Physical activity-related well-being in older adults: social cognitive influences

In this study, the pattern and correlates of physical activity-related well-being in older adults (N = 174; men = 49, women = 125; mean age = 66 years) were examined across a 6-month exercise trial. Baseline levels of self-efficacy fitness, importance of physical activity, and social support and exercise participation across the trial were used as correlates of positive and negative feeling states. Psychological responses to physical activity were assessed on a bimonthly basis across the trial. Latent growth curve analyses indicated significant growth in positive well-being over the 6-month period, with increases reaching a threshold at 4 months. Self-efficacy was inversely related to change in positive well-being across the trial. Frequency of activity and increases in well-being over the trial were significant predictors of self-efficacy at program termination. Findings suggest the social cognitive context of the exercise experience may have influence on exercise-related well-being.     

Action coordination in groups and individuals: learning anticipatory control

When individuals act alone, they can internally coordinate the actions at hand. Such coordination is not feasible when individuals act together in a group. The present research examines to what extent groups encounter specific challenges when acting jointly and whether these challenges impede extending planning into the future. Individuals and groups carried out a tracking task that required learning a new anticipatory control strategy. The results show that groups face additional demands that are harder to overcome when planning needs to be extended into the future. Information about others' actions is a necessary condition for groups to effectively learn to extend their plans. Possible mechanisms for exerting and learning anticipatory control are discussed.     

“Just Access”? Questions of Equity in Access and Funding for Assistive Technology

Assistive technology has great potential to contribute to health, functioning, and quality of life. To date, as exemplified in the Canadian context, variations and inequities in access to assistive technology are evident; the development of legislation, policies, and programs has not kept up with the increasing use of assistive technology. In this article, we apply ;Daniels’s (2008) theory of just health to argue that equitable access to assistive technology funding and services is necessary for justice. In doing so, we offer theoretical guidance for the development of legislation, policies, and programs to guide such access in health and social services.     

Balancing securitisation and education in schools: teachers’ agency in implementing the Prevent duty

ABSTRACT

Since the introduction of the Prevent duty across the UK, schools have had to balance the need to fulfil their responsibilities under the duty – often understood to include monitoring and surveillance – with their ultimate purpose to educate their students. This positions teachers within a particular set of tensions about their own beliefs about education, their values, and their roles and relationships with young people and communities. This article draws on interviews with classroom teachers and members of school leadership teams from 10 schools, in order to compare how teachers have understood and responded to those tensions. The article will focus on the various ways in which teachers frame the policy, and the ways in which they exercise agency in their responses. Drawing on an ecological approach to theorising teacher agency our data reveals how teachers develop different responses to anti-extremism policy depending on their role; their school contexts; and their own beliefs. Whilst in some important regards the statutory Prevent duty has ‘closed down’ some options, nevertheless teachers exercise agency to interpret and enact policy and, when translating the policy into a curriculum context, also make ‘leaps’ of interpretation as concepts such as fundamental British values are turned into lessons.     

A Cross-National Study of Nuclear Attitudes,Normative Support,and Activist Behavior: Additive and Interactive Effects1

We tested the cross-national similarity of additive and interactive variants of the Contingent Consistency Hypothesis in regard to antinuclear activist behavior. We predicted that attitudinally consistent behavior is influenced (a) more by specific than general attitudes, (b) by facilitation between normative support and personal attitudes in an interactive manner, and (c) by a fundamental or basic social-psychological process that can be demonstrated in people from different countries and cultures. These three hypotheses were tested for general (pacifist) attitudes, specific (antinuclear) attitudes, normative support, and antinuclear political activism in samples of college students from the U. S., England, and Sweden. In each sample, specific attitudes were strong, unique predictors of activist behavior (more so than general attitudes), while normative support had no additive influence on this behavior beyond that explained by attitudes for U. S. and British students. Interaction effects were found for both pacifist and nuclear attitudes in conjunction with normative support among the U. S. students, but only for pacifist attitudes in the British sample and only with antinuclear attitudes in the Swedish sample. In contrast with other studies where interaction effects were hypothesized for behaviors that were deviant or typically initiated by others, the present interactions were obtained for lawful behaviors that are often begun and/ or performed alone. With some notable variations, these results were confirmed in each sample, partially validating the cross-national generality of the interactive attitude-behavior model for activist behavior.     

The effect of “irrelevant” variables on decision making: Criterion shifts in preferential choice?

In decision research, it is widely assumed that decision makers have subjective experiences which indicate definitively, albeit with random fluctuations, whether or not one alternative is preferable to another. Further, it is assumed that subjects' choices reflect this underlying preference order. It follows from this position, as a logical consequence rather than an empirical observation, that if a manipulation affects people's choices, it does so by changing the way people subjectively experience the alternatives (presumably via people's encoding or combination of attribute information). In psychophysics, an analogous theoretical position has been relinquished. Specifically, it is no longer believed that observers in a detection experiment have subjective experiences which indicate definitively, albeit with error, whether a signal has been perceived. Rather, according to signal detection theory, the observer's sensory experience can be portrayed as a quantifiable sensation that must be converted into an overt report of “signal present” or “signal absent” by comparing the sensation with a criterion. In this paper, we describe two models of preferential choice, the lexicographic criterion model and a probabilistic criterion model, that replace the notion of definitive preference with an analogue of signal detection theory. In the models, the decision maker is represented as having quantifiable inclinations, rather than definitive preferences, that must be converted into an overt choice by comparing the inclinations with a criterion. By attributing the effects of experimental manipulations to shifts in the criterion, rather than to changes in people's inclinations, the model offers a testable alternative to the proposition that altered choices imply altered preferences.