General Theory Of Human Behavior Research Articles

A Theory-Based Physical Education Intervention for Adolescents with Visual Impairments

Regular physical activity participation can have a positive impact on overall health. However, school-aged individuals with visual impairments tend to be less physically active than their peers without disabilities (Haegele & Porretta, 2015). Fortunately, preliminary intervention research suggests that physical activity levels of those with visual impairments can be improved (Haegele & Porretta, 2015). For example, Cervantes and Porretta (2013), using a social cognitive theory-based intervention, examined the effect of an after-school physical activity program on adolescents with visual impairments. Their study offered a nine-lesson program to four students at a residential school over a five-week period. Results indicated that leisure-time physical activity levels were enhanced by the intervention (Cervantes & Porretta, 2013). Social cognitive theory is considered among the most acceptable models for understanding health promotion behavior (Motl, 2007). It is a general theory of human behavior that stipulates that people are active agents in their own lives as they generate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Bandura, 2001). The model of causation which is central to social cognitive theory is triadic reciprocal determinism, which suggests that one's behavior, personal factors, and environmental influences influence each other bi-directionally (see Figure 1; Bandura, 2001; Motl, 2007). The reciprocal nature of human functioning in social cognitive theory allows researchers to direct interventions at several interrelated constructs in order to change behaviors. Common constructs exploring influences of physical activity behavior, central to the program implemented by Cervantes and Porretta (2013) and to this study, are self-efficacy, self-regulation, outcome expectancies, and social support. The need to increase physical activity at an early age has stimulated the development of school-based interventions for all students. Research suggests that school-based interventions can successfully increase physical activity (Kriemler et al., 2011). However, few studies focusing on individuals with visual impairments have been conducted. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a social cognitive theory-based physical education program on the leisure-time physical activity among adolescents with visual impairments. In this study, the successful social cognitive theory-based after-school program utilized by Cervantes and Porretta (2013) was implemented as a physical education program. Within the framework of social cognitive theory and triadic reciprocal determinism, this study sought to enhance participants' personal factors (self-efficacy, outcome expectancies, and self-regulation) and environmental influences (social support) in order to impact their behavior (that is, physical activity participation). Methods Participants Four participants (two males and two females), aged 15 to 17 years and attending a Midwestern residential school for blind students, were purposively sampled based on: (a) not being enrolled in another physical activity intervention, (b) not being active members of interscholastic sport, (c) having no ambulation-related disabilities, and (d) having the ability to wear Fitbit Zip devices throughout the day. Participants were selected from two physical education classes: first period (participants 3 and 4) and ninth period (participants 1 and 2). Characteristics of the participants are presented in Table 1. Setting The intervention was delivered during the physical education class period in either the gymnasium or the health education room. During after-school hours, participants had access to physical activity opportunities that were available to them on a regular daily basis (for example, walking in the neighborhood). Intervention This study's intervention was modeled after an existing program, entitled for Exercise, Plan for Health (Stevens, 2006), and previously implemented by Cervantes and Porretta (2013). …

Analyzing collective action

AbstractCollective‐action problems pervade all societies as well as ecological systems used by humans. Substantial evidence has accrued during the last several decades that human actors are able to solve some (but definitely not all) collective‐action problems on their own without external rules and enforcement imposed from the outside. In this article, I review some of the structural variables that have been found to affect the likelihood of collective action. Then, I address the need to base future work on collective action on a more general theory of human behavior than has been used to model collective action over the last five decades. In the last section, I discuss how structural variables affect the core relationships of reputation, trust, and reciprocity as these affect levels of cooperation.

Delay discounting of self-determined and experimenter-determined commodities.

Self determination has long been a concept of great interest to psychologists. For instance, self determination was a critical concept in the person-centered therapy and theory of personality that was forwarded by Carl Rogers (Patterson & Joseph, 2007). More recently, self-determination theory has emerged (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2008) as a general theory of human behavior and motivation that has been applied in a wide variety of situations (e.g., education, Kaufman & Dodge, 2009; worker satisfaction & productivity, Kuvaas, 2009). The common theme related to self determination is that it is a good thing; people are happier, more motivated, and more productive when they can exercise self determination than when they cannot. Although behavioral psychologists have historically eschewed internal or personality variables as explanations for behavior, they too have explored the idea that situations that involve self determination are functionally different than situations that do not involve self determination. For instance, Graff, Libby, and Green (1998) found that participant-selected reinforcers maintained higher rates of free-operant responding, and produced less challenging behaviors, than did experimenter-selected reinforcers in two male participants with severe developmental disabilities. Geckeler, Libby, Graff, and Ahearn (2000) failed to replicate this effect on free-operant responding in three boys with Autism, but did find that when participant-and experimenter-selected reinforcers were available in a concurrent-choice procedure, all three boys showed a response preference for the alternative that allowed them to choose their own reinforcer. These results replicated those of a previous study (i.e., effect of self-determined choice only in the concurrent-schedule situation; Graff & Libby, 1999), which had studied four boys with either developmental disabilities or attention-deficit disorder. More recently, Tiger, Hanley, and Hernandez (2006) studied the effect of reinforcer choice on the behavior of preschool children. Results indicated that five of the six children showed an initial preference for choosing their own reinforcer, although this preference did not persist throughout the entire condition for several of the children. Tiger et al.'s fourth study demonstrated that the children continued to choose the reinforcer-choice option despite the fact that the response requirement for doing so was higher than the no-choice reinforcer option. Overall, these studies support the idea that an outcome that allows the individual to determine his/her own reinforcing consequences can be a more effective or preferred reinforcer than the identical outcome that is not chosen by the individual. Determining whether outcome choice is indeed a more powerful reinforcing consequence than a predetermined outcome has a number of potential implications, especially if that outcome can be demonstrated in an adult sample. For instance, the implication for individuals in the field of marketing would be that offering potential customers a self-chosen prize for visiting a business or website might be a more effective promotion than simply offering a predetermined prize. Instructors might find that students' work improves if their efforts result in a self-chosen outcome rather than an instructor-chosen outcome. Researchers who employ human participants in laboratory studies with the incentive of winning a prize (e.g., a gift card) for good performance may find improved performance if participants are offered a self-determined reward rather than an experimenter-chose one. The study of delay discount affords one measure of the value of an outcome or commodity. Delay discounting occurs when the value of an outcome is devalued because it is delayed in time. For instance, if someone owed you $100 but was not going to be able to pay you for a month, you might accept $95 immediately rather than waiting a month for the full amount. …

Why we compare birds with humans?

Animal study in modern psychology has started as animal model study for general theory of human behavior. I examined pigeons and songbirds as models of human visual cognition and human auditory cognition respectively. Due to difference in anatomical structures and evolutionary history between the birds and humans, research to understand human cognition by avian models has limitation. On the other hand, researches with birds, far distant animals from human beings, are crucially important to understand visual and auditory cognitive faculty in general, because these faculties are not human-specific but widely spread in animal kingdom.

The power and powerlessness of academe: Toward a general theory of human behavior

This article attempts to examine the raw face of academic politics as the personnel in the academy confront and manipulate the petty power there. These descriptions are woven into a fabric of a general theory of human behavior to demonstrate that academics are no worst than others in the broad attempt to live with human inferiority complexes.

Neuroeconomics: the consilience of brain and decision.

Economics, psychology, and neuroscience are converging today into a single, unified discipline with the ultimate aim of providing a single, general theory of human behavior. This is the emerging field of neuroeconomics in which consilience, the accordance of two or more inductions drawn from different groups of phenomena, seems to be operating. Economists and psychologists are providing rich conceptual tools for understanding and modeling behavior, while neurobiologists provide tools for the study of mechanism. The goal of this discipline is thus to understand the processes that connect sensation and action by revealing the neurobiological mechanisms by which decisions are made. This review describes recent developments in neuroeconomics from both behavioral and biological perspectives.

Why Scientific Hypnosis Needs Psychoanalysis (or Something Like it)

The author contends that some contemporary hypnosis theories are restricted and narrow in scope, rendering them unnecessarily isolated from mainstream models of human development, psychopa-thology, and personality functioning. They seem to explain hypnosis and little else. The author contrasts this with psychoanalysis, which, although sometimes overly expansive, does nonetheless lend itself to the generation of specific hypothesis via careful deduction from a general theory of human behavior and experience. For illustrative purposes, the author criticizes the sociocognitive perspective of hypnosis contending that at present it is too narrowly inductive in focus, overvalues social influence, and has its own problems with reification. The author suggests remedies for these difficulties.

Modeling the Etiology of Adolescent Substance Use: A Test of the Social Development Model.

The social development model is a general theory of human behavior that seeks to explain antisocial behaviors through specification of predictive developmental relationships. It incorporates the effects of empirical predictors ("risk factors" and "protective factors") for antisocial behavior and attempts to synthesize the most strongly supported propositions of control theory, social learning theory, and differential association theory. This article examines the power of social development model constructs measured at ages 9 to 10 and 13 to 14 to predict drug use at ages 17 to 18. The sample of 590 is from the longitudinal panel of the Seattle Social Development Project, which in 1985 sampled fifth grade students from high crime neighborhoods in Seattle, Washington. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to examine the fit of the model to the data. Although all but one path coefficient were significant and in the expected direction, the model did not fit the data as well as expected (CFI=.87). We next specified second-order factors for each path to capture the substantial common variance in the constructs' opportunities, involvement, and rewards. This model fit the data well (CFI=.90). We conclude that the social development model provides an acceptable fit to predict drug use at ages 17 to 18. Implications for the temporal nature of key constructs and for prevention are discussed.

Politics and the Function of Power in a Case Study of IT Implementation

Viewing organizations as political coalitions has a long history in management studies and has generated a great deal of research on the roles of organizational politics and power in decision making. Information technology (IT) researchers generally have followed the general trend by providing structural-functional accounts of politics, power, and control strategies. Although such studies underscore the importance, nature, and complexity of politics in IT implementation, they are constrained by the lack of both a general theory of human behavior as well as a model of power that bridges the individual actor and the wider interpersonal/organizational setting. In this paper we present a case study of power and politics in a large financial transactions company, but seen through the lenses of the action science perspective of Argyris and his associates and the model of power developed by A.A. Berle. More specifically, we examine the power vacuum in the IT effort that resulted from the senior executive abrogating his power and failing to delegate it to his subordinates. The resulting political havoc, in turn, caused competition and confusion, wasted effort, and a significant lack of productivity with regard to the implementation of a multimillion-dollar IT effort. We conclude with several hypotheses about how principles of action science and interpersonal power must be used by executives to manage the politics of IT design and implementation.

A model of premarital coitus and contraceptive behavior among female adolescents.

At the most general level, I seek to model female adolescent sexual and contraceptive behavior in terms of the social context in which it occurs. Drawing on emerging theoretical literature pertaining to social exchange theory and changes in the social positions of women (and men) and also on existing substantive literature, I apply these notions to adolescent sexuality and contraceptive usage. The reviews of the literature reveal a number of inconsistencies among those factors (variables) advanced to explain both the prevalence and frequency of premarital coitus and contraceptive employment. Furthermore, as there is a paucity of well-developed theoretical models that might explain these inconsistencies, what is needed is an additional study that seeks to examine the net effects of those variables used in the literature to explain variations in female premarital coitus and contraceptive use. The present formulation is a two-stage causal model that can be used to estimate the impact of these variables on premarital coital behavior (stage 1) and subsequent contraceptive usage (stage 2). These models, and a concomitant set of hypotheses, take into account an array of the more significant sociological and social psychological variables as far as the prediction of the two phenomena in question are concerned. These models may be useful in guiding future research as they graphically display the relationships between these sets of variables within the context of a more general theory of human behavior.

Epistemological Problems of Economics.

First published in German in 1933 and in English in 1960, Epistemological Problems of Economics presents Ludwig von Misess views on the logical and epistemological features of social interpretation as well as his argument that the Austrian theory of value is the core element of a general theory of human behavior that transcends traditional limitations of economic science. Epistemological Problems of Economics presents the first outline of Misess general science of human action, and may, therefore, be of special interest to individuals with knowledge in sociology or philosophy or those who are seeking a suitable initiation to Misess thought. This volume is unique among Misess works in that it contains a collection of essays in which he contested the theories of intellectuals he respected, such as Carl Menger, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, and Max Weber. Mises describes how value theory applies to human action at all times and places, as opposed to economic theory, which applies only to human action guided by economic calculation.

Diagnostic specificity. Some social psychiatric considerations.

Sociology’s recent maturation as a responsible basic science of human behavior has already begun to contribute to the enrichment of psychiatric knowledge and practice. Studies in the areas of epidemiology and of treatment5,11in which clinical observations are related to social structure have cast a new light on our clinical efforts. Particularly valuable in what promises to be continued, if slow, progress toward a general theory of human behavior has been Parson’s structural-functional theory of social systems.19This presently most comprehensive theoretical approach to the regularities of human group behavior has elaborated, among other valuable notions, the concept of social role in behavioral motivation. According to Leighton, Clausen, and Wilson, in their significant collection of essays, “Explorations in Social Psychiatry,”16“role is a critical point of interlock between individual dynamism and social pattern, and is, therefore, a very sensitive indicator

A Set of Categories for the Analysis of Small Group Interaction

Because problems are dimly 'felt,' because they are neither related to a general theory of behavior on the one side, nor rigorously connected with the categories and indices to be chosen for observation on the other, the results of the research can very seldom become part of the cumulative movement of truth which constitutes the growth of scientific knowledge. When concrete indices (and classifications) are not clearly related to the variables of a general theory of human behavior in society, they tend to be ad hoc. Under these conditions they are only with difficulty, applicable, i.e., translatable into another concrete situation by an investigator who seeks to confirm, revise, or disconfirm the previously 'established' proposition.1