Calling and career preparation: Investigating developmental patterns and temporal precedence

The presence of a calling and career development are assumed to be closely related. However, the nature of and reason for this relationship have not been thoroughly investigated. We hypothesized the existence of reciprocal effects between calling and three dimensions of career preparation and assessed the change of the presence of a calling, career planning, decidedness, and self-efficacy with three waves of a diverse sample of German university students (N = 846) over one year. Latent growth analyses revealed that the intercepts of calling showed a significant positive correlation with the intercepts of all career preparation measures. The slope of calling was positively related to those of decidedness and self-efficacy but not to planning. Cross-lagged analyses showed that calling predicted a subsequent increase in planning and self-efficacy. Planning and decidedness predicted an increase in the presence of a calling. The results suggest that calling and career preparation are related due to mutual effects but that effects differ for different career preparation dimensions.

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Career interventions for adults frequently include personality assessment. Personality in career counseling contexts should no longer be considered as vocational personality associated with personality interests but, rather, as a set of dispositions that has an impact on several vocational and career-related outcomes, such as work engagement, work satisfaction, job performance, etc. Although the relationship between personality and the vocational and career related outcomes is not direct, it might certainly be mediated by several regulatory processes, such as work adaptability, and moderated by contextual and environmental factors. Personality assessment initiates an individual's self-regulatory process and contributes to the overall effectiveness of career interventions when feedback is individualized and stimulates a deconstruction, reconstruction, and co-construction of the vocational or multiple self-concept. Personality assessments can also promote the reconstruction of a self-concept more aligned with the perception of the environment about the personality of the counselee, strengthening the reality principle allowing more rational and controlled choices. In addition, some specific personality profiles, such as having high levels of neuroticism and low levels of conscientiousness, can be considered as risk factors frequently leading to career decision-making difficulties. Moreover, people with low conscientiousness benefit less from career interventions, so special attention should be devoted to counselees having that characteristic. Two case studies are provided to illustrate these important aspects of personality assessment in career interventions.

A new concept of integrated cardiopulmonary bypass circuit.

OBJECTIVE: Standard cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) circuits with their large surface area and volume contribute to postoperative systemic inflammatory reaction and hemodilution. In order to minimize these problems a new approach has been developed resulting in a single disposable, compact arterio-venous loop, which has integral kinetic-assist pumping, oxygenating, air removal, and gross filtration capabilities (CardioVention Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA). The impact of this system on gas exchange capacity, blood elements and hemolysis is compared to that of a conventional circuit in a model of prolonged perfusion. METHODS: Twelve calves (mean body weight: 72.2+/-3.7 kg) were placed on cardiopulmonary bypass for 6 h with a flow of 5 l/min, and randomly assigned to the CardioVention system (n=6) or a standard CPB circuit (n=6). A standard battery of blood samples was taken before bypass and throughout bypass. Analysis of variance was used for comparison. RESULTS: The hematocrit remained stable throughout the experiment in the CardioVention group, whereas it dropped in the standard group in the early phase of perfusion. When normalized for prebypass values, both profiles differed significantly (P<0.01). Both O2 and CO2 transfers were significantly improved in the CardioVention group (P=0.04 and P<0.001, respectively). There was a slightly higher pressure drop in the CardioVention group but no single value exceeded 112 mmHg. No hemolysis could be detected in either group with all free plasma Hb values below 15 mg/l. Thrombocyte count, when corrected by hematocrit and normalized by prebypass values, exhibited an increased drop in the standard group (P=0.03). CONCLUSION: The CardioVention system with its concept of limited priming volume and exposed foreign surface area, improves gas exchange probably because of the absence of detectable hemodilution, and appears to limit the decrease in the thrombocyte count which may be ascribed to the reduced surface. Despite the volume and surface constraints, no hemolysis could be detected throughout the 6 h full-flow perfusion period.

La "bientraitance", exploration du concept et essai d'utilisation en santé publique: une expérience à Fribourg (Suisse). ["Bientraitance": conceptual exploration and an example of its application in public health: an experience from Fribourg, Switzerland]

Since the year 2000, the concept of "bientraitance" (for which no equivalent term has yet emerged in either the English or German language) has gained widespread credence among educators, sociologists and health professionals in France and Belgium. This concept emphasizes a constructive approach to care and education rather than merely one of prevention of disasters. Applied in public health, and in particular to mental health promotion, the use of the concept of "bientraitance" can help promote both effectiveness and meaning in the design and planning of community interventions. The article presents an example of an intervention for children and adolescents in Fribourg, Switzerland. The underpinning hypothesis is that the children and youth groups (such as sports clubs, artistic and cultural associations, scouts and guides) represent largely untapped, or under-tapped, informal health resources with a favourable cost-effectiveness profile. "Bientraitance" criteria are used in selecting certain associations offering structured extracurricular group educational activities and collective out-of-school (or after school) programmes. Support is provided to the organisations selected for recruiting new members, in particular those with potentially lower levels of access, for example disabled children or new migrants. The results will be evaluated for the impact of participation in various out-of-school activities on health and health determinants from a prospective and comparative perspective. This paper shows how the concept of "bientraitance" can be useful in the development of a public health intervention.

Sepsis: time to reconsider the concept.

OBJECTIVE: To discuss the difficulty in using the concept of sepsis for clinical trials and propose new ways for designing future trials for severe infections. DESIGN: Short position statement. METHODS AND MAIN RESEARCH: Using a thorough evaluation of the recent literature in the field of severe sepsis and septic shock, the authors challenge the concept of sepsis as used in the past two decades and propose new ideas for designing future trials in this setting. The two main proposals are first to use a systematic assessment of the targeted inflammatory mediators when the study intends to counteract or replace those mediators (e.g., anti-tumor necrosis factor-alpha, activated protein C) and, second, to select more homogeneous populations, coming back to "precise infectious diseases," such as severe community-acquired pneumonia, severe peritonitis, or meningitis. CONCLUSIONS: The concept of sepsis has been useful to help clinicians to suspect and detect severe infections. Due to a considerable heterogeneity in the patients and type of infections included in the trials performed in the last two decades, it has not been useful in demonstrating the efficacy of new compounds. The authors propose a dramatic change in the design of future trials dealing with severe infections.

Concept of fat balance in human obesity revisited with particular reference to de novo lipogenesis.

The measurement of fat balance (fat input minus fat output) involves the accurate estimation of both metabolizable fat intake and total fat oxidation. This is possible mostly under laboratory conditions and not yet in free-living conditions. In the latter situation, net fat retention/mobilization can be estimated based on precise and accurate sequential body composition measurements. In case of positive balance, lipids stored in adipose tissue can originate from dietary (exogenous) lipids or from nonlipid precursors, mainly from carbohydrates (CHOs) but also from ethanol, through a process known as de novo lipogenesis (DNL). Basic equations are provided in this review to facilitate the interpretation of the different subcomponents of fat balance (endogenous vs exogenous) under different nutritional circumstances. One difficulty is methodological: total DNL is difficult to measure quantitatively in man; for example, indirect calorimetry only tracks net DNL, not total DNL. Although the numerous factors (mostly exogenous) influencing DNL have been studied, in particular the effect of CHO overfeeding, there is little information on the rate of DNL in habitual conditions of life, that is, large day-to-day fluctuations of CHO intakes, different types of CHO ingested with different glycemic indexes, alcohol combined with excess CHO intakes, etc. Three issues, which are still controversial today, will be addressed: (1) Is the increase of fat mass induced by CHO overfeeding explained by DNL only, or by decreased endogenous fat oxidation, or both? (2) Is DNL different in overweight and obese individuals as compared to their lean counterparts? (3) Does DNL occur both in the liver and in adipose tissue? Recent studies have demonstrated that acute CHO overfeeding influences adipose tissue lipogenic gene expression and that CHO may stimulate DNL in skeletal muscles, at least in vitro. The role of DNL and its importance in health and disease remain to be further clarified, in particular the putative effect of DNL on the control of energy intake and energy expenditure, as well as the occurrence of DNL in other tissues (such as in myocytes) in addition to hepatocytes and adipocytes.

Energy gap in the aetiology of body weight gain and obesity: a challenging concept with a complex evaluation and pitfalls.

The concept of energy gap(s) is useful for understanding the consequence of a small daily, weekly, or monthly positive energy balance and the inconspicuous shift in weight gain ultimately leading to overweight and obesity. Energy gap is a dynamic concept: an initial positive energy gap incurred via an increase in energy intake (or a decrease in physical activity) is not constant, may fade out with time if the initial conditions are maintained, and depends on the 'efficiency' with which the readjustment of the energy imbalance gap occurs with time. The metabolic response to an energy imbalance gap and the magnitude of the energy gap(s) can be estimated by at least two methods, i.e. i) assessment by longitudinal overfeeding studies, imposing (by design) an initial positive energy imbalance gap; ii) retrospective assessment based on epidemiological surveys, whereby the accumulated endogenous energy storage per unit of time is calculated from the change in body weight and body composition. In order to illustrate the difficulty of accurately assessing an energy gap we have used, as an illustrative example, a recent epidemiological study which tracked changes in total energy intake (estimated by gross food availability) and body weight over 3 decades in the US, combined with total energy expenditure prediction from body weight using doubly labelled water data. At the population level, the study attempted to assess the cause of the energy gap purported to be entirely due to increased food intake. Based on an estimate of change in energy intake judged to be more reliable (i.e. in the same study population) and together with calculations of simple energetic indices, our analysis suggests that conclusions about the fundamental causes of obesity development in a population (excess intake vs. low physical activity or both) is clouded by a high level of uncertainty.

Callings in career: A typological approach to essential and optional components

A sense of calling in career is supposed to have positive implications for individuals and organizations but current theoretical development is plagued with incongruent conceptualizations of what does or does not constitute a calling. The present study used cluster analysis to identify essential and optional components of a presence of calling among 407 German undergraduate students from different majors. Three types of calling merged: "negative career self-centered", "pro-social religious", and "positive varied work orientation". All types could be described as vocational identity achieved (high commitment/high self-exploration), high in career confidence and career engagement. Not defining characteristics were centrality of work or religion, endorsement of specific work values, or positivity of core self-evaluations. The results suggest that callings entail intense self-exploration and might be beneficial because they correspond with identity achievement and promote career confidence and engagement while not necessarily having pro-social orientations. Suggestions for future research, theory and practice are suggested.

Speed-cohesion trade-offs in collective decision making in ants and the concept of precision in animal behaviour

In decision making, speed-accuracy trade-offs are well known and often inevitable because accuracy depends on being well informed and gathering information takes time. However, trade-offs between speed and cohesion, that is the degree to which a group remains together as a single entity, as a result of their decision making, have been comparatively neglected. We combine theory and experimentation to show that in decision-making systems, speed-cohesion trade-offs are a natural complement to speed-accuracy trade-offs and are therefore of general importance. We then analyse the decision performance of 32 rock ant, Temnothorax albipennis, colonies in experiments in which accuracy of collective decision making was held constant, but time urgency varied. These experiments reveal for the first time an adaptive speed-cohesion trade-off in collective decision making and how this is achieved. In accord with different time constraints, colonies can decide quickly, at the cost of social unity, or they can decide slowly with much greater cohesion. We discuss the similarity between cohesion and the term precision as used in statistics and engineering. This emphasizes the generality of speed versus cohesion/precision trade-offs in decision making and decision implementation in other fields within animal behaviour such as sexually selected motor displays and even certain aspects of birdsong. We also suggest that speed versus precision trade-offs may occur when individuals within a group need to synchronize their activity, and in collective navigation, cooperative hunting and in certain escape behaviours.

Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new social arrangement of work poses a series of questions and challenges to scholars who aim to help people develop their working lives. Given the globalization of career counseling, we decided to address these issues and then to formulate potentially innovative responses in an international forum. We used this approach to avoid the difficulties of creating models and methods in one country and then trying to export them to other countries where they would be adapted for use. This article presents the initial outcome of this collaboration, a counseling model and methods. The life-designing model for career intervention endorses five presuppositions about people and their work lives: contextual possibilities, dynamic processes, non-linear progression, multiple perspectives, and personal patterns. Thinking from these five presuppositions, we have crafted a contextualized model based on the epistemology of social constructionism, particularly recognizing that an individual's knowledge and identity are the product of social interaction and that meaning is co-constructed through discourse. The life-design framework for counseling implements the theories of self-constructing [Guichard, J. (2005). Life-long self-construction. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 5, 111-124] and career construction [Savickas, M. L. (2005). The theory and practice of career construction. In S. D. Brown & R. W. Lent (Eds.), Career development and counselling: putting theory and research to work (pp. 42-70). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley] that describe vocational behavior and its development. Thus, the framework is structured to be life-long, holistic, contextual, and preventive.