal consistency. To address this question, this research note examines data from Wave 13 (2003–2004), Wave 15 (2005–2006) and Wave 17 (2007–2008) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Twenty‐seven behavioral and 14 attitudinal dependent variables are studied. Consistency of effects is gauged via a series of multilevel models in which personality effects are permitted to vary by year. High levels of temporal consistency are observed for personality traits as represented by the Big Five framework.     

Kamm and Miller on Rights’ Compatibility

In their recent books, National Responsibility and Global Justice (2007) and Intricate Ethics (2007), David Miller and Frances Kamm give two similar arguments aimed at preventing their favoured accounts of the moral justification of rights from justifying an excess of demanding assistance rights. Both arguments appeal to the fact that a proliferation of assistance rights would conflict with other rights. In this paper, I show that these arguments fail. As Miller recognises in a footnote, the failure of such arguments appears to support an alternative holistic approach to the moral justification of rights. But I will show that, without significant further argument that Miller and Kamm do not provide, this holistic approach offers no better support for Miller’s and Kamm’s claim that there are few demanding assistance rights.     

Men and women are different—official

A number of topics connected with the problem of men's consciousness are discussed: the inexpressive male; the attachment to answers; the problem of the male ego; nagging; and intimacy. A case is made out that men need to pay much more attention to these matters than they do at present. This is true both in the field of personal relationships and also in the larger field of relationship to the planet