Exploring changes during life and career design dialogues

This article describes the processes of change that occur during career counseling based on the ‘making oneself self’ model (Guichard, 2008; Guichard, 2009). This counseling intervention process forms part of the more general paradigm of life designing (Savickas et al., 2009). The main goal for this counseling is fostering “reflexivity” of individuals with regard to their investment in their various spheres of life. Three career counseling interviews were conducted using both methods of dialogues for life and career design dialogues (LCDD) and self-confrontation (Larsen, Flesaker, & Foundation, 2008; Valach, Michel, Dey, & Young, 2002). Each interview is described with a focus on the changes perceived by the interviewees in relation to their initial reason for consulting as well as on their dialogues with the counselor, who facilitated these changes and provided support for them. The analysis of the dialogues suggests the existence of a three-step evolution supporting the changes. On the basis of these data, the discussion examines the reflexive approach in its theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions.     

Reflection and reflexivity during life-design interventions: Comments on Career Construction Counseling

The 8 articles in the Symposium advanced understanding of “Reflexivity in Life-Design Interventions”. This discussion highlights distinctions between reflection and reflexivity, as well as their relation to first-order and second-order change. Then the contributions of the Symposium authors are organized using four phases of narrative counseling: symbolic representation, reflective self-examination, reflexive new realizations, and revisioning career identity. The discussion concludes by organizing the diverse terms the authors used to name these four phases into a uniform format.     

Une comparaison des apports des modèles de la construction de la carrière et de la construction de soi au life designing counseling

Recent developments in Western societies and transformations in work organizations have made the vocational issues that people face more frequent, complex, and puzzling. With the individualization of the life course, people now more than ever before need to reflect and deliberate as they design their lives. To assist individuals cope with difficult issues in life-designing, counselors have devised a new approach to counselling dialogues that differs from traditional information and guidance interventions. This article briefly presents the theoretical model for life designing counseling and then compares two distinct life-designing intervention approaches. Both of them share the epistemology of social constructivism and concentrate on the client and counselor's co-construction of meaning. Each approach provides a rigorous and systematic foundation for counselling interviews yet they differ in the ways they tackle meaning-making. The major difference is that the first approach presents a highly-structured form of life-designing interview that highlights the counselor's role in reconstructing a client's meanings, identity, and intentions. In contrast, the second approach presents a form of life-designing interview that highlights the client's role in self-construction of meaning, identities, and future prospects.     

Individual glance strategies and their effect on the NHTSA visual manual distraction test

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how individual differences in glance strategy could impact the glance performance test defined in the NHTSA visual manual distraction guidelines. Better understanding of the test procedure could help development of new technology for safe driving. A custom in-vehicle information system was developed and assessed in a driving simulator by eighteen participants. The interfaces were designed according to recommendations in the NHTSA guidelines and contained manual radio-tuning tasks, sound settings tasks and six letter spelling tasks. Two of the six tested interfaces fully complied with the test. In addition, clear individual differences in glance strategy were found among the participants. Four individual glance strategies were identified. Two of these, long glancers and frequent glancers, highly affected the outcome of the compliance test. Participants belonging to the long glancers and the frequent glancers categories were identified as statistical outliers in many test cases. For example, if the individual values of these participants were replaced with sample mean, the number of complying interfaces would increase to five out of six, which is more in line with expectations for these interfaces. The results of this study show that individual variations in glance strategy exist. Also, these individual variations seem to have a non- negligible influence on the result when performance-testing of in-vehicle interfaces is done according to the NTHSA guidelines.     

Salvaging the Biological Design Argument in Light of Darwinism?

It is a common assumption that biological organisms appear as though they were designed. Prior to the Darwinian revolution, the order of biological organisms was often taken as a sign of their divine Creator. It is also commonly argued that Darwinian evolutionary theory as a good explanation for the adaptive complexity of biology reveals this appearance to be merely an illusion. However, in recent philosophical discussion several defenses of the compatibility of divine design and Darwinian evolution have emerged. These defenses insist not only that divine design and evolution are compatible, but even that biological organisms can continue to function as pointers to the Creator, even in a Darwinian cosmos. This article explores and extends these recent arguments. I analyze four different strategies for arguing that the wisdom of the Creator is apparent in biological organisms. The basic underlying assumption is that the products of some larger whole can reflect the rationality and designedness of that whole.     

Heidegger on Luther on Paul

Abstract : When it comes to how Heidegger understands theology, Martin Luther was instrumental in his early formulations. Heidegger's interpretation of Luther leads him to descry theology as a discipline best left unfettered by metaphysics and this attitude is carried right through Heidegger's career. By explicating Luther's influence upon Heidegger's early Freiburg lectures from 1919‐1923, we can raise important questions about the nuanced way Heidegger construes Luther's theology in the hopes of inspiring key insights for Luther's appropriation in current post‐Heideggerian theology.     

Optimism and pessimism as predictors of physical and psychological health among grandmothers raising their grandchildren

This study examines the role of personality in predicting psychological and physical health among grandmothers who are coping with a non-normative non-traumatic stressor, i.e. serving as primary caregivers for their grandchildren. Using the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R), a measure of personality disposition, we examine the contributions of both optimism and pessimism to health outcomes. ANOVAs and regression analyses of the LOT-R and self reports of health in 67 African American and Latino grandmothers revealed psychological (obsessive compulsive symptoms, depression, hostility) and physical (sleep disorder, hypertension) health outcomes are differentially predicted by optimism and pessimism among older and younger age-groups of grandmothers. Implications for grandmothers’ response to caregiving stress and for future studies of personality’s relation to health are discussed.     

Life events and psychological well-being in old age

Abstract

Although life event research has burgeoned in recent years, little attention has been paid to the prevalence of events among the elderly or their relationship to psychological well-being. This paper presents data from a three-wave longitudinal study of community elderly in Aberdeen. Negative life events were highly prevalent among both survivors [N=349) and non-survivors [N=108], but the relatively small differences between the groups indicate that attrition does not seriously affect longitudinal findings. Longitudinal analysis of survivors' data was performed using LISREL and yielded a model with a goodness of fit index of 0.918, demonstrating a close fit between the data and the model. The model parameters indicate that those in poor psychological state were more likely to report serious non-health events than health events, although the latter were more likely than the former to result in a decline in psychological well-being, even after prior psychological state was taken into account. While elderly people with low social integration experienced more severe reactions to life events in the short term than those with high social integration, there were no significant long term effects, even for those reporting highly stressful events. There was no evidence of a sub-group of elderly people lacked into a cycle of serious life events. However life events were not random occurrences; serious health events were more often reported by those with low education while women and those in lower social classes were more likely to report serious non-health events. Overall, long term disruption, directly attributable to life events, was minimal when viewed within the context of the community elderly's stable psychological state.     

宗教生态论

宗教生态论是用文化生态学的眼光研究不同范围中宗教文化生命系统总体态势、层次结构、内外关系、动态运行的机制,考察世界三大宗教生态模式:亚伯拉罕系统的一元分化式、印度系统的一元多神蝉变式、中国的多元通和模式,说明宗教生态论的理论价值,重点阐述中国宗教良性生态的失衡与重建。     

Recent trends in cultural theories

Multiculturalism is probably the most important and most misunderstood psychological construct of this decade. This article identifies specific and uniquely valuable contributions of a multicultural perspective and demonstrates the importance of multicultural awareness training as a primary prevention strategy, directed toward preventing multicultural misunderstandings before they happen by training mental health providers to become more aware of their culturally learned assumptions and the contrasting cultural contexts of their clients. The development of recent multicultural theories will be reviewed to demonstrate how the definition of cultural theories have changed over time toward a broader and more complicated perspective. Finally practical applications of culture-centered theories will be reviewed through the presentation of a Cultural Grid for separating behaviors from expectations in each cultural context.