Studies investigating differences in mental health problems between self-employed and employed workers have provided contradictory results. Many of the studies utilized scales validated for employed workers, without collecting validity evidence for making comparisons with self-employed. The aim of this study was to collect validity evidence for three different scales assessing depressive symptoms, emotional exhaustion, and sleep disturbances for employed workers, and combinators; and to test if these groups differed. We first conducted approximate measurement invariance analysis and found that all scales (...) were invariant at the scalar level. Self-employed workers had least mental health problems and employed workers had most, but differences were small. Though we found the scales invariant, we do not find them optimal for comparison of means. To be more precise in describing differences between groups, we recommend using clinical cut-offs or scales developed with the specific purpose of assessing mental health problems at work. (shrink)

Abstract There have been increasingly popular claims that hermeneutics provides an epistemology that is appropriate and sufficient for psychotherapy. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and explain those claims. Hermeneutics proves to provide terms that legitimize aspects of clinical expertise that have been most ignored within the traditional empiricist epistemology; namely, hermeneutics articulates and provides standards for therapeutic interpretations about clients? idiosyncratic intentions and also for using clinical theories that defy empirical test. Nonetheless, hermeneutics also proves to be (...) limited in its account of clinical knowledge. That is, clinicians who advocate hermeneutics have ruled out any legitimate basis on which clinical expertise can be influenced by knowledge about non?intentional constraints on psychological life. Yet, therapists must use such knowledge, especially that which concerns the non?intentional constraints imposed by human development. Thus, to realize its potential, hermeneutics should be embedded within a more comprehensive epistemology that includes compatible standards for knowledge about development. Finally, this paper concludes by proposing an outline for such an inclusive approach to clinical knowledge. (shrink)

Did the Romans in their dealings with other nations outside Italy know of any international laws, and did such laws ever crystallise from scattered observances into a general system? This is an interesting question, but one not easy to answer.

Vergil has a strong idea of personal fate. A certain fate becomes attached to a certain person and follows him all his life; then the fates are spoken of as the fates of that person. As a parallel one might quote the idea in Maeterlinck's essay ‘La Chance’ . For both Maeterlinck and Vergil men are marked out, one might almost call it annexed, by good or bad fortune; yet both authors refuse to endow this good or bad fortune with (...) personality: they deal with personal fates which yet lack personality. (shrink)

There can be no doubt that the Romans were very much influenced in their use of interstate arbitration by the Greeks. This statement can be made without affecting the question as to whether the actual principle of arbitration was known to them before their contact with the Greeks. Either the practice sprang up independently in Italy and Greece owing to similarity of conditions, or else it was part of the same stock of political and social ideas inherited by each race (...) alike from common ancestors. It would be improbable if two nations of such close relationship and such similar civilisation could not have inherited so natural an idea or developed it along similar lines, and indeed the very widespread practice of arbitration in private law at Rome has none of the signs of an imported idea. (shrink)

Since 1990, the multinational public accounting firms have all adopted flexible work arrangement policies. In part, the firms are doing this to fulfill an ethical obligation in creating an appropriate professional environment for their employees. This study examines the effect of participation in a flexible work arrangement program on an individual''s professional success and anticipated turnover as perceived by the participant''s peers and superiors. Subjects from one Big Five accounting firm read a description of a manager and answered a series (...) of questions about the likelihood of the manager''s promotion to partner, voluntary and involuntary turnover, and desirability on a job. Gender and participation in a flexible work arrangement were manipulated in a 2×2 design. The results indicate that participation in a flexible work arrangement evoked significantly more pessimistic predictions on all of the dimensions. Gender did not have an effect on the likelihood ratings. Follow-up questions about the factors that enhance and hinder individuals career success in each work scenario indicated that the perceived ability to "juggle" and the ability to "pull one''s weight" potentially affects evaluations of what it takes to be a successful professional in the financial services environment. Implications for professional and ethics practice and research are also presented. (shrink)

The last two decades have produced unprecedented successes in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML), due almost entirely to advances in deep neural networks (DNNs). Deep hierarchical memory networks are not a novel concept in cognitive science and can be traced back more than a half century to Simon's early work on discrimination nets for simulating human expertise. The major difference between DNNs and the deep memory nets meant for explaining human cognition is that the latter are (...) symbolic networks meant to model the dynamics of human memory and learning. Cognition-inspired symbolic deep networks (SDNs) address several known issues with DNNs, including (1) learning efficiency, where a much larger number of training examples are required for DNNs than would be expected for a human; (2) catastrophic interference, where what is learned by a DNN gets unlearned when a new problem is presented; and (3) explainability, where there is no way to explain what is learned by a DNN. This paper explores whether SDNs can achieve similar classification accuracy performance to DNNs across several popular ML datasets and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Simulations reveal that (1) SDNs provide similar accuracy to DNNs in most cases, (2) SDNs are far more efficient than DNNs, (3) SDNs are as robust as DNNs to irrelevant/noisy attributes in the data, and (4) SDNs are far more robust to catastrophic interference than DNNs. We conclude that SDNs offer a promising path toward human-level accuracy and efficiency in category learning. More generally, ML frameworks could stand to benefit from cognitively inspired approaches, borrowing more features and functionality from models meant to simulate and explain human learning. (shrink)

In this paper we consider whether one type of individual investor, which we call at risk investors, should be denied access to securities markets to prevent them from suffering serious financial harm. We consider one kind of paternalistic justification for prohibiting at risk investors from participating in securities markets, and argue that it is not successful. We then argue that restricting access to markets is justified in some circumstances to protect the rights of at risk investors. We conclude with some (...) suggestions about how this might be done. (shrink)

For any profession, establishing codes of ethics that are both practically relevant and up to date is an ongoing challenge. Law enforcement is no exception to this as agencies are faced with an evolving modern environment. With changes in technology, types of policing, and sources of societal conflict there is a potential array of new or evolving ethical considerations that confront the profession. Attempts to distill and prescribe law enforcement ethics at the international level have resulted in the creation of (...) the “Law Enforcement Code of Conduct” of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the “Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials” of the United Nations. However, both these codes were created decades ago, so they do not cover some of the more contemporary ethical issues that have arisen. This article compares the content of the IACP and UN codes and identifies a range of ethical issues either absent or insufficiently addressed. Normative themes and issues are organized around the following topics: difficulties in applying the codes, human rights and the use of force, misconduct and integrity, and enforcement and accountability. (shrink)

Flexible work arrangements (FWAs) are widely offered in public accounting as a tool to retain valued professional staff. Previous research has shown that participants in FWAs are perceived to be less likely to succeed in their careers in public accounting than individuals in public accounting who do not participate in FWAs (Cohen and Single, 2001). Research has also documented an increasing backlash against family–friendly policies in the workplace as placing unfair burdens on individuals without children. Building directly on a previous (...) study in this journal (Cohen and Single, 2001), this study addresses the issue of whether the documented perceptions toward FWA participants are the result of electing to take part in the FWA or the result of bias against employees with children. The research questions are addressed in a 3 × 2 experimental setting in which we manipulate FWA participation, along with family status and gender of a hypothetical manager in a public accounting firm. Our findings indicate that FWA participants are viewed as less likely to advance and as less committed than individuals without children or individuals who had children but who were not taking part in a FWA. Male FWA participants are viewed as less likely to succeed than female FWA participants. This effect appears to arise from a perception that FWA participants are willing to make sacrifices in their careers to accommodate family needs and thus may not be as committed to making the sacrifices perceived as necessary to meet the rigorous demands of the public accounting environment. This raises the ethical question of what could be done to change the culture in public accounting to foster a substantive support system for individuals who want to balance a family and a career. (shrink)

Although both EU policy makers and researchers acknowledge that public or stakeholder engagement is important for responsible innovation (RI), empirical evidence in this field is still scarce. In this article, we explore to what extent companies with a disposition to innovate in a more responsible way are moving towards the ideal of mutual responsiveness among stakeholders, as it is presented in the RI literature. Based on interviews with companies and non-economic stakeholders in the Dutch Food industry, it can be concluded (...) that innovative food companies are still far from implementing the ideal of mutual responsiveness in a significant way. The tension between the call for the active involvement of stakeholders in the literature and actual stakeholder engagement practices is explained by identifying a number of critical issues regarding stakeholder engagement, which are specific to actors involved in RI in the private sector. Finally, management practices designed to deal with these critical issues regarding stakeholder engagement are identified. (shrink)

How is it that many schizophrenics identify certain instances of verbal imagery as hallucinatory? Most investigators have assumed that alterations in sensory features of imagery explain this. This approach, however, has not yielded a definitive picture of the nature of verbal hallucinations. An alternative perspective suggests itself if one allows the possibility that the nonself quality of hallucinations is inferred on the basis of the experience of unintendedness that accompanies imagery production. Information-processing models of “intentional” cognitive processes call for abstract (...) planning representations that are linked to goals and beliefs. Unintended actions - and imagery - can reflect planning disruptions whereby cognitive products do not cohere with concurrent goals. A model of schizophrenic speech disorganization is presented that postulates a disturbance of discourse planning. Insofar as verbal imagery can be viewed as inwardly directed speech, a consequence of such planning disturbances could be the production of unintended imagery. This link between the outward disorganization of schizophrenic speech and unintended verbal imagery is statistically supported by comparing the speech behavior of hallucinating and nonhallucinating schizophrenics. Studies of “borderline” hallucinations during normal, “goal-less” relaxation and drowsiness suggest that experiential unintendedness leads to a nonpathological variant of hallucinatory otherness that is correctable upon emerging from such passive cognitive states. This contrasts with the schizophrenic case, where nonconcordance with cognitive goals reinforces the unintendedness of verbal images and sustains the conviction of an external source. This model compares favorably with earlier models of verbal hallucinations and provides further evidence for a language production disorder in many schizophrenics.Short Abstract: How is it that many schizophrenics identify certain instances of verbal imagery as hallucinatory? This paper proposes that the critical feature identifying hallucinations is the experience of unintendedness. This experience is nonpathological during passive conscious states but pathological if occurring during goal-directed cognitive processing. A model of schizophrenic speech disorganization is presented that postulates a disturbance of discourse planning that specifies communicative intentions. These alterations could generate unintended verbal imagery as well. Statistical data are offered to support the model, and relevant empirical studies are reviewed. (shrink)

There are wide individual differences in the ability to detect a stimulus contingency embedded in a complex paradigm. The present study used a cognitive masking paradigm to better understand individual differences related to contingency learning. Participants were assessed on measures of electrodermal arousal and on working memory capacity before engaging in the contingency learning task. Contingency awareness was assessed both by trial-by-trial verbal reports obtained during the task and by a short post-task recognition questionnaire. Participants who became aware had fewer (...) non-specific skin conductance responses and tended to score higher on a digit span assessment. Skin conductance level was not significantly lower in the aware group than in the unaware group. These findings are consistent with studies showing that lower arousal and greater cognitive processing capacity facilitate conscious perception of a greater breadth of information within a scene or a task. (shrink)

Interest in science and math plays an important role in encouraging STEM motivation and career aspirations. This interest decreases for girls between late childhood and adolescence. Relatedly, positive mentoring experiences with female teachers can protect girls against losing interest. The present study examines whether visitors to informal science learning sites differ in their expressed science and math interest, as well as their science and math stereotypes following an interaction with either a male or female educator. Participants were visitors to one (...) of four ISLS in the United States and United Kingdom. Following an interaction with a male or female educator, they reported their math and science interest and responded to math and science gender stereotype measures. Female participants reported greater interest in math following an interaction with a female educator, compared to when they interacted with a male educator. In turn, female participants who interacted with a female educator were less likely to report male-biased math gender stereotypes. Self-reported science interest did not differ as a function of educator gender. Together these findings suggest that, when aiming to encourage STEM interest and challenge gender stereotypes in informal settings, we must consider the importance of the gender of educators and learners. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to call for the formulation and adoption of a declaration on the universal rights and duties of business. We do not attempt to define the specific contents of such a declaration, but rather attempt to explain why such a declaration is needed and what would be some of its general characteristics. The catalyst for this call was the recognition that even under optimal conditions, good companies sometimes are susceptible to moral lapses, and when companies (...) undertake ventures in authoritarian countries with poor human rights records, even those with the best intentions may find themselves drawn into complicity in human rights abuses. There, market exigencies may persuade them to leave their codes of ethics and commitments to human rights at home. Pragmatism, it would seem, requires thatthey accept the ethical inconsistencies that follow from a “When in Rome, do as they Romans do” outlook. When facing the moral dilemma about whether or not to invest in human rights abusing countries, companies are offered two alternatives: they can operate in those countries and accept potential complicity or they can stay away. We suggest, however, that a preferable option is to address the underlying problem, and to this end we advocate the promulgation of a declaration for business that is comparable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our proposed name for this is the “Declaration on the Universal Rights and Duties of Business.” To be effective, such a declaration would require enforcement mechanisms. To illustrate this issue, we focus on China, not because China is unique in its human rights abuses, but because China occupies such a central place in the globalization efforts of the major companies from around the world. A robust international declaration is needed to provide a common framework for the practice of consistent and fair business competition everywhere. (shrink)

Milton Friedman famously stated that the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, a position now known as the shareholder model of business. Subsequently, the stakeholder model, associated with Edward Freeman, has been widely seen as a heuristically stronger theory of the responsibilities of the firm to the society in which it is situated. Friedman’s position, nevertheless, has retained currency among many business thinkers. In this article, we argue that Friedman’s economic writings assume an economy in which (...) businesses operate under the protections of limited liability, which allows corporations to privatize their gains while externalizing their losses. By accepting limited liability, Friedman must also accept a view of business as embedded in social interdependency, which serves as the logical and moral foundation for corporate social responsibility (CSR). To achieve consistency with his economic principles, Friedman must either abandon limited liability or modify his doctrine on CSR and his related shareholder model of business. (shrink)

Background: Discussions about medical errors facilitate professional learning for physicians and may provide emotional support after an error, but little is known about physicians’ attitudes and practices regarding error discussions with colleagues.Methods: Survey of faculty and resident physicians in generalist specialties in Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions of the US to investigate attitudes and practices regarding error discussions, likelihood of discussing hypothetical errors, experience role-modelling error discussions and demographic variables.Results: Responses were received from 338 participants . In all, 73% of (...) respondents indicated they usually discuss their mistakes with colleagues, 70% believed discussing mistakes strengthens professional relationships and 89% knew at least one colleague who would be a supportive listener. Motivations for error discussions included wanting to learn whether a colleague would have made the same decision , wanting colleagues to learn from the mistake and wanting to receive support . Given hypothetical scenarios, most respondents indicated they would likely discuss an error resulting in no harm , minor harm or major harm . Fifty-seven percent of physicians had tried to serve as a role model by discussing an error and role-modelling was more likely among those who had previously observed an error discussion .Conclusions: Most generalist physicians in teaching hospitals report that they usually discuss their errors with colleagues, and more than half have tried to role-model discussions. However, a significant number of these physicians report that they do not usually discuss their errors and some do not know colleagues who would be supportive listeners. (shrink)