Intentionality Of Action Research Articles

Disused coal tip management in Wales: environmental regulation under climate change

In view of recent coal tip failures in Wales under pressures of climate change conditions, particularly severe rainfall, the Welsh Government has committed to taking preventive action to address threats associated with disused coal tips, which number more than 2,500. This legislation is currently under development, aided by a report from the Law Commission of England and Wales, which recommended the creation of a coal tips register and the designation of an authority for overseeing inspections, assessing risk levels, and ensuring appropriate management. Whilst the intent of such regulatory action on coal tips is the protection of both public safety and environmental health, paradoxically a central barrier to an effective regime is the body of environmental regulations which constrain development. This article reviews such tensions in areas such as waste management, environmental permitting, habitat protection, ecological assessments, and nature conservation, before considering potential solutions to enable timely implementation of coal tip safety measures whilst safeguarding long-term ecological health and sustainability. The conclusion reflects on how the issue of disused coal tip safety serves as a harbinger of the types of legislative challenges likely to arise under climate change.

Identifying trends in interpretation and responses to hurricane and climate change communication tools

Coastal regions such as the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts are highly vulnerable to extreme coastal hazards such as tropical cyclones and major hurricanes. The effects of these hazards pose a threat now and are expected to increase in the future, which highlights the need for coastal communities to receive and understand information regarding risks involved with these hazards. Through this study, we identify points of improvement in the tools used to communicate the short and long-term risk associated with hurricane hazards through three surveys in Mobile, AL, Savannah, GA, and Houston TX. These surveys identify public response to hurricane descriptions, Cone of Uncertainty graphics, and long-term trend graphics. Analysis of trends in responses to these communication tools identifies relationships between risk perceptions and existing factors in each study location. Further, public response to these tools is identified and analyzed using structural equation models for each location with a “response” latent variable containing information from endogenous variables in the survey. Response was measured as action intent, concern for the scenario, reported evacuation likelihood, and interpretation of long-term trends. We identify points of improvement for all three communication tools to aid in public comprehension of the information provided as well as to increase response to hurricane hazards by more effectively communicating risk information. These would help to improve comprehension and increase different responses to tropical storm and hurricane damage from high winds and storm surge with the intent to improve resident response to hazards along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.

The State of Health and Intentions for Action to Advance Mental Health and Well-being for the Nursing Workforce.

The aims of this study were to explore the health of nurse leaders and assess intentions to integrate workplace mental health/wellness practices. National efforts address high rates of poor mental health and lifestyle behaviors among nurses. Few studies describe the extent to which nurse leaders in academic and clinical environments can influence a strategic mission for health/well-being among the nursing workforce. Two hundred seventeen email invitations were distributed to nurse leaders from 5 Kentucky nursing organizations to complete a 1-time 46-item online survey assessing individual health behaviors and intentions to build a culture of workplace health/well-being. Most respondents reported positive physical health (86%), positive mental health/intentions for action to change behaviors (80%), improved self-care practices (86%), integration of self-care practices in the workplace (79%), and commitment to integrate suicide prevention training (55%). Overall, nurse leaders reported positive healthy behaviors. The finding that the highest intentions were reported to integrate, sustain, and/or advance lifestyle behaviors for self-care practices as well as to integrate practices for mental health and well-being in the work environment is encouraging. Enhanced strategies and efforts are needed to prioritize workplace cultures of wellness to benefit nurses and further promote well-being among nurse leaders.

New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style

New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style

Emotional framing in online environmental activism: Pairing a Twitter study with an offline experiment.

As the consequences of anthropogenic climate change become more apparent, social media has become a central tool for environmental activists to raise awareness and to mobilize society. In two studies, we examine how the emotional framing of messages posted by environmental activists influences engagement and behavioral intentions toward environmental action. In the first study, tweets (N = 510k) of 50 environmental activists posted between November 2015 and December 2020 are examined to measure their emotional content and its relation to tweet diffusion. Environment-related tweets are found to be shared more the less they contain positive emotion and the more they contain negative emotion. This result supports the negativity bias on social media. In Study 2 (N = 200), we experimentally test whether negatively vs. positively framed environmental content leads to increased reported intent to engage with collective action, and whether mood mediates that link. We find both direct and indirect effects on reported climate action intentions when mood is used as a mediator. The negative mood resulting from seeing negative tweets makes participants more likely to report higher action intention (indirect effect)-congruent with Study 1. However, seeing negative tweets also makes participants less inclined to act (direct effect), indicating a suppression effect and the presence of other factors at work on the pathway between information and action intent formation. This work highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of this relation and motivates more experimental work to identify other relevant factors, as well as how they relate to one another.

Intentionality, not just agency: bringing intended meaning back into the micro–macro institutionalization processes

ABSTRACT Organization theory and organizational institutionalism have moved toward a more generative understanding of agency to better account for the relation between the microfoundations and macrofoundations of institutions. Central to such an understanding is an overlooked construct: intentionality, defined as actors’ consciousness directed at or about something, the content of which is actors’ intended meaning. Intentionality and intended meaning have three dimensions: prior intentionality, intentionality in action, and posterior intentionality. I propose that intentionality and collective intentionality mediate between macro-level structures and micro-level actions. This model allows for a more fluid conception of intended meaning before, during, and after an action, and thus facilitates a more fine-grained understanding of (1) how the macro is instantiated in the micro and how the micro transforms into the macro, (2) multiple pathways of institutional maintenance and change, and (3) the complexity of decoupling at both the micro and the macro levels.

Transforming adversity into an ally: A qualitative study of “feeding your demons” meditation

Contemplative science has made great strides in the empirical investigation of meditation practices, such as how mindfulness, compassion, and mantra practices impact health and well-being. However, meditation practices from the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition that use mental imagery to transform distressing beliefs and emotions have been little explored. We examined the “Feeding Your Demons” meditation, a secular adaptation of the traditional Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist meditation practice of Chöd (“Severance”) in a pilot, randomized controlled trial in which 61 community adults from the U.S. with prior meditation experience and moderate levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms (70% female)were randomly assigned to one month (15 meditation sessions) of “Feeding Your Demons” practice or a waitlist control group. Written diary entries were collected immediately after each meditation session. We used an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis approach to examine qualitative responses to two questions which probed (1) how participants made meaning of each meditation session and (2) how they thought it may impact their future thoughts and intentions for action. Five major themes were identified based on 20 codes developed through an inductive review of written responses across all participants. The themes included an enhanced sense of self-worth and confidence, empathy for the “demon” or rejected parts of oneself, increased self-awareness, an active-oriented “fierce” self-compassion, and an acceptance form of self-compassion. Overall, participants expressed an ability to reframe, or transform, their relationship to distressing thoughts, emotions, and experiences as they gained personal insights, self-compassion, and acceptance through the meditation process which in turn shaped their future intentions for action in the world. This research suggests that a secular form of a Vajrayana Buddhist practice may be beneficial for Western meditation practitioners with no prior training in Vajrayana Buddhism. Future research is warranted to understand its longer-term impacts on health and well-being.

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>

STEPS: Semantic Typing of Event Processes with a Sequence-to-Sequence Approach

Enabling computers to comprehend the intent of human actions by processing language is one of the fundamental goals of Natural Language Understanding. An emerging task in this context is that of free-form event process typing, which aims at understanding the overall goal of a protagonist in terms of an action and an object, given a sequence of events. This task was initially treated as a learning-to-rank problem by exploiting the similarity between processes and action/object textual definitions. However, this approach appears to be overly complex, binds the output types to a fixed inventory for possible word definitions and, moreover, leaves space for further enhancements as regards performance. In this paper, we advance the field by reformulating the free-form event process typing task as a sequence generation problem and put forward STEPS, an end-to-end approach for producing user intent in terms of actions and objects only, dispensing with the need for their definitions. In addition to this, we eliminate several dataset constraints set by previous works, while at the same time significantly outperforming them. We release the data and software at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/steps.

Judging intentionality in the context of ambiguous actions among autistic adults

BackgroundDiscerning intentional from unintentional actions is a key aspect of social cognition. Mental state attribution tasks show that autistic people are less accurate than neurotypicals in attributing an agent’s intention when there is clearly a right answer. Little is known about how autistic people judge the intentionality of ambiguous actions (i.e., actions that are neither clearly intentional nor clearly unintentional). AimsThis study sought to find out whether autistic individuals differ in their interpretation of ambiguous action compared to neurotypical controls. Methods and procedures20 autistic and 20 neurotypical adults completed an ambiguous action and theory of mind task. Autistic traits, verbal reasoning and non-verbal perceptual reasoning ability were measured. Outcomes and resultsResults show that intentionality endorsement scores for ambiguous but prototypically accidental actions were higher in autistic participants than controls. Theory of Mind (ToM) scores did not correlate with intentionality endorsement scores in either group therefore group differences could not be explained by ToM ability. Conclusion and implicationsAutistic participants had a tendency to over-attribute intention compared to neurotypicals, which could not be explained by ToM ability. Studying ambiguous action is important with respect to ecological validity, given that we often face ambiguous actions during social encounters.

Tracking relations between development of tactical knowledge and tactical behaviour: a season-long action research study

ABSTRACT Background: Specific learning experiences are vital for athletes to continuously interact with developing knowledge of the performance environment, through the refined design of representative learning contexts (ecological paradigm), and appropriate didactical interventions (constructivist paradigm). Although there is a well-established relationship between tactical knowledge (TK) and tactical behaviours (TB), research has investigated the development of both separately. Thus, the inter-dependency between knowledge and behaviour has been inferred, but not contextually interpreted in a process-oriented analysis of performance. Purpose: Through an insider action-research (AR) design, and adopting a mix-methods approach, this study aimed to: (i) investigate in-depth the influence of a constructivist-ecological pedagogical intervention on developing players’ TK and TB; (ii) explore effects of integrated tactical knowledge and behaviour on competitive performance. Participants and settings: Fifteen female volleyballers participated in this study. An insider-AR (first author assumed the dual role of coach and researcher) was conducted from September 2017 to June 2018. In total, four AR-cycles were completed. A mixed-method approach was used to obtain distinct, but complementary, data on the impact of a constructivist-ecological pedagogical intervention on development of players’ TK and TB. Qualitative data were used to explore the development of TK, while TB was analysed through quantitative methods. Data collection: Qualitative data on the coach’s perceptions were collected using a reflexive diary and field notes, while players’ perceptions were recorded through four semi-structured focus-group interviews, one per AR-cycle. Quantitative data from four official competitive matches, one per AR-cycle, were analysed. Players’ positional coordinates were used to calculate the synchronisation tendencies of lateral blocking and defensive lines through the cluster-phase method. Data analysis: Qualitative data were analysed using thematic analysis, in which inductive procedures deepened understanding of the development of the players’ TK. A 4 (matches) x 1 (court direction) repeated-measures ANOVA was used to analyse quantitatively the differences in the mean cluster-amplitude values of lateral blocking and defensive lines between matches. Main findings: The unique integration of constructivist and ecological principles scaffolded the development of players’ TK and TB. Players evolved from an initial stage in which they verbally described competitive game scenarios (using knowledge about environment), to an endpoint where they revealed superior tactical understanding and action intentionality. Increments in tactical complexity favoured the development of TK and TB in a long-term analysis. However, over the short-term, TB was reduced. The development of players’ TK (supported by interactions yielding knowledge of practice and performance environments) shaped a basis for the acquisition of co-adaptive TB during competitive performance. Practical implications: First, sport practitioners could benefit from combining strategies from different theoretical approaches so that they can satisfy the daily needs of athletes in practice. Second, we advise coaches to adopt didactical and representative learning designs, grounded on video analysis and the co-creation of game-plans. Third, the data imply that time and the continuous exposure of players to meaningful and representative practice tasks in learning environments are needed so that athletes can enrich their tactical behaviours, using knowledge of the performance environment to interact effectively its constraints.

Nichtstun, Aufschreiben, Ausschneiden. Grenzwerte der Zusammenarbeit in der Literatur (Günther, Goethe, Schiller, Brecht)

AbstractThis article explores creative collaboration as an old, yet rarely discussed problem. It is mainly focused on literature, but the questions raised as well as the results are broadly applicable to most modern artforms that are based on a strong concept of authorship. Collaborations are familiar to all artistic genres at all times, in some periods and contexts they are even prevalent. Therefore, they currently gain notable attention in many academic disciplines, especially in the humanities but also in social sciences. In recent years the notion has become popular that in a certain way all works of art are collaborative (cf. Inge 2001, 623). One of the central points the article is trying to make is that the loose application of the concept of collaboration is clouding the view onto specific practices. At the same time, it is the main reason for the present uncertainty of what an artistic collaboration actually is or how it manifests itself in the resulting work of art. Therefore, the article explores the threshold of the concept of collaboration and presents readings of a few examples that challenge the stereotype of cooperative action as a setting of shared intentionality and stable roles of action. To make the huge field of collaborations more manageable, the article proposes to divide it into two different sets of practices: The first consists of all acts that bring texts into existence. On that level of material practices there is no need to make typological distinctions between the actors involved. It is more about the way a text is produced than who claims to be the author. Hence the question is how a person writes, on which surface and under which circumstances, if alone or interacting with others. The distinction between the author and all other actors involved in the production – the secretaries, the editors, the partners, to name only a few – is made on a second tier. It is the level of representation and representational practices. To separate the level of writing (Verfasserschaft) from the level of authorship (Autorschaft) allows a more neutral perspective on collaboration, that prevents confusion of writing with its representation. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’sEsquissed’une théorie de la pratique(1972) the article proposes a praxeological approach which calls for a close look at the specific constellation of textual production. To acknowledge the symbolic value of different writing-scenes (Schreibszenen) this approach needs to be complemented by a history of reading and writing (i.a. Roger Chartier). To specify and exemplify this notion the article analyses three different settings of textual production that can all be located at the margins of collaboration. All of them show a certain way of making common practices seem extraordinary. It is not the general type of practice but the specific way it is acted out in a certain constellation that gains symbolic value. Some of the specific examples addressed are: 1) What makes Johann Christian Günthers dictation so special that it is communicated in the paratext to his poem? And is it enough to let the unknown writer escape mere instrumentality and advance to being a collaborator? 2) Can individual verses of Goethe’s and Schiller’sXenienbe perceived as collaborations even though only one of them has written them? Can, in other words, doing nothing be considered an authorial practice as long as there is a contextualizing agreement on co-authorship? 3) Can Brecht’sKriegsfibelbe considered a collaboration even though he used photos published in newspapers without permission or consent? Is intention necessary or is it possible to collaborate unknowingly? These questions are difficult to answer definitively and maybe it is not even possible to answer them with absolute certainty. But they provoke reflections on the theoretical foundation of collaboration and authorship, they let us see some of the outlines of these concepts, hence help make our ignorance ›specified‹ (Robert K. Merton).

Sustainable food literacy: A measure to promote sustainable diet practices

Sustainable diets and food systems are considered essential aspects of food literacy. Food literacy advocates also suggest food literacy programs be enhanced to develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes to address sustainability issues. However, previous food literacy assessment tools cannot effectively measure the knowledge and abilities required to implement sustainable diets. To overcome such flaws, this study developed and validated a new food literacy scale highlighting important issues of healthy food consumption and environmental sustainability and for possible use as a tool in evaluating an individual's ability to practice sustainable diets. Following a four-stage scale development approach, this study performed web-based questionnaire surveys to develop a sustainable food literacy scale. A total of 968 valid questionnaires collected from Taiwanese residents were received. The results revealed the sustainable food literacy scale exhibits good reliability and validity. Four critical dimensions containing 26 items of sustainable food literacy were identified, including sustainable food knowledge, food skills, attitudes, and action intent and action strategies. This study further examined the relationship between all subscales and the socio-demographic characteristics. The findings suggested gender and education were not found to be related to sustainable food literacy. Both the frequency of cooking and food purchase were significantly associated with all subscale scores. Monthly household income was a significant correlate of all subscales except attitudes. The scale validated in this study not only helps scholars test theories relating to sustainable diet but also assists food policy makers and educators to gage individuals’ sustainable food literacy across genders.

Leaders’ influence on collective action: An identity leadership perspective

What makes followers act collectively when called upon by their leaders? To answer this question, participants were randomly allocated to leader–follower relationships embedded either in a partisan group or a workgroup context; and the relationship between identity leadership and collective action through ingroup identification (Study 1: N = 293) or both ingroup identification and group-efficacy (Study 2: N = 338) were assessed. Based on the model of identity leadership, we predicted and found that identity leadership was positively related with intentions for collective action when called upon by the leader, both via ingroup identification and belief in group efficacy. As predicted, the social identity process for the effectiveness of identity leadership was more important in partisan groups than in workgroups. The efficacy related process was group context invariant. These results have implications for our understanding of group processes involved in the leadership in collective action.

Воля: потерянное звено современной зарубежной психологии

The article presents the results of a review of publications on the problem of will in foreign psychology over the past 40-50 years. The main reasons for fluctuations in research interest in the problem of will in the 20th century are analyzed, as well as the main directions of research of volitional regulation in modern foreign psychology and related phenomena, methodological approaches and theoretical concepts. The main approaches to the definition of will in modern foreign psychology are described: will as control of impulses, will as a mechanism for the realization of intention in action, will as control of action’s determination. The results of the analysis made it possible to substantiate the need to refer to the concept of will in modern psychology, as well as to formulate the main criteria that distinguish the will from other mental phenomena. The main prospects for the further development of will are outlined, associated with the transition to the study of will in the process of transformation of the system of relations between a person and the surrounding worlds in real life situations.

Long-Term Trajectory Prediction of the Human Hand and Duration Estimation of the Human Action

In the frameworkof human-robot collaborative assembly, it is important to predict the long-term human hand trajectory for collision avoidance and to estimate the durations of the human actions for collaborative task planning. Many existing works predict long-term human trajectory by a preset time horizon, while in this letter, our prediction horizon depends on how far in the future we could predict the human's actions. To be more specific, we predict the human trajectory and estimate the durations for the human's current action and future actions. To address this problem, we propose a recognition-then-prediction framework. First, we present a hierarchical recognition algorithm to infer the human intentions for the current action and the future actions. Next, we propose to use the sigma-lognormal function to model and predict the human movement, and from this model we estimate the action durations. To accommodate different human behaviors, we also propose an online algorithm to adapt the movement model by using the observed trajectory, the human intentions and the scene layout. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is supported by experimental validations on the human trajectory data for conducting a computer assembly task.

Impact of Medical Blog Reading and Information Presentation on Readers' Preventative Health Intentions: Mixed Methods, Multistudy Investigation.

BackgroundMedical blogs have become valuable information sources for patients and caregivers. Most research has focused on patients’ creation of blogs as therapy. But we know less about how these blogs affect their readers and what format of information influences readers to take preventative health actions.ObjectiveThis study aimed to identify how reading patient medical blogs influences readers’ perceived health risk and their intentions to engage in preventative health actions. Further, we aimed to examine the format of the medical blog and the reader’s response.MethodsWe surveyed 99 university participants and a general-population, online panel of 167 participants. Both studies randomly assigned participants to conditions and measured blog evaluation, intentions for preventative health action, and evaluation of health risk and beliefs, and allowed open-ended comments. The second study used a different sample and added a control condition. A third study used a convenience sample of blog readers to evaluate the link between reading medical blogs and taking preventative health action.ResultsAcross 3 studies, participants indicated a desire to take future preventative health action after reading patient blogs. Studies 1 and 2 used experimental scenario-based designs, while Study 3 employed a qualitative design with real blog readers. The 2 experimental studies showed that the type of blog impacted intentions to engage in future preventative health actions (Study 1: F2,96=6.08, P=.003; Study 2: F3,166=2.59, P=.06), with a statistical blog being most effective in both studies and a personal narrative blog showing similar effectiveness in Study 2, contrary to some prior research. The readers’ perceptions of their own health risk did not impact the relationship between the blog type and health intentions. In contrast, in one study, participants’ judgments about the barriers they might face to accessing care improved the fit of the model (F2,95=13.57, P<.001). In Study 3’s sample of medical blog readers, 53% (24/45) reported taking preventative health action after reading a health blog, including performing a self-check, asking a doctor about their health risk, or requesting a screening test. Additionally, these readers expressed that they read the blogs to follow the author (patient) and to learn general health information. All studies demonstrated the blogs were somewhat sad and emotional but also informative and well-written. They noted that the blogs made them appreciate life more and motivated them to consider taking some action regarding their health. ConclusionsReading patient blogs influences intentions to take future health actions. However, blog formats show different efficacy, and the readers’ disease risk perceptions do not. Physicians, medical practitioners, and health organizations may find it useful to curate or promote selected medical blogs to influence patient behavior.

Promises, Intentions, and Reasons for Action

Abraham Roth argues that to accept a promise is to intend the performance of the promised action. I argue that this proposal runs into trouble because it makes it hard to explain how promises provi...

Миссия университета в гуманитарном измерении: к постановке проблемы

The article focuses on the mission humanitarianism of a university as a social institution from the perspective of social ontology. The mission is viewed as a perfect benchmark (supreme goal and purpose) necessary for university existence as well as for maintenance and authorization of its institutional identity. It is shown that despite the changes in functionality of universities under the conditions of knowledge-intensive economy development (use of business models in interaction with the society), the humanitarian orientation has not lost its significance since it is necessary for the existence of a university as an institutionally organized specific educational activity, including knowledge generation, storage and transmission. Key institutional characteristics are considered that reveal the importance of humanitarianism for preserving the university as a unique social phenomenon. The authors are guided by the methodology of moderate constructivism – the study of value and meaning of human mentality, ideas and ideals in forming the institutional design of social reality. The role of the ideal and the intentionality of human actions in the construction and function of an educational social institution, which is expressed in the university corporation’s drive to be orientated at values, which give positive social significance to its activities and are aimed at achieving good, are explored. The university produces and conveys knowledge through establishing a knowledge subject, in other words, it forms the very intention to achieve a socially significant result not only in an objectified form of knowledge, but also in the form of evolution (development) of an individual who can produce and use knowledge for the good of society and for their personal advancement. In this context, the mission is understood to be a supreme goal and an ideal benchmark in the concrete historic practices of university education in forming a knowledge subject who must master the fundamental values necessary for society’s existence. The university mission is based on the concrete historic interpretation of the key socially significant goal of education: the development of a “human being” who acts for the good and benefit of society and its members via conveying the thesaurus of universal human values in their concrete historic theoretical and ideological formats.

Voluntary Action, Chosen Action, and Resolve

ABSTRACT This paper provides a phenomenological account of the intentional structure of action. To establish the context, I first distinguish (a) physiological changes and the bodily motions manifesting them that one passively undergoes in response to external causes from (b) actions as such. With respect to actions, I further distinguish among what I call incomplete actions, voluntary actions, and chosen actions. I shall frame my discussion in terms of three similar distinctions, although my position will intersect but not coincide with any of them. The three distinctions are Edmund Husserl’s distinction between action-will and decision-will, John Searle’s distinction, as amended by John McDowell, between intention in action and a prior intention-to-do, and Aristotle’s distinction between voluntary and chosen action. The paper concludes with a discussion of a particular instance of chosen action that I call “resolve” and its relation to personal identity.