The Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale: Adaptation and Validation for Young Adolescents

Emotional self-efficacy (ESE) is an important aspect of emotional functioning, with current measures for children and adolescents focused on the measurement of self-beliefs in relation to the management of emotions. In the present study, we report the psychometric properties of the first adaptation of the Emotional Self-Efficacy Scale for youth (Youth-ESES) that measures additional aspects of ESE, such as perceiving and understanding emotions and helping others modulate their emotions. Participants were 192 young adolescents aged 11 to 13 years from a U.K. state school. They completed the Youth-ESES and measures of ability emotional intelligence (EI) and cognitive ability. Results support the same four-factor structure that has been previously documented using the adult version of the ESES, with the four subscales being largely independent from cognitive ability and only moderately related to ability EI. However, the four subscales were less differentiated in the present study compared with adult data previously published, suggesting that there is a strong general factor underlying young adolescents’ ESE scores. Overall, the results suggest that the adapted Youth-ESES can be reliably used with youth, and that confidence in how a young person feels about his or her emotional functioning remains distinct from emotional skill

Using Social Media to Promote STEM Education: Matching College Students with Role Models

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields have become increasingly central to U.S. economic competitiveness and growth. The shortage in the STEM workforce has brought promoting STEM education upfront. The rapid growth of social media usage provides a unique opportunity to predict users' real-life identities and interests from online texts and photos. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach by leveraging social media to promote STEM education: matching Twitter college student users with diverse LinkedIn STEM professionals using a ranking algorithm based on the similarities of their demographics and interests. We share the belief that increasing STEM presence in the form of introducing career role models who share similar interests and demographics will inspire students to develop interests in STEM related fields and emulate their models. Our evaluation on 2,000 real college students demonstrated the accuracy of our ranking algorithm. We also design a novel implementation that recommends matched role models to the students.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, accepted by ECML/PKDD 2016, Industrial Trac

In Things We Trust? Towards trustability in the Internet of Things

This essay discusses the main privacy, security and trustability issues with the Internet of Things

Cognitive representations of disability behaviours in people with mobility limitations : consistency with theoretical constructs

Disability is conceptualised as behaviour by psychological theory and as a result of bodily impairment by medical models. However, how people with disabilities conceptualise those disabilities is unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine disability representations in people with mobility disabilities. Thirteen people with mobility disabilities completed personal repertory grids (using the method of triads) applied to activities used to measure disabilities. Ten judges with expertise in health psychology then examined the correspondence between the elicited disability constructs and psychological and medical models of disability. Participants with mobility disabilities generated 73 personal constructs ofdisability. These constructs were judged consistent with the content of two psychological models, namely the theory of planned behaviour and social cognitive theory and with the main medical model of disability, the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health.Individuals with activity limitations conceptualise activities in a manner that is compatible with both psychological and medical models. This ensures adequate communication in contexts where the medical model is relevant, e.g. clinical contexts, as well as in everyday conversation about activities and behaviours. Finally, integrated models of disability may be of value for theory driven interdisciplinary approaches to disability and rehabilitation

Exploring efficacy in personal constraint negotiation: an ethnography of mountaineering tourists

Limited work has explored the relationship between efficacy and personal constraint negotiation for adventure tourists, yet efficacy is pivotal to successful activity participation as it influences people’s perceived ability to cope with constraints, and their decision to use negotiation strategies. This paper explores these themes with participants of a commercially organised mountaineering expedition. Phenomenology-based ethnography was adopted to appreciate the social and cultural mountaineering setting from an emic perspective. Ethnography is already being used to understand adventure participation, yet there is considerable scope to employ it further through researchers immersing themselves into the experience. The findings capture the interaction between the ethnographer and the group members, and provide an embodied account using their lived experiences. Findings reveal that personal mountaineering skills, personal fitness, altitude sickness and fatigue were the four key types of personal constraint. Self-efficacy, negotiation-efficacy and other factors, such as hardiness and motivation, influenced the effectiveness of negotiation strategies. Training, rest days, personal health, and positive self-talk were negotiation strategies. A conceptual model illustrates these results and demonstrates the interplay between efficacy and the personal constraint negotiation journey for led mountaineers

Educating through Exemplars: Alternative Paths to Virtue

This paper confronts Zagzebski’s exemplarism with the intertwined debates over the conditions of exemplarity and the unity-disunity of the virtues, to show the advantages of a pluralistic exemplar-based approach to moral education (PEBAME). PEBAME is based on a prima facie disunitarist perspective in moral theory, which amounts to admitting both exemplarity in all respects and single-virtue exemplarity. First, we account for the advantages of PEBAME, and we show how two figures in recent Italian history (Giorgio Perlasca and Gino Bartali) satisfy Blum’s definitions of ‘moral hero’ and ‘moral saint’ (1988). Then, we offer a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of heroes and saints with respect to character education, according to four criteria derived from PEBAME: admirability, virtuousness, transparency, and imitability. Finally, we conclude that both unitarist and disunitarist exemplars are fundamental to character education; this is because of the hero's superiority to the saint with respect to imitability, a fundamental feature of the exemplar for character education

How Does Reasoning (Fail to) Contribute to Moral Judgment? Dumbfounding and Disengagement

Recent experiments in moral psychology have been taken to imply that moral reasoning only serves to reaffirm prior moral intuitions. More specifically, Jonathan Haidt concludes from his moral dumbfounding experiments, in which people condemn other people’s behavior, that moral reasoning is biased and ineffective, as it rarely makes people change their mind. I present complementary evidence pertaining to self-directed reasoning about what to do. More specifically, Albert Bandura’s experiments concerning moral disengagement reveal that moral reasoning often does contribute effectively to the formation of moral judgments. And such reasoning need not be biased. Once this evidence is taken into account, it becomes clear that both cognition and affect can play a destructive as well as a constructive role in the formation of moral judgments

Innovator resilience potential: A process perspective of individual resilience as influenced by innovation project termination

Innovation projects fail at an astonishing rate. Yet, the negative effects of innovation project failures on the team members of these projects have been largely neglected in research streams that deal with innovation project failures. After such setbacks, it is vital to maintain or even strengthen project members’ innovative capabilities for subsequent innovation projects. For this, the concept of resilience, i.e. project members’ potential to positively adjust (or even grow) after a setback such as an innovation project failure, is fundamental. We develop the second-order construct of innovator resilience potential, which consists of six components – self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, optimism, hope, self-esteem, and risk propensity – that are important for project members’ potential of innovative functioning in innovation projects subsequent to a failure. We illustrate our theoretical findings by means of a qualitative study of a terminated large-scale innovation project, and derive implications for research and management