This study examines the career development behavior of Asian international, non-Asian international, and domestic students, specifically the certainty of career and major choice and environmental factors that have influenced their choices. Environmental factors include family, school counselors, teacher, friends, and government. The results show no difference in the level of career certainty between the three groups. In contrast, influences of family, school counselors, and friends varied among these three groups. Furthermore, only the Asian international students exhibited a positive correlation between level of career certainty and intent to persist. Implications and recommendations for counseling are given based on the research findings.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the level of death anxiety among a national sample of United States funeral directors with varying levels of death exposure, age, and sex. Utilizing the Multidimensional Fear of Death Scale (MFODS), the results showed a significant, but weak negative relationship between levels of death anxiety and the participants' reported number of funerals attended per year. The correlation between death anxiety scores and the number of reported embalming cases performed yearly was, however, not significant. We found a significant negative correlation between death anxiety and age in both men and women funeral directors. The difference in the death anxiety scores between men (n = 166) and women (n = 38) funeral directors was not significant. There was a significant negative correlation with age in both men and women in several fears of death including fear of the dying process, fear for significant others, and fear of premature death. The significant negative correlations were stronger for women than men across all three subscales. Results, direction for further research, and implications of the findings for mental health workers are discussed.

Conceptual metaphor provides a potentially powerful counseling framework, generalizable across theoretical orientations. According to the conceptual perspective, metaphor is not merely a matter of language, but is an indispensable dimension of human understanding and experience whereby more abstract ideas (like relationships) are understood in terms of more concrete experiences (like journeys). Consequently, when a couple in counseling says, "we're just spinning our wheels," they are not only using a common colloquial expression, but also giving information about how they conceptualize their relationship. This article provides a theoretical foundation for use of conceptual metaphor and offers examples of its potential for counseling.

It is truly a logical question to ask what spirituality is. We sustain this position as we review important corollaries from dualistic and hylomorphic views of human nature. We argue that in 21st century America we ought to be able to think of spirituality separately from religiosity and propose conceptual clarity is necessary to study spirituality. We uphold every person is a substance of two coherent principles, a body and a soul; the nature of which is spirituality. Spirituality's functions are intellect and volition and their proper ends are truth and goodness. We call on ethicists, theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners in health care disciplines to focus on the interaction between these aspects of spirituality. We define spirituality as an attitude toward life, making sense of life, relating to others, and seeking unity with the transcendent. We challenge the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) codification of spirituality and ask that it be reviewed or removed because spirituality is not equivocal to religiosity, germane to loss of faith, or a factor of cultural diversity. We insist that human individuals are born spiritual, not religious, and present distinctions between these notions at every juncture. We conclude that spirituality must be separated from religiosity if effective epistemic endeavors are to be achieved on either construct. We reject current conflations of “religious-spirituality.”

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