Emotional Stability and Affective Self‐regulatory Efficacy Beliefs: Proofs of Integration between Trait Theory and Social Cognitive Theory

The present study aimed to investigate the development and interplay of emotional stability and affective self‐regulatory efficacy beliefs through adolescence to young adulthood. A latent growth curve approach was used to investigate level and stability of emotional stability and self‐efficacy in managing negative emotions and in expressing positive emotions. We found that initial levels of emotional stability and self‐efficacy beliefs are highly correlated. In accordance with the posited hypothesis, the growth rate of perceived self‐efficacy in managing negative emotions predicted the growth rate of emotional stability, whereas the opposite path was not significant. The growth rates of perceived self‐efficacy in expressing positive emotions and emotional stability were not related to each other. Taken together, these findings point to self‐efficacy beliefs as instrumental to the change of traits. Practical implications of results are discussed, highlighting the role of social cognitive theory in supplying the proper strategies to design effective interventions to enable people to make the best use of their potentials. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Longitudinal Investigation of Egoistic and Moralistic Self-Enhancement

This study used a 3-wave longitudinal design to investigate stability and change of egoistic and moralistic self-enhancement. Participants (n = 195) were followed for 6 years, from late adolescence (age 15) to emerging adulthood (age 21). A significant degree of rank-order stability was found that reveals a reasonable continuity in the individuals’ relative standing on measures of egoistic and moralistic self-enhancement. Latent growth curve analysis was used to track the developmental trajectories of the examined constructs. Findings revealed that egoistic self-enhancement is stable from 15 to 21 years, whereas moralistic self-enhancement slightly decreases during the same developmental period. Cross-lagged models were used to examine the reciprocal relations between self-enhancement and the Big Five personality traits. No prospective effects were found between the constructs, which develop independently from late adolescence to young adulthood, showing only synchronous associations. Implications for personality research and assessment are discussed.     

The longitudinal relations between self-esteem and affective self-regulatory efficacy

The present study examines the longitudinal relations between self-esteem and perceived affective self-regulatory efficacy (i.e., self-efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions and in expressing positive emotions). Participants were a group of 206 late adolescents (47% males) aged 16, 18, 20 and 24 years at T1, T2, T3 and T4, respectively. Findings corroborated the posited paths of mutual relations, while pointing to a major contribution of self-esteem in predicting perceived affective self-regulatory efficacy across time. In particular, self-esteem consistently predicted subsequent levels of self-efficacy beliefs in managing negative emotions and in expressing positive emotions. Paths in the opposite direction were significant but small. Findings are discussed in light of the contributions of perceived affective self-regulatory efficacy to promote self-esteem from 16 to 24 years.     

Experts and laymen grossly underestimate the benefits of argumentation for reasoning

Many fields of study have shown that group discussion generally improves reasoning performance for a wide range of tasks. This article shows that most of the population, including specialists, does not expect group discussion to be as beneficial as it is. Six studies asked participants to solve a standard reasoning problem—the Wason selection task—and to estimate the performance of individuals working alone and in groups. We tested samples of U.S., Indian, and Japanese participants, European managers, and psychologists of reasoning. Every sample underestimated the improvement yielded by group discussion. They did so even after they had been explained the correct answer, or after they had had to solve the problem in groups. These mistaken intuitions could prevent individuals from making the best of institutions that rely on group discussion, from collaborative learning and work teams to deliberative assemblies.     

Conversation analysis at work: detection of conflict in competitive discussions through semi-automatic turn-organization analysis

This study proposes a semi-automatic approach aimed at detecting conflict in conversations. The approach is based on statistical techniques capable of identifying turn-organization regularities associated with conflict. The only manual step of the process is the segmentation of the conversations into turns (time intervals during which only one person talks) and overlapping speech segments (time intervals during which several persons talk at the same time). The rest of the process takes place automatically and the results show that conflictual exchanges can be detected with Precision and Recall around 70% (the experiments have been performed over 6 h of political debates). The approach brings two main benefits: the first is the possibility of analyzing potentially large amounts of conversational data with a limited effort, the second is that the model parameters provide indications on what turn-regularities are most likely to account for the presence of conflict.     

Impact of Family Efficacy Beliefs on Quality of Family Functioning and Satisfaction with Family Life

The present study tested with 142 families a structural model of the interplay of perceived dyadic and collective forms of efficacy within the interdependent family system, and how these different forms of efficacy are structurally related to quality of family functioning and satisfaction with family life. Dyadic parent–child efficacy, dyadic spousal efficacy, and filial efficacy were linked to family satisfaction through the mediating impact of collective family efficacy. A high sense of collective family efficacy was accompanied by open family communication and candid disclosure by adolescents of their activities outside the home. Collective family efficacy contributed to parents' and adolescents' satisfaction with their family life both directly and through its impact on quality of family functioning. An alternative structural model in which quality of family functioning affects the different forms of perceived family efficacy and family satisfaction provided a poorer fit to the data.     

Task related modulation of the motor system during language processing

Recent neurophysiological and brain imaging studies have shown that the motor system is involved in language processing. However, it is an open question whether this involvement is a necessary requisite to understand language or rather a side effect of distinct cognitive processes underlying it. In order to clarify this issue we carried out three behavioral experiments, using a go-no go paradigm. Italian verbs expressing hand actions, foot actions or an abstract content served as stimuli. Participants used their right hands to respond. In Experiment 1, in which a semantics decision task with an early delivery of the go signal (during processing language material) was used, slower responses were found for hand action-related verbs than for foot action-related verbs. In Experiment 2, using the same task with either an early or a delayed delivery of the go signal (when language material had been already processed), no difference was found between responses to the two verb categories in the delayed delivery condition. In Experiment 3, in which a lexical decision task with an early delivery of the go signal was used, again no difference between the two verb categories was found. The present findings demonstrate that during language processing the modulation of the motor system crucially occurs while performing a semantics decision task, thus supporting the notion that this involvement is a necessary step to understand language rather than a side effect of upstream cognitive processes.