Secondo esonero di Individual differences Iin personality and temperament + 2 domande aperte

Second mid term personality

Part 1: self-efficacy

Albert Bandura:

• Agency.
• His work is also based on his life from a little village to Columbia University, PhD in behavioral, Stanford University.
• Bobo Doll (based on aggressive behavior and observational learning) = Bobo Doll experiment demonstrated that children are able to learn social behavior such as aggression through the process of observational learning, through watching the behavior of another person.
• Power of the environment on personality.
• Clinical psychology and psychotherapy.
• Modelling the behavior thanks to experiences.
• Investigate wide positive change, he considers areas such as infibulation, HIV, literacy.
• It is a matter of self-efficacy and collective efficacy (relative to groups and not the singular individual).

Social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective

An agentic theory specifies the mechanisms by which people come to live in accordance with moral standards. In social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1991b), moral reasoning is translated into actions through self-regulatory mechanisms rooted in moral standards and self-sanctions by which moral agency is exercised.

Origins of human agency

Central to social cognitive theory is the recognition and utilization of human agency, the fundamental human quality that directs and regulates the very experiences of human living. Humans, as agents, can intentionally influence their functioning and immediate circumstances (Bandura, 2001a, 2006).

Core features of human agency

Bandura discusses four core features of human agency: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness. Intentionality refers to acts a person performs intentionally. An intention includes planning, but it also involves actions.

• 1) Intentionality → Deliberate ability to make choices. Agency refers to acts done intentionally. For example, a person who smashed a vase in an antique shop upon being tripped by another shopper would not be considered the agent of the event. Human transactions, of course, involve situational inducements, but they do not operate as determinate forces. Individuals can choose to behave accommodatively or, through the exercise of self-influence, to behave otherwise. An intention is a representation of a future course of action to be performed. It is not simply an expectation or prediction of future actions but proactive commitment to bringing them about. Intentions and actions are different aspects of a functional relation separated in time. It is, therefore, meaningful to speak of intentions grounded in self-motivators affecting the likelihood of actions at a future point in time.
• 2) Forethought → The temporal extension of agency goes beyond forward-directed planning. The future time perspective manifests itself in many different ways. People set goals for themselves, anticipate the likely consequences of prospective actions, and select and create courses of action likely to produce desired outcomes and avoid detrimental ones (Bandura 1991b, Feather 1982, Locke & Latham 1990). Through the exercise of forethought, people motivate themselves and guide their actions in anticipation of future events. When projected over a long time course on matters of value, a forethoughtful perspective provides direction, coherence, and meaning to one’s life. As people progress in their life course they continue to plan ahead, reorder their priorities, and structure their lives accordingly.
• 3) Self-reactiveness → An agent has to be not only a planner and fore thinker, but a motivator and self-regulator as well. Having adopted an intention and an action plan, one cannot simply sit back and wait for the appropriate performances to appear. Agency thus involves not only the deliberative ability to make choices and action plans, but the ability to give shape to appropriate courses of action and to motivate and regulate their execution. This multifaceted self-directedness operates through self-regulatory processes that link thought to action. The self-regulation of motivation, affect, and action is governed by a set of self-referent subfunctions. These include self-monitoring, performance self-guidance via personal standards, and corrective self-reactions.
• 4) Self-reflectiveness → People are not only agents of action but self-examiners of their own functioning. The metacognitive capability to reflect upon oneself and the adequacy of one’s thoughts and actions is another distinctly core human feature of agency. Through reflective self-consciousness, people evaluate their motivation, values, and the meaning of their life pursuits. It is at this higher level of self-reflectiveness that individuals address conflicts in motivational inducements and choose to act in favored one over another. Verification of the soundness of one’s thinking also relies heavily on self-reflective means (Bandura 1986). In this metacognitive activity, people judge the correctness of their predictive and operative thinking against the outcomes of their actions, the effects that other people’s actions produce, what others believe, deductions from established knowledge and what necessarily follows from it.

Modes of human agency

Agency refers to the human capability to influence one's functioning and the course of events by one's actions. There are four functions through which human agency is exercised. One such function is intentionality. People form intentions that include action plans and strategies for realizing them. The second function involves temporal extension of agency through forethought. People set themselves goals and foresee likely outcomes of prospective actions to guide and motivate their efforts anticipatorily. The third agentic function is self-reactiveness. Agents are not only planners and fore-thinkers. They are also self-regulators. The fourth agentic function is self-reflectiveness. People are not only agents, they are self-examiners of their own functioning. Through functional self-awareness, they reflect on their personal efficacy, the soundness of their thoughts and actions, the meaning of their pursuits, and make corrective adjustments if necessary.

People exercise their influence through three forms of agency: individual, proxy and collective. In agency exercised individually, people bring their influence to bear on what they can control. In proxy agency, they influence others who have the resources, knowledge, and means to act on their behalf to secure the outcomes they desire. In the exercise of collective agency, people pool their knowledge, skills, and resources and act in concert to shape their future.

• Personal → What they can control.
• Proxy → Influence others who have the resources.
• Collective → Shape the future.

Theorizing and research on human agency has been essentially confined to personal agency exercised individually. However, this is not the only way in which people bring their influence to bear on events that affect how they live their lives. Social cognitive theory distinguishes among three different modes of human agency: personal, proxy, and collective.

• 1) Proxy agency → Under these circumstances, they seek their well-being, security, and valued outcomes through the exercise of proxy agency. In this socially mediated mode of agency, people try by one means or another to get those who have access to resources or expertise or who wield influence and power to act at their behest to secure the outcomes they desire. Proxy agency relies heavily on perceived social efficacy for enlisting the mediative efforts of others.
• 2) Collective agency → People’s shared belief in their collective power to produce desired results is a key ingredient of collective agency. Group attainments are the product not only of the shared intentions, knowledge, and skills of its members, but also of the interactive, coordinated, and synergistic dynamics of their transactions. Because the collective performance of a social system involves transactional dynamics, perceived collective efficacy is an emergent group-level property, not simply the sum of the efficacy beliefs of individual members. However, there is no emergent entity that operates independently of the beliefs and actions of the individuals who make up a social system. It is people acting conjointly on a shared belief, not a disembodied group mind that is doing the cognizing, aspiring, motivating, and regulating. Beliefs of collective efficacy serve functions similar to those of personal efficacy beliefs and operate through similar processes (Bandura 1997).

Triadic reciprocal determinism

Reciprocal triadic determinism = individual, reciprocal association between the person environment (personality and behavior) and (context like school, parents, culture).

Self-efficacy beliefs

Self-efficacy beliefs:

• Believes in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of actions required to produce given attainment.
• Attest to the functioning of an integrated self-system capable of conferring unity, continuity and directedness to individuals’ actions (Bandura 1997).
• People undertake activities and persevere in the face of difficulties only if they believe they are able to produce desired results (Bandura 1997).
• Expectations about his/her efficacy influence results directly.

Perceived self-efficacy plays a pivotal role in the process of self-management.

• Cognitive determinants.
• Motivational determinants.
• Decisional determinants.
• Affective determinant.
• Actions all together are linked to beliefs of personal efficacy influence what self-regulative standards people adopt (Bandura 1997).

How do people persevere in the face of difficulties?

• How resilient are they to adversity?
• How vulnerable are they to stress and depression?
• What types of choices they make at important decisional points that set the course of life paths?

To possess self-regulatory skills is something different from being able to adhere to them in taxing and perturbing situations.

High efficacy: for individuals, failures, setbacks and obstacles are viewed as surmountable and therefore, spark redoubled effort rather than discouragement and despondency.

Low self-efficacy: for individual of failure undermines motivation and breeds dependency.

Affective regulatory self-efficacy

• Importance of self-regulation – it is associated with bad behavior (delinquency problems, and problem in mental health in particular in adolescence).
• Positive and negative adjustment in adulthood are consequences of self-regulation in childhood.
• Understanding antecedents of self-regulation could improve mental health interventions.
• Emotion regulation as an especially relevant aspect of self-regulation for adjustment = emotion regulation comprises internal and external process involves in initiating, maintaining, and modulating the occurrence intensity and expression of emotion. In adolescence:

Emotion regulation and psychological adjustment

• Patterns of emotion dysregulation have been related to both aggressive behaviours and depressive symptoms.
• This association between emotion regulation and aforementioned outcomes may depend on the type of strategy used and the type of emotion being managed.
• Anger dysregulation is linked to aggressive behavior.
• Sadness dysregulation is linked to depressive symptoms.
• First research question = adolescent personality.
• Second research question = adolescent adjustment.
• Third research question = parenting → adolescent personality → adolescent adjustment.
• Interest to study the relationship between adolescence, self-efficacy about emotion regulation and emotion regulation are linked together (the transition to adolescence).
• Being efficacy able is not feeling competent.
• Self-efficacy beliefs can be proxy indicators of effective performance.

Longitudinal study in Rome

3) Longitudinal study in Rome.

Child development article

4) Child development article.

Future directions

5) Future directions.

Self-efficacy domain or task specific

Key words:

• Personal/subjective.
• Deal with difficulties/challenges.
• Related with personality traits and temperament.
• Beliefs.
• Can be specific (specificity).

Self-efficacy is treated as a domain-specific or task-specific construct. This serves to increase predictive power for academic outcomes, and it allows for insights that are not available from more general assessments of self-beliefs. SE can be general or task specific, allowing individuals to have a range of SE beliefs about themselves at any one time.

The four sources of self-efficacy

Self efficacy: the exercise of control (reciprocal determinism).

1977 = Albert Bandura introduced the construct of self-efficacy as one of the properties of human agency in the framework of social cognitive theory. Based on reciprocal determinism: reciprocal relationship between person, environment and behavior.

Self-efficacy = subjective, challenging, beliefs, specificity. – Beliefs in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainment → organize an action and make it happen → people undertake activities and persevere in the face of difficulties only if they believe that they are able to procedure the desired results → expectations about one’s own efficacy influence results directly.

Self-efficacy beliefs influence actions through 4 determinants (cognitive, motivational, effective and decisional) (Bandura 1997).

High self-efficacy = failures and obstacles are viewed as surmountable and therefore spark redoubled effort rather than discouragement and despondency.

Low self-efficacy = failure undermines motivation and breeds despondency.

4 sources (self-efficacy sources).

People’s beliefs can strengthen or weakened though.

Very important for the midterm.

Mastery experience

• 1) Mastery experience: most powerful source of self-efficacy.
• Based on direct and personal experiences.
• Attributed to one’s own effort and skills.

Hypothesis:

• Strong mastery experience → higher self-efficacy.
• Adverse mastery experience (failures) → lower self-efficacy.

Modelling vicariant experience

• 2) Modelling (vicariant experience) affects self-efficacy through a social comparison process (people judge their capabilities in relation to the capability of others).

Empirical:

• Observing similar people succeeded with sustained effort → high self-efficacy.
• Observing similar people fail despite high effort → lower self-efficacy.

Verbal persuasion

• 3) Verbal persuasion: third effective source.
• Say like “you can do it” or “you can’t do it” have an impact on the efficiency to achieve a goal.
• It is most effective when following a mastery experience (by itself it has not a huge impact).
• With realistic encouragement people are more likely to exert greater effort and become successful.

Empirical:

• Strong verbal persuasion → higher self-efficacy.
• Adverse verbal persuasion → lower self-efficacy.

Physiological arousal

• 4) Physiological arousal: fourth effective source.
• Based on effective and emotional arousal.
• People tend to attribute a physiological condition to an efficacy perception (fatigue) → physical incapability).
• Depends on personal/personality characteristics.
• Linked to, for example, difficulties to breathing or pain which can impact on the self-efficacy.

Hypothesis:

• Strong physiological arousal → higher self-efficacy.
• Adverse physiological arousal → lower self-efficacy.

Guide for constructing self-efficacy scales

Self-efficacy to positive emotions make the sum.

Self-efficacy dealing to negative emotions make the sum.

Self-efficacy dealing with empathic emotions make the sum.

• The self-efficacy scale in the domain of emotion regulation. Items belong to the factor positive emotions called “self-efficacy about the expression of” (low = 8 high = 40), and which items belong to the factor called “self-efficacy about the regulation of negative emotions”. Items related to control yourself during difficult situations and how react to them. (low = 7 – high = 35).
• Empathic self-efficacy. My score = 59 (low = 12 - high = 60).
• The academic self-efficacy scale. The same one that it has been used for the correspondent construct in both Caprara et al. (2008) and Di Giunta et al. (2013). Items related to control in school and doing assignments, take notes etc.
• Social self-efficacy, or self-efficacy in the domain of interpersonal relationships (actually also empathic self-efficacy belongs to this domain). Items linked to be able to understand others needs and emotions.
• Self-efficacy related to risky behaviors. Items related to control yourself in front of risky situations like stole, smoke cigarettes, use drugs.

Self-efficacy, self-esteem, locus of control, and outcome expectancies

Self-efficacy, self-esteem, locus of control, and outcome expectancies (Bandura 2006).

Perceived self-efficacy should also be distinguished from other constructs such as self-esteem, locus of control, and outcome expectancies.

• Perceived efficacy is a judgment of capability; self-esteem is a judgment of self-worth. They are entirely different phenomena.
• Locus of control is concerned, not with perceived capability, but with belief about outcome contingencies—whether outcomes are determined by one’s actions or by forces outside one’s control. High locus of control does not necessarily signify a sense of enablement and well-being. For example, students may believe that high academic grades are entirely dependent on their performance (high locus of control) but feel despondent because they believe they lack the efficacy to produce those superior academic performances.
• Another important distinction concerns performance outcome expectations. Perceived self-efficacy is a judgment of capability to execute given types of performances; outcome expectations are judgments about the outcomes that are likely to flow from such performances. Outcome expectations take three different forms (Bandura, 1986). They include the positive and negative physical, social, and self-evaluative outcomes.

The positive expecta