Social cognitive theory (SCT) is an action-oriented approach to understanding the personal cognitive, environmental, and behavioral influences on behaviors and to developing theory-based interventions to improve the health status and inequities of societies. It has broad applications across a diverse array of health-enhancing and health-compromising behaviors and has been used successfully in a variety of cultures, with many different intervention methods. Social cognitive theory provides empirically based concepts to explain health behavior and provides useful constructs and processes with which to design interventions.
Intervention design using SCT typically follows a sequence of information gathering and project development steps. Literature about the magnitude of the heath problem, its’ risk factors, and the success of previous intervention attempts is carefully reviewed and summarized. The review is presented to the community and qualitative and quantitative assessments are undertaken with the recipients of the intervention to identify the most salient and powerful SCT constructs that are associated with the targeted behavior. Taken together, these preliminary data are then used in the application of SCT constructs for intervention design. Given the recognized differences in how SCT constructs manifest with different ethnic and cultural groups, the careful delineation, tailoring, measurement, and application of these constructs are critical for successful interventions.
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Social Cognitive Theory Applied to Health and Risk Messaging
Steven H. Kelder, Deanna M. Hoelscher, and Ross Shegog
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Psychological Considerations for Physical Activity Participants With Intellectual Disabilities
Yeshayahu Hutzler and Joelle Almosni
Persons with intellectual disability (ID) exhibit reduced levels of participation in recreational and habitual physical activity, which leads to an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases and resulting medical and psychosocial burdens. In spite of their cognitive limitations, persons with ID are able to benefit from utilization of learner-centered approaches to physical activity participation. Several theoretical models, including social cognitive theory (SCT), self-determination theory (SDT), and constructivism, are helpful for explaining the benefits of internalizing learning within the framework of physical activity in persons with ID. Peer modeling, decision-making for leisure (DML), divergent production style (DPS), and the cycle of internalization (CIL) are practical teaching models focusing on internalizing learning experiences and developing an intrinsic motivation for action in the physical domain. These models have been successfully practiced in persons with ID, and their feasibility and effectiveness was established particularly for developing autonomy and social relatedness. In this article the theoretical constructs and the research literature pertaining to SCT, DML, DPS and CIL is reviewed, enabling to synthesize perspectives on how to integrate these models within residential, vocational or community based physical activity programs for persons with ID. Utilizing such models and practices may facilitate persons with ID developing an internalized motivational approach to participation in physical activity and therefore be beneficial for reducing risk factors, keeping fit and enhance quality of life. Staff members in community residences and homes for persons with ID as well as in day-care and vocational centers, should be encouraged to utilize such models as an alternative to the widely used directive teaching model following the behaviorist approach.
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Teaching Self-Efficacy
David B. Morris
Teaching self-efficacy refers to the beliefs that teachers hold about their instructional capabilities. According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory, individuals develop a sense of efficacy by attending to four sources of information: mastery experiences (i.e., performance attainments), vicarious experiences (i.e., observing social models), social persuasions (i.e., messages received from others) and physiological and affective states (e.g., stress, fatigue, mood). Personal and contextual factors also play a role in the development of teaching self-efficacy. A fundamental assumption in much of this work is that teachers who believe in their capabilities are psychologically healthier, provide better quality instruction, and are more effective in motivating their students. Unfortunately, understandings of the phenomena associated with teaching self-efficacy have been limited by poor conceptualizations and methodological shortcomings. As research on the construct has evolved, so, too, have understandings of its sources and benefits for teachers and their students.
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The Role of Human Agency in Entrepreneurship
Keith M. Hmieleski
Human agency stands as a foundational element of entrepreneurship, embodying individuals’ proactive ability to shape their destinies, innovate, and navigate the complexities of new venture creation and development. Rooted in social cognitive theory, this concept underscores the interactive interplay between personal characteristics, behaviors, and environmental influences in driving entrepreneurial endeavors. Within this framework, agentic personal characteristics, comprising both socially admired attributes (e.g., entrepreneurial self-efficacy, dispositional positive affect, grit, and locus of control) and socially deviant features (e.g., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) provide the motivational force and resilience needed to tackle entrepreneurial endeavors. These personal characteristics are associated with engagement in a range of agentic behaviors (e.g., improvisation, transformational leadership, learning, and personal initiative) that embody entrepreneurial action exhibited by business founders as they work to effectively shape and adapt their ventures. Situational factors (e.g., institutional forces, political barriers, and industry-specific dynamics), in turn, can positively or negatively impact the expression of agentic personal characteristics and behaviors. Thus, understanding human agency in entrepreneurship necessitates a holistic examination of the intertwined dynamics between personal characteristics, behaviors, and contextual factors. Despite significant strides in comprehending human agency in entrepreneurship, numerous avenues for exploration remain. These include investigating gender disparities in agentic versus communal orientations among entrepreneurs, the impacts of artificial intelligence on entrepreneurial agency, trajectories of entrepreneurial agency over time, strategies for fostering collective agency in new venture teams, and exploring the darker (or unproductive) aspects of entrepreneurial agency. Developing a deeper understanding of human agency in the realm of entrepreneurship not only enriches the comprehension of the new venture creation and development process but also lays the groundwork for crafting more impactful strategies, policies, interventions, and educational initiatives to cultivate and leverage the full potential of business founders and their ventures.
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Collective Efficacy and Teacher Collective Efficacy
Khaliza Saidin, Aizan Yaacob, and Nurul Shahidah Ahmad Nasir
Efficacy is a person’s degree of beliefs and confidence to implement a task and produce a positive change. Efficacy can be divided into two aspects, namely self-efficacy and collective efficacy. In the context of education, the focus of research on efficacy is on teacher self-efficacy and collective teacher efficacy. Teacher self-efficacy is teachers’ belief in their own ability to carry out a task in order to bring positive changes, while collective teacher efficacy is the shared belief of teachers from different backgrounds and competencies in their ability to achieve the same goal. Collective efficacy depends on teacher self-efficacy to create collective beliefs in ensuring the achievement of the school’s vision and mission. Studies on collective teacher efficacy have brought positive effects on student performance and achievement and become an indicator of student performance. However, the research trend has shifted to focus on the relationship between collective teacher efficacy and teacher leadership. It was found that collective teacher efficacy not only influenced student performance and achievement but also affected teacher leadership.
In the Malaysian context, studies on collective teacher efficacy are still scarce and they mostly focused on demographic levels, factors affecting teacher collective efficacy, level of collective teacher efficacy and the relationship between collective teacher efficacy and student achievement. As teacher quality is an important factor in educational improvement, it is proposed that future studies in the Malaysian context emphasize the relationship between teacher collective efficacy and issues regarding teacher leadership as they eventually bring positive effects on students’ academic achievement. Therefore, more research is needed to address the role of teacher collective efficacy on teacher leadership in promoting quality of teaching and learning. A large scale radical improvement in the educational field is highly needed.
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Positive Affect Related to Health and Risk Messaging
Mengfei Guan and Jennifer L. Monahan
Positive emotional appeals can be an important, if often underutilized, component in health campaigns. Research reviewed from advertising, marketing, health communication, and social influence demonstrated how campaigns can promote risk-reduction behaviors by focusing on positive incentives, highlighting positive outcomes, and evoking positive feelings toward the health-related behavior. People who feel good during and after exposure to a health message tend to have favorable attitudes toward the message, which in turn establishes more open, rather than resistant, attitudes toward the issue or risk-reduction behavior promoted in the message. Along with influencing behavior via attitudes, positive affect can have a direct impact on behavior or intention. As suggested by broaden-and-build theory, positive affect broadens attention and thinking processes, increases openness to information, and helps form beliefs that the behavioral change promoted in the message is possible. Relatedly, positive affect tends to activate approach-oriented behaviors through the function of the behavioral activation system.
Two primary strategies have demonstrated efficacy at promoting positive feelings: the use of gain-framed appeals and evoking the core relational theme of happiness. Gain-framed appeals emphasize the rewards obtained by following message recommendations and can boost behavioral adoption, particularly of proscriptive behaviors, by highlighting positive outcomes and goal congruency. Happiness occurs when people believe they are making progress toward realizing their goals, and messages can be created to induce positive feelings like happiness by focusing on self-efficacy, response efficacy, and perceived benefits. Positive message appeals are especially useful for counteracting the potential drawbacks of traditional negative appeals in that they can reduce message fatigue, gain attention, and attenuate psychological reactance. Challenges for future research include increasing efforts to systematically understand how and when to best utilize the power of positive messages in campaigns. Another related challenge is to examine how positive affect is aroused at a particular stage of exposure to health risk messages, and how emotions (both negative and positive), flow, evolve, and transit from one to another (e.g., fear to relief, anxiety to happiness) during and after message exposure.
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Transtheoretical Model and Stages of Change in Health and Risk Messaging
Seth M. Noar
The Transtheoretical Model (TTM) is an integrative health behavior change theory that describes the process of how people change their behavior. The central organizing construct in the theory is stages of change, which are five distinct stages of readiness to change behavior, ranging from not ready to change (precontemplation), thinking about change (contemplation), preparing to change (preparation), changing (action), and maintaining the change (maintenance). Movement through the stages may be nonlinear, and cycling and recycling through the stages is viewed as a natural part of the change process. Other model constructs explain what drives individuals forward through the stages of change. Decisional balance involves a weighing of pros and cons of changing behavior, while self-efficacy involves situation-specific confidence that one can change. Increases in pros, deceases in cons, and increases in self-efficacy propel people forward through the stages of change. The processes of change are experiential and behavioral strategies that people use to change their behavior. In early stages of change, people use experiential strategies while they use behaviorally oriented strategies in later stages of change. The TTM holds significant implications for message design. Most notably, messages should be targeted and tailored to stages of change, and where possible, to other model variables as well. Studies indicate that the TTM has been successfully applied to health communication campaigns, and to a larger extent, to computer-tailored interventions to change health behavior. Meta-analyses indicate that scores of computer-tailored interventions have been efficacious, including many based upon the TTM and stages of change. New applications of the model include a focus on novel health behaviors, multiple behavior change, and advancing an understanding of message design in the context of the TTM in combination with other theoretical approaches.
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Virtual Reality Horror Games and Fear in Gaming
Tammy Jin-Hsuan Lin
Fear is a basic human emotion important for survival and for staying alert to potential danger. In psychology, fear is defined as a discrete emotion to help humans adapt to the environment and serves as a signal for potential danger to help humans avoid or prepare for such threats. While fear is typically experienced through real-world threats as a natural response for survival, modern society also exposes us to fear through mediated content like movies and news. Interactive media, such as video games and virtual reality (VR), have emerged as new ways to experience fear because of their immersive environments. Researchers have discovered that people have similar reactions to both real-life and mediated threats. Previous studies have explored the reasons and methods behind how people experience fear through media. With advancements in technology, researchers have also examined the emotional impact of interactive media, such as video games and VR.
This article examines fear elements, fear reactions, and coping reactions in video games and VR. Results indicate that horror games are the most likely to elicit fear responses in video games, and participants often experience greater cognitive than physical reactions. In VR, research has shown that elements that make players feel realistic inside the games, termed plausibility illusion elements, are most effective in eliciting fear. Players’ reactions toward the VR horror games include active approach strategies, or a constant reminder that the VR events are not real; directly disengaging physically and mentally; and other self-help coping strategies. In addition to immediate fear during VR-horror gameplay, some players showed residual fear on the day after they finished playing the game, indicating that the Tetris effect is strong in VR-horror games. Overall, the empirical evidence in existing gaming literature show that emotional responses are greater in VR than in non-VR video games. The literature also explores the appeal of horror games, and their mechanisms are reviewed. By understanding the fear responses of audiences in video games and VR, researchers and the industry can design effective intervention and training materials.
Media-elicited fear, mediated fright, is reviewed, followed by the appeal of horror games. Game elements from the design perspective to discuss various elements in horror games that may elicit fear are also reviewed. Fear reactions, negative emotions experienced in horror games and other game-related elements such as music and soundtrack, virtual environment, game characters’ appearance, and their facial expressions, all contributed to the fear emotion among players. The discussion of unique affordances and traits of VR and its implications conclude the article.
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Exercise Perceptions and Motivation of Children and Adolescents
Richard Rosenkranz
As technology advances and offers enjoyable sedentary alternatives to sport, active recreation, and transportation, there is a growing need to understand and harness the drivers of physical activity and exercise among children and adolescents. Determining how youth perceive their physical capabilities and their opportunities and what motivates them to be physically active can provide essential information for teachers, coaches, youth leaders, and program planners who are interested in promoting physical activity. Several well-established and also more recently developed behavioral theories offer numerous avenues to gaining a better understanding of the perceptions and motivation of youth with respect to physical activity and exercise behavior, including the social ecological model, social cognitive theory, self-determination theory, habit theory, dual-process theory, and nudge theory, among others.
Children and adolescents have individual characteristics that influence their perceptions, motivations, and behavior. They also exist within a multilayered ecological context that helps to shape those perceptions, motivations, and behavior. For youth to be sufficiently physically active and thereby help to reach their full potential, the environment must be conducive to consistent routines of physical activity. Such an environment can be designed to provide easily accessible and enjoyable opportunities for youth to fulfill their basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence to be physically active. There is potential for technology to contribute positively toward the design of conducive environments, and toward fostering motivation and enjoyment of exercise and physical activity among children and adolescents.
Article
Cognitive Regulation
Dale H. Schunk and Maria K. DiBenedetto
Cognitive regulation refers to the self-directed regulation of cognitions (thoughts, beliefs, affects) toward the attainment of goals. Cognitive regulation can occur before individuals engage in tasks, while they are working on them, and during pauses or when tasks are completed where individuals reflect on their performances. Researchers have addressed which cognitive regulation processes are used during various phases of task engagement, how these processes differ among individuals due to ability and achievement levels and due to development, how cognitive regulation processes operate during task engagement, and which interventions can effectively help persons become better cognitive regulators.
The implications of the research findings are that teachers and others can help learners improve their cognitive regulation skills. Some important processes are goal setting, strategy use and adaptation, monitoring of cognition and performance, motivation (e.g., self-efficacy), and self-evaluation. Effective interventions expose students to models displaying these skills and provide for practice with feedback. There are six limitations of the present research that should be addressed. This can be accomplished by conducting more intervention studies, examining fine-grained changes in cognitive regulation, conducting research in non-traditional contexts, integrating the educational and developmental literatures, exploring cognitive regulation across cultures, and investigating cognitive regulation during learning with technology.
Article
Self-efficacy of School Principals
Yael Fisher
The term school principals’ self-efficacy has changed over the past three decades because principals’ roles and duties have changed. Given that professional self-efficacy deals with competence in the profession, if the nature of the profession changes, the level of one’s professional self-efficacy will change as well. There have been found connections between self-efficacy and choosing a career and that efficacy is a robust contributor to career development. People seek a match between their interests and occupational environments. Thus, self-efficacy is believed to be a situational rather than a stable trait. Therefore, understanding that the term principals’ self-efficacy includes certain level of confidence in one’s knowledge, skills, and abilities, which are associated with the task of leading. This has a great importance with respect to the overall managing of schools.
Self-efficacy should not be confused with self-esteem or self-concept since it is a task-specific evaluation. In contrast, self-esteem and self-concept reflect more general affective evaluations of the self.
Research on principals’ self-efficacy usually includes measures of multidimensional self-efficacy, which enables to capture the various elements of the principals’ work.
Few studies have been conducted on the measurement of school principals’ self-efficacy, and most of these are based on the quantitative methodology, emphasizing instruments and scales that describe situations and areas of the principal’s work.
Understanding principals’ self-efficacy could assist policymakers with decisions concerning continuing professional development.
Article
Gender and Reproductive Health Empowerment
Shannon N. Wood, Robel Yirgu, and Celia Karp
Gender and reproductive health empowerment are central concepts for understanding and improving population health and well-being. Beginning in the 1990s, global platforms, including the United Nations, began recognizing gender-based inequities, including violence against women and lack of women’s participation in education and the economy, as social determinants of health. Since the 1990s there has been growing international interest in the concept of empowerment as a means for understanding the mechanisms that drive outcomes related to health and development. Although several definitions of empowerment have evolved over the past 30 years, the pivotal work of Dr. Naila Kabeer has grounded many interpretations of women’s empowerment as a process by which a woman has the individual capacity and freedom to act on her own choices in life. To date, the lack of comparable empowerment definitions remains a major hindrance to conducting comprehensive research that links empowerment to health outcomes. Additionally, while most recognize empowerment as a multidimensional process, the majority of measures used for examining this concept have been unidimensional (focused on agency, self-efficacy, household decision-making, etc.), thereby limiting the understanding of empowerment across populations, geographies, and contexts. Subsequent framing of women’s empowerment has focused specifically on sexual and reproductive empowerment, recognizing that women may be empowered in certain realms (e.g., economic), but not in others (e.g., autonomy in contraceptive decisions). Developments in the conceptualization of reproductive empowerment since 2015 have paved the way for improved measurement and exploration of this concept, yet gaps in research remain.
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Strength Training and Sport Psychology
E. Whitney G. Moore
Strength training sessions are developed and overseen by strength and conditioning coaches, whose primary responsibilities are to maximize individuals’ athletic performance and minimize their injury risk. As the majority of education and certification for being a strength and conditioning coach focuses on physiology and physiological adaptations, biomechanics, and related scientific areas of study, there has been less emphasis on coaching behaviors, motivational techniques, pedagogical approaches, or psychological skills. These are important areas because to accomplish both long-term and short-term training goals, strength and conditioning coaches should use and train their athletes in the use of these techniques.
Motivation of training session participants is essential to being an effective strength and conditioning coach. Coaches motivate their athletes through their behaviors, design and organization of the training sessions, teaching techniques, role modeling, relationships with the athletes, and the psychological skills they incorporate within and outside of the training sessions. Coaches also often teach athletes about psychological skills not to motivate the athlete but to assist the athlete in their performance, mental health, or general well-being. Some of these psychological skills are so ingrained in the strength and conditioning discipline that coaches do not recognize or categorize them as psychological skills. Because of the relationship built between strength coach and athlete, the strength and conditioning coach often provides informal knowledge of advice on topics regarding general life lessons or skills that can actually be categorized under psychological skills. However, the lack of formal education and training in sport psychology techniques also means that strength and conditioning coaches do not take full advantage of many behaviors, motivational techniques, and other psychological skills. These areas remain an area for further professional development and research within the strength and conditioning field.
