Ch 9 Personal Control

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Read chapter 9. Summarize the chapter. What was the most surprising thing you learned? How do personal control beliefs serve to encourage (motivate) or discourage behavior? Provide an example of each (an encouraged and discouraged behavior) and specifically discuss how personal control beliefs would influence those behaviors.

Provide a list of terms at the end of your post that you used from the chapter. 500 words

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The most surprising thing I learned was that there are two kinds of expectancy; efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations are a judgment of ones capacity to execute a particular act or course of action, the question usually is “can I do it?”. Outcome expectations are judgments that a given action will cause a particular outcome.

I think that personal control beliefs serve to encourage and discourage behavior. Perceived control revolves around how the self can exert control. Self-efficacy is important in personal control beliefs. It is the capacity to use ones personal resources well under diverse and trying conditions. It can also be defined as ones judgment of how well (or badly) one will cope with a situation. An example of this could be failing a test. A way this could motivate you is to use your resources (professor, TA, and textbook) to study more for the next exam. A way this could discourage you, is that you don’t ask the professor for extra help and you don’t study for the next test. People learn their current self-efficacy from their interpretations and memories of past attempts to execute the same behavior. If the student has always gotten good grades and on one test they fail, that student might handle it well by going to ask the professor where they went wrong so that for their next exam, it doesn’t happen again. Effort and persistence is important to self-efficacy. An individual with strong self-efficacy beliefs produce persistent coping efforts aimed at overcoming setbacks and difficulties, whereas doubt leads people to slacken their efforts.

Empowerment is important because it’s an individuals’ level of self-efficacy that predicts ways of coping that can be called “competent functioning” or personal empowerment (like overcoming an avoidance based fear). Empowerment involves processing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. Empowerment can encourage behavior by overcoming a fear, like the book said. If an individual is afraid of being in large crowds, and they slowly work up to feeling comfortable in that situation, they may feel a sense of empowerment because now they are able to do some things that they may not have been willing to do, due to their fear of large crowds. They might finally be able to go to a concert or go to a game at their favorite teams stadium. This could also be discouraging as well. If a person is afraid of large crowds, they may turn down offers to hang out with friends just because of how large the event is.

Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. Efficacy expectancies are the building blocks of self-efficacy and outcome expectancies are the building blocks of learned helplessness. If a parent always does everything for their child, their child has no way of learning to do things on their own. This can be discouraging because if the child gets into a situation that their parents have always handled for them, they may avoid it as best as they can. This can be encouraging because this can lead the child to asking their parent for help, instead of the parent doing everything for them. This means that the child will learn how to ask for help when they need it.

Terms: expectancy, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, perceived control, self-efficacy, empowerment, learned helplessness

Chapter 9 discusses personal control beliefs and motivation. Within the idea of motivation and personal control is a prediction based on a what people believe. This idea is called an expectancy. The idea of expectancy is split into two separate phenomena: efficacy expectations and outcomes expectations. Efficacy expectations is the “Can I do it?” question. Outcome expectations are the “Will my effort work?” questions. Basically the efficacy expectations are asking if the person has the skill to get something to act a certain way. Outcome expectations ask how likely predicted events will happen following the actions. The textbook says that both expectations need to be high before motivations can be created.
The next topic that is addressed is perceived control. The three aspects that are shown in the model of perceived control are Self (Agent)- Action (Means)- Control (Ends). This model says that the person uses efficacy expectations to prepare the action. Then the agent uses outcome expectations to prepare for the end (outcome). If the expectations line up with the individual’s ideas, motivation will be created to help the person get to the end point.
The textbook describes the idea of self-efficacy next. Self-efficacy shows how people's decisions and beliefs affect them in the future. The book uses an example of driving a car. Most people think they can drive a car well. Self-efficacy is important when circumstances change how we feel in situations.
There are many different sources of self-efficacy. One of which is someone’s behavior history. Personal behavior history is used as personal experience. Memories and situations people have been in before can help them act in new situations. They know what worked and what didn’t. Another source is vicarious experiences. Watching others do activities and following suit is a great way to gain self-efficacy. Verbal persuasion (used by coaches, teachers, parents, etc.) is one way to motivate people to gain self-efficacy. Finally, someone’s physiological state (tired, confusion, pain, etc.) can greatly impact how they feel and act. The author says that once self-efficacy is determined and sustained, it changes and forms people’s decision and motivation.
A few important examples of effects on behavior are effects on effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotionality. Someone with a formed and positive self-efficacy will have more effort and a higher persistence. People think better when they believe in their self-efficacy because they can more easily think through situations from the past that relate to the situation they are in now. Finally, people with a strong self-efficacy will think through the task more and will think less of how they look doing it or how they might fail (emotionality).
Another topic that relates to how motivation is created is the idea of mastery beliefs. When someone has a mastery belief, they are confident that they can get an outcome of a task more consistently. If a person has weak mastery beliefs, they will think that they do not have an effect on their environment and cannot change things alone.
The last topic that I want to highlight from chapter 9 is helplessness. Individuals that are motivationally orientated with mastery ideals are strong and learn through moments of failure. Those who are motivated with a helplessness orientation are broken in failure and think that is was all their fault. The idea of helplessness is said to be completely learned and observed. The most interesting thing I learned in this chapter is that this suggests that surrounding yourself with people that are mastery motivated makes is more likely that you will be as well.
Personal control beliefs can motivate behavior by backing up things you believe in. An example would be someone that is very religious. These people might think that they have a lot of control over their time on a holy day. They are much more likely to be motivated to use this time to go to church (or another equivalent) because they believe they can consistently go, than someone who is not. They feel like the time is their own, but they believe that they should spend it doing an activity. An example of someone who would be discouraged is someone who is trying to cross a bridge. If the bridge looks loose, they might think about the fact that the bridge might fall. By doing this, they are more likely to discourage this behavior and find another way across or turn around. Because the person thought about the likelihood of making it, they knew they had control over their decisions and either were motivated or discouraged.
Terms:
Two kinds of expectancy
Perceived control
Sources of self-efficacy
Personal behavior
Vicarious experience
Verbal persuasion
Physiological state
Effects on behavior
Mastery beliefs
Helplessness

Chapter 9 is titled Personal Control Beliefs and focuses on motivation to exercise personal control over what happens to you. The chapter further explains self-efficacy, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, reactance theory, and hope. We learn expectancies about our control as we try to control events. There are two kinds of expectancy: efficacy expectation and outcome expectation. Efficacy expectation is “a judgement of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action, can I do it?” (pg. 231). An outcome expectation is “a judgement that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome, will what I do work?” (pg. 231). Efficacy and outcome expectation must be high within a person before behavior becomes energetic and goal directed. The Person, Behavior, and Outcome model on page 232 shows the relationship between expectancy motivation. Self-efficacy is “a more generative capacity in which the individual organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with the demands and circumstances he or she faces” (pg. 233). Self-efficacy beliefs come from personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological state. Once formed, self-efficacy effects a person’s choice of activities and selections of environments, effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotionality. Learned helplessness is “the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable” (pg. 244). Contingency, cognition, and behavior are three components of the learned helplessness theory. Contingency refers to the relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcomes. Cognition refers to biases, attributions, and expectancies. Behavior refers to the coping behavior on a continuum from active and energetic to passive and withdrawing. Reactance theory explains how people react to events in life that are uncontrollable (pg. 256). Hope integrates agentic thinking and pathway thinking. Agentic thinking is the “can do” attitude that relates to confidence and efficacy to accomplishing goals. Pathway thinking is the belief that one has multiple and controllable pathways to those goals.
The most surprising thing I learned was about the two expectancies: efficacy and outcome. Efficacy expectancies are the building blocks of self-efficacy and outcome expectancies are the building blocks of learned helplessness.
Personal control beliefs can encourage or discourage behavior. When people expect they can perform well on an action, they will put forth more effort and persistence in facing the difficulties. For example, when someone believes they can get an A on an exam, they will study more/more often, this behavior is encouraged and they accomplish their goal of getting an A on the exam. On the other hand, when people expect they cannot perform well on a task, they will not be willing to engage in the activities requiring the behavior. For example, when someone believes they cannot pass an exam with an A, they will be discouraged from studying and preparing for the exam.

Terms used:
-Motivation to personal control
-Efficacy/Outcome expectancy
-Self-efficacy
-Mastery beliefs
-Learned helplessness
-Reactance theory
-Hope

Chapter 9 focuses on the discussion of how control can influence an individual’s motivation. More specifically, how the perceived locus of control can really sway how an individual experiences life, motivates themselves to perform behaviors, and explain why things happen as they do. The chapter begins by introducing the concept of personal control, and how it is born by the influences of expectancy. More specifically, personal control is born of the two kinds of expectancy: Efficacy and Outcome Expectation. The initial diagram provided explained that a person uses the efficacy expectation to judge whether they can successfully perform an action, then the person rates (with outcome expectation) whether the performed behavior/action will have any affect on the outcome. Having both high efficacy and outcome expectation leads to energetic and directed (AKA motivated) behavior. The chapter then relabels this model under the Self-Action-Control Model to introduce the concept of Perceived Control (whether your behavior has any effect on the “control” (outcome)). Perceived Control then leads into Self-Efficacy (adaptation of skills to a situation) and its antithesis: Self-Doubt. It discusses the four sources (Personal Behavioral History, Vicarious Experience, Verbal Persuasion, and Physiological State) of self-efficacy, followed by the effects self-efficacy has on behavior (Choice, Effort & Persistence, Thinking & Decision-Making, and Emotional Reaction).

Seeing as they are similar, the chapter then distinguishes the concept of self-efficacy from the previously-discussed psychological need of Competence. Moving on, the chapter discusses the concept of Empowerment as something that can be predicted by a person’s own self-efficacy. The chapter then moves on into Mastery Modeling Programs and Mastery Orientation Beliefs and the benefits that they bring to coping strategies and improving on self-efficacy. The chapter then compares Mastery with Helplessness, before introducing the concept of Learned Helplessness (the mindset that your behaviors cannot influence outcomes). Touching on the three main components of learned helplessness (Contingency, Cognition, and Behavior), the chapter discusses the effects (Motivational, Learning, and Emotional Deficits) of learned helplessness, followed by its supposed relation to depression. Explanatory style (Optimistic & Pessimistic) follows this and is subsequently followed by the criticisms and possible alternative explanations researchers have for Learned Helplessness Theory. The chapter semi-concludes with the concept of Reactance Theory (attempts to reestablish perceived lost/eliminated control), compares this with learned helplessness, and finally concludes with a discussion of the concept of Hope (culmination of self-efficacy and mastery motivational orientation).

Sorry for the longer than usual summary there, this was just an overall interesting chapter to me and every time I tried to summarize it more succinctly, it felt like I was not doing the chapter justice. Moving on, however, I found the most interesting topic discussed to be the comparison between learned helplessness and depression. After taking Cognitive Psychology, I was told that learned helplessness is often used in research with depression, especially in testing of anti-depressants on animal subjects before moving on to human trials. The beginning of the discussion in the chapter seemed to support this notion, as it discussed how many researchers were concluding that learned helplessness was a form of “unipolar” depression. However, the chapter then goes on to completely contradict that finding with Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson’s 1979 study where college students with and without depression were compared. Alloy and Abramson found that those students with depression were not more susceptible to learned helplessness tendencies but were more realistic than their normally-developing counterparts. The “normal” college students were overzealous in their personal evaluation of control, and overpredicted. Therefore, learned helplessness was correlated with depression, because those with depression, by comparison with a normal group, were comparatively lower, but more accurate. I took this as a bit of a personal victory, so that if anyone ever calls me “depressing” or “pessimistic” ever again, I can say (with evidence to prove so) that I am more realistic than they are.

Mastery motivational orientation beliefs serve to encourage our behavior as they display the extent of perceived control we have over achieving the outcomes we want and avoiding the outcomes we do not want. We are motivated purely by our drive to become masters/experts in the focused field. When failure rears its ugly head, someone with a mastery belief would be able to remain task-focused and push through the failure to achieve mastery. Failure is something that is to be expected and carries feedback for improvement. Most importantly, failure is not a display of your value as a person. Just because you fail does not mean that you are a failure, it means that you are human, and you have areas to improve in.

A personal control belief that would discourage behavior would be (most obviously) learned helplessness. This is a state of mind where everything and anything you do does not matter because the outcomes and “controls” are out of your control. Someone afflicted by learned helplessness would be unwilling/unable to see the benefits in failure. Failure reflects themselves, and because they failed they will be more than likely to give up. This is because they perceive the reasoning behind the failure as beyond their control, that there is no way to improve themselves and they simply give up.

As a personal anecdote to add a little spice and hopefully a little comedy to this blog post, let’s focus on the behavior of dating. I will speak of myself, but I can assure you that the scenarios presented are (mostly) fictional, and all heartbreak is suffered by a Maxwell of my own imagination and definitely, 100% not the real Maxwell (probably).

So, if Maxwell One adopts a mastery orientation belief with regards to dating, he would desire to perfectly master the dating behavior (which I will operationally define as: “Achieve a lasting relationship from a date.”). Maxwell One would then set out tirelessly to achieve this mastery. He would utilize all the proper coping strategies that he sees as his best chance to achieve the mastery of the dating behavior. He would utilize approach-oriented (as opposed to avoidance-oriented) behaviors because Maxwell One realizes you cannot date whom you do not approach. He would approach the nice lady/gentleman (no judgements) of his choosing and attempt to initiate conversation as opposed to quietly lurk in a corner staring at the person he was interested in. He could, perhaps, request the assistance of a “wingman” to tackle the scenario in a social way as opposed to “lone-wolf-ing.” Maxwell One would see this as beneficial, because there are multiple people involved, so more opportunity for efficacy and adaptation than if he just attempted to tackle it on his own. Seeing as we’re discussing dating, Maxwell One should probably take a proactive approach (preventing problems before they happen) as opposed to a reactive one. Waiting to try and attract a woman/man after creeping them out with a little corner lurking (a reactive approach) probably is not a good way to secure anything other than a solid pepper-spraying or knee to the groin. I could continue down the list, but I’m already at one thousand words, so I’ll just move on to the conclusion of Maxwell One’s story: He is successfully able to acquire a date, because even though he may have been rejected one or two or twenty times, he sees failure as a call for improvement rather than a reflection of his own personal shortcomings, pushes through the failure, and carries on to the next attempt.

Now we move on to the tragedy of Maxwell Two. Unlike the suave, sexy, and confident mastery approach of Maxwell One, Maxwell Two has taken up the personal control belief of learned helplessness. Besides being an absolute downer to be around, Maxwell Two is not very solid on the dating scene. He perceives that anything he does is useless, because he’ll likely wind up alone and sad no matter what he tries. Focusing in, Maxwell Two experiences three major deficits in his functions thanks to his adoption of learned helplessness. The first is a motivational deficit, which means that Maxwell Two is barely motivated to even go out to the bars to find a nice lady/gentleman. His motivational state is more in a, “Why even bother?” than a, “Can do!” Because of this, the first lady (whom I’ll retroactively name Samantha) that Maxwell Two approaches rejects his advances. This failure hurts Maxwell Two’s already crippled motivational state and may cause him to leave the bars altogether for awhile. Maxwell Two then experiences his second deficit, a learning deficit. He is unable to view his method of lurking in the corner staring at Samantha with the expression of Droopy Dog as ineffective. As such, he is unable to therefore make a new response to make a new outcome. He sees all responses as useless, since outcomes are uncontrollable, so making a new response to increase his chances of finding a date is equally useless. Therefore, he’s more than likely going to keep attempting the same strategy and fail and/or eventually quit.

And, pulling back to the Droopy Dog reference, Maxwell Two suffers from emotional deficits caused by his learned helplessness. Like the titular depressed pooch, Maxwell Two comes across as lethargic and passive, pursuing his goal of achieving a relationship with the aggressiveness of a snail (which is a bit of an oxymoron, because snails are actually VERY aggressive animals). This is especially crippling on the dating scene, as social psychologists have found that positive affect can make a possible partner much more attractive to a potential mate. So, in this situation which normally calls for a very active and intense involvement of emotion, Maxwell Two would appear almost bored and tired of talking to the girls/guys. This would, again, result in failure, flattening Maxwell Two’s affect even further, causing him to fail more, causing him to quit and go home to his cat Thomas.

Terms Used:
Competence – Pg. 154
Personal Control – Pg. 231
Expectancy – Pg. 231
Efficacy Expectation – Pg. 231
Outcome Expectation – Pg. 231
Perceived Control – Pg. 232
Self-Action-Control Model – Pg. 233
Self-Efficacy – Pg. 233
Self-Doubt – Pg. 234
Empowerment – Pg. 241
Mastery Modeling Programs – Pg. 241
Mastery Orientation Motivational Beliefs – Pg. 242
Learned Helplessness – Pg. 244
Alloy & Abramson (1979) – Pg. 253
Explanatory Style – Pg. 253
Pessimistic Explanatory Style – Pg. 254
Optimistic Explanatory Style – Pg. 254
Reactance Theory – Pg. 257
Concept of Hope – Pg. 259

Chapter Nine in our textbook Understanding Motivation and Emotion is primarily about personal Control and the components and effects that are associated with personal control. It also went into detail about the motivation and behavior influences behind personal control, self efficacy, and personal growth. The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was about how our self efficacy belief affects multiple things. Before talking about the affects external things have on self efficacy, let’s give a basic definition of self efficacy. Self efficacy is an individual’s belief in their ability to perform behaviors necessary to perform in their behavior and social environment. According to our text there are four things that our self efficacy beliefs affect. The first is our choice of activities and selection of environments. This simply means that the way we perform is based on what we chose to do and in what environment. The second effect is the extent of effort and persistence put forth during performance. This effect simply means that our self efficacy is affected by the amount of effort and how much effort we put onto something for a period of time. The third affect is the quality of thinking and decision making during performance. So this means that the way we think in the process of our decisions will affect our ability to perform. The fourth and final affect is emotional reactions, especially those related to stress and anxiety feelings that we experience. I had no idea that these things affected our self efficacy until the textbook pointed out that these were factors that affected self efficacy.
Personal control beliefs are the degree to which a person believes that he causes desirable outcome and prevents aversive outcomes. This also takes into account mastery vs helplessness. Mastery control is the mindset that you can make positive things happen. Failure is just feedback to move forward. Helplessness motivational orientation is the mindset that your viewed as weak, when you fail, you believe it is all about you and then you start avoiding and the eventually quit.
Personal control beliefs serve to encourage positive and desirable outcomes because as people we wants desirable outcomes and to prevent troublesome outcomes. We see these desirable and not so desirable outcomes come to life in our everyday walk through life. Now let’s talk about an example that takes us back to when we were younger and learning how to write and such. This example hits a l An example of an encouraged behavior is that we write and draw on paper when we are learning the alphabet and such. An discouraged behavior would be to not draw on the walls and various other things that were not paper. Since personal control beliefs are focused on the degree to which a person believes that we cause desirable outcomes and prevent aversive outcomes, we would focus on drawing on paper and listening to the guidelines that were given to us and not draw on the walls and get into trouble.

Key Terms
Self Efficacy
Personal Control Beliefs
Mastery
Helplessness

The primary topics covered in Chapter 9 are self-efficacy, mastery beliefs, and learned helplessness. The beginning of the chapter touches on how expectancy branches into two sub-categories consisting of efficacy expectancy and outcome expectancy. Efficacy expectancy is being able to carry out a desired behavior in response to a given situation and outcome expectancy is the belief that one’s behavior will produce the desired result. Self-efficacy is an individual’s own judgement of how well they will be able to cope with a situation, given the skills possessed and the circumstances faced. Doubt is the opposite of self-efficacy, this being that with doubt the individual makes the judgement call that they will likely not succeed. Mastery beliefs are a reflection of the person’s perceived control over a situation. A motivational orientation geared towards mastery will consist of a high correlation between actions and outcomes. This is the “hard work pays off” mentality. On the other hand there is a motivational orientation that emphasizes helplessness in which actions are not associated highly with outcomes. These people tend to give up on tasks often as they do not view their efforts as being meaningful. This segways into the topic that I found rather interesting to read about, learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness occurs when people expect both desired or undesired outcomes to happen to them regardless of the actions that they take to either achieve or avoid such outcomes. This meaning that they view influences other than themselves to carry far more significance than they own behavior. Helplessness is learned by being immersed in environments that are not very responsive to an individual’s behaviors, therefore giving the perception that the environment is to some extent uncontrollable. This concept made me think about my upbringing as a child and the important role that my parents played in developing my mastery focused motivational orientation. My parents tended to encourage me to make bold attempts at solving problems that confronted me. My parents were also very interactive with me as a child. This could show that lots of environmental feedback, specifically positive feedback, can lead people towards believing that their actions carry more weight than initially perceived. More positive feedback would in my mind promote mastery over helplessness.

The main theme when it comes to personal control beliefs seems to be two questions that people ask themselves when confronted with a situation. The first being, “am I capable of carrying out the behaviors needed in order to deal with the situation at hand?” The second being, “will my behaviors lead to the outcome that I desire?” If the answer to the first question leans more towards no as opposed to yes then that individual lacks self-efficacy. They do not feel that they are capable of performing the desired behaviors. This deficit can come from a lack of skill, practical application of those skills, or a bit of both. If the answer to the second question is no then the individual possesses a motivational orientation emphasizing helplessness. This means that the individual views their actions as carrying little significance. An individual possessing high agency, the “can do” belief, along with perceiving that their pathways in life are controllable will outperform their peers that possess feelings of helplessness and low self-efficacy.

In summary, people that believe they will perform well tend to put forth more effort and be more persistent, which leads to them in fact performing well. If someone believes they will not perform well then they have in part already given up and will likely not put forth a sufficient amount of effort, which will lead to poor performance. For examples of each, consider midterm exams. On one hand, we have the students that believe they will earn good grades on their exams. Due to this belief, they also put forth the effort to study past their bedtimes, review the textbook, etc. Their optimism encourages their persistent work ethic. Lo and behold, they earn good grades. On the flip side however, there are some students that have a history of not performing well on their exams and they don’t expect his time to be any different. Potentially due to anxiety, the courses being too complex, or maybe they just aren’t good test takers. Their feelings of helplessness and doubt discourage studying and reviewing. These students in turn do not put forth the same amount of persistent effort as their optimistic peers, leading to them earning lower grades on average.

Terms Used:
Personal Control Beliefs
Expectancy
Efficacy Expectancy
Outcome Expectancy
Self-Efficacy
Mastery Beliefs
Helplessness
Motivational Orientation
Doubt

Chapter 9 is titled Personal Control Beliefs and talks about things like self-efficacy, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness and the effects that these sort of things may have. First there are two types of expectancies, efficacy and outcome expectations. Efficacy is the judgement of one’s capacity to perform a task or action. Outcome expectations estimate how likely it is that something bad like consequences will follow. Self-efficacy is defined as how well a person thinks they will cope with a situation with what skills and circumstances they currently have or lack. Sources that affect self-efficacy include personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and our psychological state. For example, vicarious experience talks about, “You go first, I’ll watch,” on pae 235 which means that by watching someone else perform a task very well, it raises the observer’s own sense of efficacy, as it initiates a social comparison for us. Self-efficacy and the its sources may effects on our behavior like choices of activities and environments,effort and persistence, decision making, and emotionality. For effort and persistence, self-efficacy influences how people exert themselves and for how long. A strong sense of self-efficacy results in persistent coping efforts at overcoming setbacks, while the opposite side of the continuum could be doubt. People slacken their efforts when difficulties are encountered. Mastery beliefs are the perceived controls one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing bad ones. Ways of coping like social vs solitary or direct vs indirect are ways one can use to exercises to dominate or avoid certain events or outcomes. Learned helplessness, called this because it is a learned condition in which a person suffers from a sense from a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. People can shut down, not react to undesired stimulus like a irritating noise as they were unable to escape, did not try escape as it could have seen pointless. Something I found interesting were the ways of coping and which ones that most people seem to use. I think that people in the United States, especially today use Approach vs Avoidance and Direct vs Indirect strategies in terms of coping. It is seen as easier to avoid the problem than to confront it, and when it is confronted, it is with Direct or Indirect as someone like a friend, teacher, or parent will be there to try and help. It is sort of something that is taught in school, like pre k to elementary school.
Personal control beliefs and their sources affect things like social opportunities, like dating, dancing, sport participation, and career paths. It will affect our personal behavior and psychological activities. It may be high or low, and depending may have positive or negative impacts depending on how one thinks of their self-efficacy.
An encouraged behavior would be something like for a person low in self-efficacy that if math test was soon and it were to be difficult or overwhelming, they would withdraw from the class. The person with a higher self-efficacy would not drop the class, but at least try to take the test.
Words: Learned helplessness, self-efficacy, ways of coping, mastery beliefs, expectations, persistence, approach vs avoidance.

Jon Lutz - section 01

Personal control is the calculation between the objective control available in the environment and a person’s abilities. A person’s perception of the latter is known as self efficacy, which is championed in the chapter as a near overwhelming positive motivational factor. While a person high in self efficacy is does not necessarily have increased objective control, they will less vulnerable to surprise, setback, and difficulty compared to a equivalently competent person with more self-doubt (self efficacy's opposite).
Self efficacy is not a static characteristic. It varies task to task and can be improved with empowerment training or naturally through successful controlled events. But on the other hand, avoidance, failing to control events, or exposure to uncontrollable and unpredictable tasks lowers self efficacy. Reactance, the motivationally charged response to loss of control, may diminish to a state of passivity and negative affect known as helplessness. Once in a helpless state, people experience deficits in learning, motivation, and emotion. Helpless postures have a possibility of being the optimal behaviors in low control environments just as the illusion of control may lead to negative outcomes in uncontrollable tasks. HIgh self efficacy, however, appears to be the superior mental state for the majority of tasks.
For example if I were a baseball player, having high self efficacy would be an asset at the plate. Even the best hitters in the world get on base less than half the time and strike out fairly often with thousands of individual strikes called against them. Though curveballs (surprise), bad swings (setbacks), and ace pitchers (difficulty) are ever present, there remains a high level of objective control. Staying calm, focused, and aware are necessary to perform at a high level, all facilitated by self efficacy. A good batter will think back to all the pitches they’ve hit well. Early in their career they watched other’s maintain proper swinging technique. The team and crowd provide a hitter with reassurance of their ability. When a mistake is made and doubt appears, a batter can step out of the box take a deep breathe and few practice cuts to get their physiology back on track. If they perceive they are the master of this exchange, a hitter will approach at bats with energy and process oriented thinking, hopefully adding to the intrinsic reservoir of motivation.
Now imagine you’ve stumbled into a complex card game that you have never even heard of with strangers. No one is explaining any of the rules. All your are given is the cards in your hand and actions you infer from what your opponent's do. You lose repeatedly, it’s the one thing your opponent's do tell you, but somehow you win a couple hands. Yet, at no point can you deduce any sense of effective strategy. For all you know, the game is a 100% luck or these strangers are playing some kind of prank. Soon frustration gives way to depression. You stop responding to your losses and stop looking for rules and techniques, only acting when prompted and at random. Based on your experience you are less likely to engage or interact with this or other new card games, even though the card game could be high in objective control. Assuming the game has rules and mechanics, there are many strategies that could have taught you the rules and then honed your skills. Persistence stood the best chance of winning you the game, but your perception of helplessness led to your termination of engagement and the stagnation of your growth.
I am surprised there was not a few more pitfalls to having a high self efficacy. My perception is that people under-deliver often, especially in an academic setting. How often have we promised our professors that we’d have that assignment in by midnight only to send the “sorry I’m late!” email in the morning. I could see how under-delivering could be fatal for ancient humanity. Evolutionary speaking, there is a low failure tolerance in the jungle. This is the distinction that didn’t appear to me at first; failure is inevitable in our complex pursuits of the 21st century. Overcoming failure is a life hack of sorts and gives those who stay focused have a large advantage.

Self efficacy
Self doubt
Reactance
helplessness
Process oriented thinking
Intrinsic motivation

Chapter 9 discusses the motivation (or lack thereof) to exert personal control. There are two types of expectancy. Efficacy expectation is the judgement of one’s capacity to produce a given action. This addresses the “Can I do it?” question. Outcome expectation is the judgement that a given action will produce a particular outcome. This addresses the “Will it work?” question.
Going further, self-efficacy is one’s judgement of how well one will cope with a situation. This is not merely ability because self-efficacy also takes into account the given circumstances or the situation. The opposite of self-efficacy is doubt. (In my mind, the opposite of doubt is confidence. Does this mean that self-efficacy and confidence are related or possibly synonymous?)
There are four sources of self-efficacy. The most influential, especially with newer tasks, is one’s personal history in trying to complete a particular behavior. The second most influential source comes from observing others complete a particular behavior. This relates to modeling. Another source is verbal persuasion, AKA pep talks, but this source is bounded by what one thinks is possible. The final source is physiological states. There are also four effects on behavior, including choice, effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions. It’s important to note that there is a difference between self-efficacy and competence. Self-efficacy can change with differing situations. Competence is fairly constant.
Chapter 9 also discusses mastery beliefs. Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of one’s perceived control. When someone is mastery-oriented, they believe their own behavior has more impact on outcomes that happen to them than other influences. This is contrasted with helplessness. Learned helplessness is the belief that the events in one’s life are beyond one’s control.
There are three components to learned helplessness. Contingency is the relationship between behavior and the environment’s outcomes. Cognition is the relationship between actual environmental contingencies and one’s subjective understanding of control. This is influenced by biases, attributions, and expectations. The final component is coping behavior, which exists on a continuum.
There are also three effects of helplessness. Motivational deficits include decreased willingness to try. Learning deficits are acquired pessimistic mindset that interferes with one’s ability to learn new response-outcome contingencies. Emotional deficits are affective disruptions, such as depression when active emotion is needed.
What I found most surprising in this chapter was related to helplessness and depression. Both relate to the expectation of bad things and the perception that nothing can be done to prevent the bad things from happening. The interesting thing is that depressed people do not misjudge control, but non-depressed people do. Non-depressed people perceive more control than they actually have. If used in a functional way, this can be an asset, relating to optimistic explanatory style. If misused, optimistic explanatory style can lead to delusions of control and narcissism.
Another interesting part of this chapter was related to reactance theory, which is the psychological and behavioral attempt at reacting against a threatened freedom. Reactance and helplessness seem similar, but reactance precedes helplessness. Reactance correlates with expectations of control and enhances performance. Helplessness correlates with expectations of no control and undermines performance.
Personal control beliefs can both motivate and discourage behaviors. This is clear to see through mastery orientation versus learned helplessness. If we perceive that we have the control to attain a desirable outcome (mastery), we will be more likely to attempt to do so. If we perceive that an outcome is out of our control (helplessness), we will likely be discouraged to take action towards that outcome.

Terms: motivation, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, self-efficacy, competence, mastery beliefs, mastery-oriented, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, biases, attributions, expectations, behavior, motivational deficits, learning deficits, emotional deficits, depression, reactance theory, personal control beliefs

Chapter 9 of the text discusses personal control beliefs and the manner in which they motivate individuals to perform specific tasks. The personal control beliefs that were discussed in this chapter were focused around self-efficacy, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, and reactance theory.

Self-efficacy is described as the belief that an individual has in his own ability to successfully perform a situation or task. Although every individual has their own self-efficacy, each person varies on their confidence in their own ability. An example used in the book discusses how most people see themselves as good drivers, however their confidence or self-efficacy is tested when they encounter sudden challenges on the road. Challenges such as ice or a car accident can reveal the self-efficacy an individual has regarding their driving ability. I found it interesting that there are four factors that influence our self-efficacy beliefs. The first factor is the personal behavior history. The text describes this factor as the most crucial influence on self-efficacy. Individuals tend to use their past performance as a baseline for their self-efficacy. Individuals who performed well in the past will most likely have a higher self-efficacy in the future. The second factor is the observation of others performing the task. People tend to look at the performance of others before they attempt an activity as a means to either boost their confidence or lower it when they compare themselves to others. The third factor discussed in the text is verbal persuasion. The phrase known as “pep talks” can influence an individual and build up their confidence and self-efficacy when faced with a certain task. The final component is the physiological response to a task. Our bodies tend to react differently to specific tasks. Many times individuals will tremble or shake when faced with a task that they do not feel comfortable performing, while others may stay calm in the face of adversity.

Mastery beliefs are known as the extent that an individual has regarding their ability to attain a desired outcome and preventing an undesirable one. Mastery beliefs will of course differ depending on each individual. One thing I learned about mastery beliefs is the fact that the manner in which we choose to cope with different situations. An example used in the book is with approach and avoidance. Choosing to take action and approach a problem provides a higher mastery belief than simply walking away from the issue. However, different coping mechanisms may cause a sense of hopelessness to arise. There are some individuals as described in the text that go through life feeling that they do not have any control over the outcomes of life. I found it interesting to note that people who experience helplessness often learn it through previous experiences. The text uses the dog experiment as an example of learned helplessness. In the experiment dogs were randomly shocked and after several attempts from the dogs to prevent the shock, they ultimately accepted it and experienced helplessness. This example can be translated to humans in a manner that past failures can cause a person to accept it and experience learned helplessness. In comparison, individuals with high mastery beliefs take on adversity as a means of overcoming a challenge while people with learned helplessness tend to give up because they believe that no matter what they will ultimately fail. The reactance theory is the final personal control belief discussed in the chapter. The reactance theory simply states the manner in which an individual reacts to a certain situation. Individuals who feel that they can affect the outcome of a task or event will do everything in their power to change the outcome to favor them. However, the individuals who do not believe that they can change the outcome of the event will experience the form of helplessness. The idea of “hope” is used when individuals believe that a task is capable of being completed successfully even though it may seem difficult. The sense of hope allows individuals to keep attacking a task until they become successful. Through this belief, encouraged behavior may result. Encouraged behavior results when individuals believe strongly in a task and as a result implement certain behaviors to accomplish them. An example of this is when an individual believes that he can make the varsity basketball team. As a result of his strong belief, he is constantly putting in hours of practice in order to accomplish his goal of making the team. Aside from encouraged behavior, discouraged behavior may arise when an individual does not believe that they can accomplish a task or goal. The individual may want to make the varsity team, however he believes that it is hopeless even if he puts in hours of practice. The result of this belief is that he does not spend time practicing and does not make the team.

Terms:
-Self-Efficacy
-Mastery Beliefs
-Learned Helplessness
-Reactance Theory
-Physiological State
-Hope
-Approach vs Avoidance

Chapter 9 is about personal control, self-efficacy, empowerment, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, and the reactance theory. All of these concepts come together to create hope. Those with high hope have motivational resources of confidence, self-efficacy, optimism, and mastery motivational orientation as well as outperform those with low hope because high hope individuals put in more effort and are more persistent when focused on a goal.
The most surprising thing I learned was how important self-efficacy is to our motivation. Our text covers a lot about self-efficacy, including the sources of efficacy and benefits of having high self-efficacy. A source of self-efficacy includes personal behavior history, meaning if someone has done well in the past when executing behavior, they are more likely to execute that behavior in the future. Another source of self-efficacy includes vicarious experience, which is when someone observes another person successfully completing a behavior and feel competent enough to complete that same behavior. The less experience that the observer has at the behavior, the greater impact vicarious experience will have. Verbal persuasion is another source of self-efficacy; this is essentially a motivating pep talk from a trusted and credible persuader. However, this can become ineffective if the past experience contradicts the pep talk. A physiological state also can influence self-efficacy because this state is a sign that the task exceeds the performer’s capacity to cope with those demands. Self-efficacy also influences choices of activities and environments. Weak self-efficacy leads to avoidance behavior whereas strong self-efficacy leads to approach-oriented behavior. People with high self-efficacy give more effort, show more persistence, are better analytic thinkers because they are able to remain focused, and are more enthusiastic and optimistic.
I also thought it was interesting that learned helplessness is such a big factor in motivation. People with external locus of control are more likely to develop learned helplessness. There is a range from 0 to 1 of how controllable outcomes are. 0 is uncontrollable outcomes and 1 is controllable outcomes. People who constantly believe that outcomes are uncontrollable but in less effort and are not persistent when performing a task whereas people who believe outcomes are controllable try harder and are more persistent with their goals. Something surprising to me was how similar depression and learned helplessness are. People with either depression or helplessness expect that bad events will happen and that there is nothing they can do to prevent that bad event from happening. Something interesting about this conclusion is that depressed individuals can accurately judge how much control they have over a situation whereas non-depressed people overestimate how much control they have over a situation.
Personal control beliefs encourage behavior because if someone expects that they can perform an action, they will be persistent and put forth more effort into completing that action, even when facing obstacles. For example, I think I can pass my Public Health Theory exam tomorrow, so I am going to use the Quizlet I made persistently, even when I get a term wrong, I will work until I get it right. I put a lot of effort into my Quizlet for this exam because I know there are only two grades put into ELearning all semester, the midterm and the final.
Personal control beliefs may discourage behavior if someone does not expect to execute an action well. Therefore, they put in less effort and are more likely to give up when they come across obstacles. If I did not believe I could perform well on my Public Health Theory exam tomorrow, I would not put in the time to even make a Quizlet, let alone go over one. I would probably just read over the notes my professor sent out and if I did not understand the material, I would skip over it with the mentality of, “If I do not know it now, I never will”.
Terms:
Personal control, self-efficacy, empowerment, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, reactance theory, optimism, persistent, goal, personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, physiological state, expectancy, effort

This chapter focuses on our beliefs about personal control. This belief is fueled by expectancy; which is a prediction of the likelihood that an event will occur. This idea that we are able to control things can help to motivate us towards certain things.
The thing I found to be interesting and surprising was the idea of self-efficacy beliefs. It begins with things in the past and one’s memory of the activity last time they attempted it. Self-efficacy begins with the history of one’s personal behavior beliefs. It stems from one’s memories on how they did when attempt to complete the behavior previously. I relate this to my ability to perform well during a basketball game. From previous games and practices, I knew I was able to shoot the ball, dribble, and run plays quite effectively. The next concept of the self-efficacy idea is vicarious experience. One watches and then attempts to do it on their own. I will continue to use my basketball example when relating this as well. In practice, we always had the starters run new plays while every one else watched. Some of these individuals had been playing for years so they already knew the plays. Once the plays had been shown to the younger ones they were given the chance to run it themselves. By having players who were experienced with the plays already model them it gave the others who were learning more confidence that they could run the play as well. Our coach also tried his best to use persuasion in order to encourage us to continue working hard. He would make a point to congratulate a player if he saw them doing well or they had a good game. This acknowledgement from our coach reassured us we were doing well and motivated us to continue to improve our skills. Unknown to me, I believe my self-efficacy in relationship to basketball is what made me continue to pursue the sport and perform to the best of my abilities.
Personal control beliefs can inhibit our behavior if we experience a negative effect from them such as fatigue, mental confusion or a number of other things. This generally serves as a signal to an individual that they are not capable of completing the activity. It can also cause us to be excited about an activity and want to continue performing it. If we believe we are capable of the behavior then we are more likely to continue performing the behavior. It can also lead us to not perform certain activities if we believe we will not be successful at them. Strong personal control beliefs can motivate an individual to continue with the behavior because the person feels as though there is a strong causal link between action and outcome and this is the opposite for those with weak personal control beliefs.
An encouraged behavior could be having a student do well in school. I know for me it was always a big factor in what my parents wanted for me. They served as verbal persuasion for me all the time. This led my personal beliefs to be quite strong. Through succeeding in classes I was able to develop the past experience that served as a reminder that I was capable of doing well. By continually doing well it increases one’s self-efficacy which; will over time create positive outcomes. One should try an develop an expectancy towards doing well in order to make their personal control beliefs stronger. If they learn to believe they can be a successful student than this can lead to them performing better as well.
A discouraged behavior could be skipping school. Nobody wants someone to get into this habit because the consequences from it can be numerous. The first attempt to discourage this could simply be having someone this person looks up to sit down and talk to them. If they have this conversation it could serve as the persuasion they need to no longer skip school. Another option could be having them meet with someone who use to skip school a lot and ended up suffering considerably from it. By taking part in this vicarious experience it could persuade the person to no longer want to skip school. It would show them the downside of skipping school and remind them that if they do continue to skip school that could end up being them in the future.

Terms:
Expectancy
Self-efficacy beliefs
Personal behavior history
Vicarious experience
Verbal persuasion
Behavior effects
Personal control beliefs

Chapter 9 talks about our motivation and how personal control can change affect that motivation. Personal control is introduced as being brought upon us by expectancy. There are two forms of expectancy that are mentioned in the chapter. Efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectation is essentially, “Can I do it?” While outcome expectation is basically asking yourself, “Will it work?” Having both high efficacy expectation and outcome expectation leads to a higher level of motivation. The chapter then goes on to talk about mastery beliefs and learned helplessness. Mastery beliefs are essentially a person’s opinion of their control over a situation. Learned helplessness deals with people who often give up on tasks easily as they feel that their efforts are irrelevant or meaningless.
The most surprising thing that I learned (or what was the most interesting to me) was the idea of verbal persuasion. As a sports fan, I have seen countless videos of coaches or other players making motivational speeches that seem to “alter” the course of the game. The book talks about these speeches as methods allowing people to focus on their strengths instead of their weaknesses or in words from the book, they focus on their efficacies instead of the inefficacies. This seemed spot on to me, as that is what seemed to have happened in those speeches that I had often heard about. But this has made me wonder about the power of these speeches. They could never work on a winless team against a state champ, right? Well, the book went on to explain that its effectiveness is limited by the boundaries of the possible. Therefore solving my question regarding the power of these “magical speeches” that propel a team to victory against all odds. The speeches may help the players find what they need to win, but if what they need is not there, there are not enough words in the world that will allow them to walk out victorious.
Personal control beliefs serve to encourage/motivate behaviors that we could feasibly accomplish. This means that if we are unable to accomplish a task, personal control beliefs will discourage us from participating in that behavior. Self efficacy beliefs are a good example of ideas that can motivate or discourage behaviors. An example of a behavior for many people might be getting a passing grade in a course. This idea is encouraged and we are likely motivated to obtain this passing grade because we look at efficacy expectation and outcome expectations. We ask ourselves the question, “Can I do it?” and we ask ourselves the question, “Will it work?” The answers to both of these questions should be yes so long as we put in the right amount of work. Knowing this should motivate us to put in the work and allow us to accomplish this. This is how personal control beliefs can encourage a behavior. The inverse of this could be getting an A in an extremely challenging course when we may be aware that our mental capacity is limited. Passing almost any course with hard work is reasonable but sometimes, obtaining an A is not the most reasonable thing. With this being said, we may ask ourselves the same questions of “Can we do it?” and “Will it work?” The answer to one or both of these questions may be no. This will lower our motivation and discourage us from striving to obtain that A. Learned helplessness may also get involved and allow us to bow out of the attempt at an A.
This chapter was very interesting in helpful in understanding the idea of personal control and how we go about understand whether or not our control of a situation will be strong enough to accomplish what we need within that situation. I thought it was very interesting how perceived control can also turn into real control . Once we believe we can do something, we often put in the effort to bring it to fruition.

Efficacy Expectancy
Outcome Expectancy
Mastery Beliefs
Learned Helplessness
Verbal Persuasion
Personal Control Beliefs

This chapter focuses a lot on expectancy, self- efficacy, and our beliefs about personal control. Expectancy is a subjective predication of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two kinds of expectancy, person and behavior. Person consists of Efficacy Expectation which is an expectation of being able to enact the behaviors one needs in order to cope effectively with the situation at hang. Behavior consists of Outcome Expectation which is an expectation that one’s behavior will produce positive outcomes (or prevent negative outcomes). This chapter also focuses on some different ways that people cope when they are stressed and covers a concept termed learned helplessness.

Something that I found surprising or interesting in this chapter was the topic of self-efficacy. Self-Efficacy is one’s judgment of how well (or poorly) one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces. Generative capacity in which the performer improvises ways to best translate personal abilities into effective performance. I admire people who have a high self-efficacy because they can really look at the world in a positive way and more problem focused type of way as well. There are multiple sources of self-efficacy such as persona behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological activity. All of these things lead to the extend of self-efficacy, which later result in choice, effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions. I also found all of the different ways of coping very interesting.

An encouraged behavior would be to do well in school because a lot of kids are motivated to get good grades because some parents offer reinforcements for those good grades. Doing well in classes will increase an individual’s self-efficacy and create positive outcomes in the long run. A discouraged behavior would be doing drugs, at least I think so. Seeing the negative affects of drugs can help discourage this kind of behavior in the future. Doing something like this with your own children or simply in the school setting could be very important and beneficial.

Terms: encouraged and discouraged behavior, self-efficacy, learned helplessness, coping

Chapter 5 delves into our expectancies and self-efficacy. Expectancy is a subjective prediction, someone makes, of how a situation will go. There are two kinds of expectancies: efficacy expectation, which is more of a "can I do it?" mindset. And then theres outcome expectation, which is "will it work?" mindset. Self-efficacy is a very important topic in this chapter. Self-efficacy is one's judgment on how well or poorly they will cope with a situation. Different from self-esteem, which is a person's perceived value of themselves. We as humans build self-efficacy through evaluating our actions and outcomes in our experiences. We begin building our sense of self-efficacy at a very young age. The chapter outlines multiple sources of self-efficacy such as: personal behavior history, modeling from others, effort and persistence, and verbal persuasion. Related to this is one's mastery beliefs, which is the perceived control someone has over attaining an outcome and preventing undesirable ones as well.

The most interesting concept this chapter talked about I thought was hope. Hope has always seemed like something from the movies to me. We always see the good guy talking about hope to inspire people, or something along the lines. This chapter has shown me that hope is much more than that, it is a scientific concept that combines two types of thinking. Agentic thinking and pathway thinking. Agentic thinking is the performers perceived capacity to accomplish, an "I can do this" mindset. While pathway thinking is a person's belief to generate multiple solutions to get a desired outcome. This is a "I will find a way" mindset. When put together, these two forms of thinking give us hope that we will achieve our desired outcome.

When it comes to my personal control beliefs, I think my self-efficacy is very important. Athletics is the most prominent example that comes to mind. I have played golf since I was 8 and have put many hours into practice. When I am about to begin a tournament, there may be some nerves but I feel comfortable. I know that after the hours of practicing that I have the skills to do what it takes to win, because I have done it before. After that arrogant statement, I would point out that golf can also be a large source of helplessness for me. When I get off to a bad start, and the mistakes seem to persist even after, I start to feel like everything is out to get me. My motivation to fight back into contention goes away, and I begin to start getting irritated with the mistakes I make. Often things that come out of my mouth when this happens are things like "of course that would happen right now". That is how I know this is a feeling of helplessness, the dark cloud seems to follow me around the course on those days.

Terms:
Self-Efficacy
Agentic Thinking
Pathway Thinking
Efficacy Expectation
Outcome Expectation
Helplessness

Everyone has a desire to express control over their life. The strength of that desire is based on a person’s expectation of their ability to exert that control. There are two types of expectations. Efficacy expectation is the event that a person can perform a behavior. Outcome expectation is the event that the desired consequences arise as a result of the behavior performed. Self-efficacy is the capacity to perform an ability in an effective manner. Self-efficacy includes both the environment and one’s abilities in its definition. The opposite of self-efficacy is doubt. If person doubts their abilities in trying times, they will experience anxiety. Self-efficacy beliefs originate from personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasions, and physiological states. Personal history raises or lowers self-efficacy based on past attempts. Vicarious experience is the observation of modeling. Based on the similarity between the performer and the observer and the experience of the observer, observation can influence self-efficacy in regard to how successfully the modeler performed the behavior. Verbal persuasion are actions such as pep talks, and physiological states are bodily responses such as stress. Self-efficacy influences a person’s behavior. An individual will choose an environment or activity based on whether they believe it will overwhelm their abilities. They will put more effort and work longer at something if they believe it is within their capabilities and be able to calmly perform analytic thinking in stressful times.
Mastery beliefs are based on a person’s sense of perceived control. When a person has strong mastery beliefs, they attribute success to themselves; when weak, they believe they have little influences on what happens to them. This is similar to learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the belief that behavior has little influence on events but is instead heavily influenced by outside forces. Learned helplessness has three components: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Learned helplessness negatively affects motivation, learning, and emotions. Self-efficacy and mastery beliefs combine to create hope as the individual knows how they can work towards their goal and have the motivation to do so.
I found it surprising how pervasive and all-encompassing learned helplessness can be. It seems so wild that it only takes a few failures for a person to give up on trying to control their behaviors and the results of those behaviors. I am a fairly motivated person, so I find it difficult to imagine what a person must be like in order to act like the dogs in Seligman and Maier’s experiment and just give up completely.
As a person from Chicago, I have to know how to drive well in rush hour traffic. If you are a person with low self-efficacy and have little belief in your ability to drive competently, you will get in an accident because you have to drive confidently through Chicago traffic. After your accident, instead of driving through the heavy traffic every day, you might instead choose to take the train as you doubt your ability to think calmly and control your vehicle in the heavy traffic. On the other hand, if you have a high level of efficacy, you will try to attempt the busy Chicago traffic once more. You might get a new car and take a new path to work while trying to improve your driving skills, so an accident does not happen again.
Now, if you are a high achieving student and have high self-efficacy and you ace a test, you might be discouraged from studying harder as you believe you already possess the skills to do well in the class. On the other hand, if you have low self-efficacy and do well on a test, you might be encouraged to continue to study for the class because it produced good results in the first place.
Terms: self-efficacy, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness


This chapter focuses on the personal control beliefs that individuals have inside of them. The expectations that people have come in two types: efficacy and outcome. In order for people to exert personal control over situations, both efficacy and outcome must be high. Self-efficacy is an individual’s personal belief about their own abilities. In other words, our self-efficacy is when we ask ourselves, “do I have what it takes to do this?” Those with low self-efficacy will show anxiety and stress in situations they don’t believe they can handle. Mastery beliefs is our perceived control of attaining the desired outcome we expect to attain while preventing the aversive outcomes. When faced with a challenge, those with high personal control beliefs with a mastery motivational orientation will respond to failure by remaining focused. On the other hand, those with a helpless motivational orientation will view themselves as fragile during times of failure and tend to withdraw from the situation. This feeling of helplessness can turn into learned helplessness, which is the psychological state that is formed when people expect that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. This learned helplessness can lead to motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits, such as depression. The reactance theory is also present in this chapter, proposing that people experience reactance only if they expect to have some control over what happens to them.

The most surprising thing I learned was that depressed individuals are not more prone to learned helplessness deficits. Instead, it’s those that aren’t depressed and believe they have more personal control than they actually do who develop more helplessness deficits. Through the study done on this by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, they’ve shown that the reason for this is because those with high personal control beliefs have a bias for recalling more positive events than negative ones. This leads them to misjudge the situation more thus leading them to be more prone to learned helplessness deficits. On the opposite end of the spectrum, depressed individuals are more likely to recall a more equal amount of negative and positive events from their memories, which results in them being less likely to form learned helplessness because they aren’t only recalling positive emotions and getting shot down.

Personal control beliefs encourage behavior by giving people the control they need in order to achieve the outcome they desire. The personal control beliefs that discourage behavior are the ones that make individuals feel that they have no control over their lives or the outcomes of their lives. When people can recall a past experience that was positive, they are more likely to feel in control of the situation and feel more like the outcome will be what they want it to be. If a past experience is negative, it’s likely they will avoid the situation so that the outcome isn’t another negative for them.
An example of an encouraged behavior would be one of high self-efficacy. This could be believing that I can swim 2 laps because I have done it before and I tell myself that I can do it. An example of a discouraged behavior would be feeling helpless about something and feeling that your voluntary behavior will have little or no effect on the outcomes that you wish to occur.

Terms: Personal Control Beliefs, Self-efficacy, Helplessness, Mastery Beliefs

Chapter 9 was about personal control beliefs. People like to have control, and we have different expectancies that we hold in relation to how we exercise personal control. The first is efficacy expectations, and these have to do with how well we feel that we can perform a specific behavior. The other is outcome expectations, and this has to do with what we expect will come from performing our specific behavior. When both of these expectancies are high, our behavior can become energetic and goal-directed. Perceived control is viewed as someone does a behavior and this results in a specific outcome.

Self-efficacy is how well someone will do in a specific circumstance based on their skills and circumstances. Someone with high self-efficacy would do better in a stressful situation than someone with low self-efficacy. The opposite of self-efficacy is doubt, and this can get in the way of thinking well and decision making. Four factors play into self-efficacy and these are personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological state. Four factors result from self-efficacy (either high or low) and these are choice (approach or avoid), effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotionality.

Levels of self-efficacy can predict different ways of coping that can be empowering. Empowering is the allowance of someone to have personal control based on possessed knowledge, skills, and beliefs. Empowerment can be attained through a mastery modeling program. These use the four factors of self-efficacy to improve people’s self-efficacy. These mastery beliefs allow people to have a strong sense of perceived control.

Helpless motivational orientation is a fragile thinking of oneself when failure comes around whereas mastery motivational orientation is more resistant and the belief that the self can improve and work harder the next time failure comes around. Those with a mastery belief have a more positive outlook when difficult challenges arise compared to those with a helpless belief.

People learn helplessness. Just like the dogs who were given the inescapable shock and learned to be helpless, humans also do this when they feel they are in a situation where their actions won’t effect what happens. Three features play along with helplessness, and they are contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is the relationship one has between the environment and their actions. Cognition relies on how a person perceives their control in an environment. Behavior is the way one copes to either achieve or prevent an outcome. People who experience learned helplessness may have motivational deficits by not wanting to try new things, learning deficits by a pessimistic attitude that interferes with learning new responses that may results in a different outcome, and emotional deficits by having depressing emotion reactions in times that require an assertive emotion.

People explain situations in two different ways. One is pessimistic, and the other is optimistic. Optimistic people tend to credit failure to things that were out of their control while success is usually credited to themselves. Pessimistic people tend to react to failure by just giving up and use a poor coping styles. Hope is based on agency and pathways which are accredited to self-efficacy and mastery motivation. When these two come together with high agency and many pathways, hopeful thinking comes about.

The most surprising thing I learned was that helplessness might actually be a physiological problem instead of a psychological, cognitive problem. Apparently, when the dogs were given shocks in the inescapable group, their norepinephrine levels dropped. This neurotransmitter has been seen to be associated with a response of giving up and helplessness. Does this mean that someone with low levels of this neurotransmitter would be more likely to learn helplessness and could we give people with helplessness norepinephrine to see if their learned helplessness can be fixed?

Personal control beliefs can be used to encourage or discourage behavior. Watching someone else do a behavior through vicarious experience like give a presentation to the class and see them do well, one’s self-efficacy could be raised. Because of this experience, one might be encouraged to choose other activities like giving a presentation or performance because of their raised self-efficacy and knowing that they have done it before and did well. They would also be more likely to put in more effort and persistence during the presentation or performance. A discouraged behavior could come from a past personal behavior that may not have been pleasant. For example, a dental hygienist student could have a patient and accidentally poked the patient with a drill while working on their teeth. This could result in the dentist’s sense of self-efficacy plummeting and doubting their skills as a future dentist. They may not think they can perform adequately, and then may give up on trying to be a dentist.

Terms: vicarious experience, personal behavior history, self-efficacy, behavior, helplessness, pessimist, personal control beliefs

Chapter 9 is all about the motivation to exercise personal control. One of the main focuses on this chapter, and that I learned was all about expectancy. This chapter explains that there are two kinds of expectancies including, efficiency expectations and outcome expectations. Efficiency expectations is the judgment of an individual’s capacity to execute a certain action. This can be shown through the saying of, “Can I do it?”. On the other hand, outcome expectations are the judgment of a certain action after it is already performed. This one can be shown through the saying, “Will what I do work”. I found self efficiency to be interesting and easily relatable. Perceived self-efficacy is the perception of their capabilities in future situations and how you'll do. It is how you think you'll do is closely related to how you actually will do, like a selection of goals. This can be shown in examples can be shown with emotion, and when there is higher self efficacy an individual will have a better mood and less anxiety. I was also interested in learned helplessness, when a person starts to believe that their actions have no affect on the environment. People who experience learned helplessness, believe that what they do doesn't really matter. They tend to be less motivated, stop trying, and may experience lower self-esteem and depression. Learned helplessness was demonstrated in our book through an experiment by Seligman. There were 3 different dog groups in this experiment, group 1 was placed in a room in harness and then removed. When it was placed in box and given painful electric shock and all can escape. The next group was placed in room and also placed in harness, and exposed to painful electric shocks. This group can press lever to stop shocks. When placed in box and given painful electric shock, the dog quickly escape shock. Lastly, group 3 was placed in room and placed in harness. Then exposed to painful electric shocks. Shock starts and stops randomly, and the dog can pull lever but it doesn't do anything. When it was placed in box and given painful electric shock, it did nothing and showed no attempt to escape. I found explanatory style to be super interesting, the book tells that this is a cognitively based personality variable that reflects the way people explain the reasons behind why bad things happen to them. The first style is an optimistic explanatory style, being someone who explains bad events as attributions that are unstable and controllable. The next style is called pessimistic explanatory, which is the tendency to explain bad events with attributions that are stable and uncontrollable. When learning about both of these styles, I believe that I fall more into the optimistic strategy but I also could see falling into the pessimistic strategy as well. I know that I tend to correlate my success with giving myself credit and then will take my failures and attribute it to something other than myself. Overall this was an interesting chapter, and I could relate it to my life!

Terms:
efficiency expectations
outcome expectations
self efficiency
optimistic explanatory
pessimistic explanatory

Personal control beliefs enable us to perform well. “Can I do it” sums up the central problem of personal control beliefs. An individual’s answer to this question affects his or her emotions, motivation, behavior, and performance. I was surprised how much the sense of control played in performance. The relevant evidence-based theories in the personal control beliefs toolkit include self-efficacy, mastery and helplessness orientation, explanatory style, reactance, and hope. Each theory address the question “can I do it” in a different way.

Self-efficacy describes a person as a judge who decides whether or not they have enough resources to cope with a specific challenge. Self-efficacy allows a person to be flexible, confident, and perform well, which typically cycles back into approaching activities. Without it people are doubtful, perform poorly, and end up avoiding activities they judge themselves not capable of coping with.

Mastery and helplessness orientation differentiates what people focus on after failing. Mastery-oriented people focus on how they can remedy the failure, whereas helplessness-oriented people focus on why they are failing. Focusing on remedying a failure helps people grow, whereas focusing on failure leads to negative emotions, immature behavior, and self-denigration.

Explanatory style differentiates how people explain events. Optimistic people tend to explain events as unstable and controllable (e.g. a learning strategy), whereas pessimistic people tend to explain events as stable and uncontrollable (e.g. IQ). Pessimistic people, although sometimes more realistic about their failures, have tendencies toward “giving up, academic failure, social distress, physical illness, impaired job performance, depression, and even defeat in elections”. Optimistic people, although tend to be less accepting of failure and more delusional about their amount of control, are more motivated because of it.

Reactance theory explains what happens when control is threatened. People don’t fall prey to helplessness right away. They first fight to regain control. Even when facing something challenging (e.g. one unsolvable puzzle) there is still some expectation of control. It is that very expectation of some control mixed with the threat of the loss of it that causes people to fight even harder for it, and perform better, than when control is not threatened or there is no expectation of control (helplessness).

Hope is simply the combination of self-efficacy and mastery-orientation. People who are mastery-oriented perceive many ways to get their goals and who also have self-efficacy believe they can get it done. In essence hope is “I know I can get it done, and I’ll find a way to do it”. Hope has effects such as increasing performance in sports and increasing the likelihood of college graduation.

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Encouraged behavior: A kid crossing the monkey bars.

If we were to interpret this through the lens of self-efficacy theory, the kid would be most encouraged in his or her monkey bar crossing if he or she has good memories of learning motor skills, watches other kids who maneuver them successfully, is given encouragement from the other kids, and interprets physiological arousal as “energizing”.

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Discouraged behavior: Graduating for college.

If we were to interpret this through the lens of explanatory styles, the student would be more discouraged from graduating from college if he or she interpreted any failures, such as a poor test grade, as a result of a stable and uncontrollable trait, such as their skin color. This would be considered a pessimistic explanatory style, which also have negative consequences on one’s physical and mental health.

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Terms:
Personal control beliefs
Self-efficacy
Mastery
Helplessness
Explanatory style
Reactance theory
Hope

Graduation *from* college

Chapter 9 is on the topics dealing with control, self- efficacy, and learned helplessness. The first thing that started off this chapter which couldn’t be truer is when it was said that what we except to happen later in our lives or when we have problems arise is actually kind of how it goes therefore saying if you think positively about something it may go better than if you believe that its going to turn out bad and be a problem. The next large topic is a person’s self control and that all depends on a person’s belief of if they think can do something or not. I also find this to be very true I remember that as a child and even now there are times in which I think I cant do something I don’t have it in me and then I don’t achieve what I want but if I sit myself down and say that I can do it and I am able to achieve it then it seems to go better because I have it in me or believe I do to achieve what I want. Along with that and expecting what will happen out of events there are two routes that our mind can take when it comes to thinking about the outcome of an event there is efficacy expectation in which we as a person wonder if we can even do it. For me I feel like this always happens when a test is coming up in a class and I wonder can I do it and get the score I want if I start studying is it even worth it will I even get a good score. Then there is the second way which is outcome expectancy which is the thought of will what I do work. Meaning the route that you are planning to do to achieve something will it work will the work you put in come out in a positive way at the end. For either of those to actually take place the outcome and expectations for it must be high to generate the want to even go or achieve it. To go along with expectations of oneself and how we as a person think an event will come out or how we will do on a certain test or other things in life that can be depended upon our self-efficacy. There are many different things that can go into building our self-efficacy and that motivate us to achieve want we want. One of those bigger ones is our personal history for some people they have the history whether it be family members or just their personality that they have the drive to achieve and try in life. Another factor that plays a role is the observation of others. If you are around people that don’t try much or care to achieve much then you yourself may have a smaller want to achieve and stand out to get your goals you may be much more laid back and not try as hard. The third factor that plays a role is peers around you whether it be family or friends that are their to talk you through when issues comes your way that make you keep going or could tell you to stop as well. Lastly is the factor of your state of physiological. This meaning that if you are in a time when your basic needs are met you aren’t going to want to try to hard to achieve anything and would have a much harder time seeing any positive outlooks on any events. Self-efficacy can also play a role when it comes to behaviors. This can either make your behaviors positive or negative meaning that maybe you try a lot harder in the world or maybe you don’t try much of anything at all. Overall the body and mind work a lot together when it comes to having a goal and achieving it and whether you chose to work hard towards something or give up.

Terms:
Control
Self efficacy
Learned helplessness
Efficacy expectation
Outcome expectation

This chapter talks about personal control beliefs. Within these personal control beliefs, there is a little something called expectancies. These are subjective predictions of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two types of expectancies that the chapter focuses on, being efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. The first expectation being efficacy expectation is a judgement of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action (can I do it?) The second is the outcome expectation which is a judgement that a given action will cause a particular outcome (will what I do work?) These questions essentially boil down to what we expect out of anything that we try and achieve throughout our lives. Regardless of the action, you always stop and think to yourself, “can I actually do this? Will this even work?”

The most surprising thing I learned throughout chapter 9 is learned helplessness. I’ve already known a lot about this, but every time I read about it in textbooks it really throws me off. In lecture, Dr. Macklin elucidated on the thought of learned helplessness with the examples about how this happens the same way to humans. That almost blew my mind! People don’t even know they’re learning helplessness until someone tries to point it out in which the person may just respond with, “no I am not.” After lecture, I thought about the times I’ve learned helplessness. It dawned on me that it subconsciously happened to myself and I did not process it. This is obviously how it works. Another surprising concept that I learned was hope. Hope actually plays a big role in our behavior. High self efficacy supports our confidence, while a mastery motivational orientation supports optimism. I never knew that there was an “equation” to hope. I just thought it was kind of there, and we either chose to believe in it or not. This is crucial to me because I personally feel like I have a lot of hope, and this must mean that I have high self efficacy while having mastery motivation too!

Personal control beliefs motivate our behavior by lifting us up and giving a helping hand, or tell us that behavior is stupid. A lot of it has to do with what we expect. If we expect something good to come from the behavior, we are encouraged by our behavior. I think of it as studying very hard for an exam you need to do well in, and believing that you CAN do well in it. This will reinforce our behavior and you will study much more and retain more information. If someone does not believe they will do well in the exam, they are much more likely to just abandon all hope and not even study. Another example would be wanting to go to the gym for cardio. If we expect to have a decent to good time, we are more likely to actually go and do cardio instead of just bailing if we think that it’ll be awful (which it is).

Terms:
Efficacy expectations
Outcome expectations
Learned helplessness
Personal control
Self efficacy
Hope

This week’s reading, chapter nine, focused on personal control beliefs. The information in this chapter touched on terms such as self-efficacy and learned helplessness to consider different ways in which personal control beliefs impact motivation. Throughout this post, I will consider the information that I found interesting and the role that personal control beliefs serve in encouraging or discouraging behavior.

As per usual, there was an abundance of information that I found interesting throughout this chapter. The areas that were most interesting to me involved self-efficacy and learned helplessness. Firstly, self-efficacy is a term that I have heard but never fully understood the definition. The textbook defined it as something that stems from interpretations of past attempts to enact the same behavior. Due to this, personal history is the most influential source of self-efficacy. Similarly, motivational speeches such as pep talks are only so useful if they are contradicted by personal history. Furthermore, doubt in our own competence can lead us to not participate in activities which, in turn, damages our ability to grow and develop. I can think of several times where in I can see my low self-efficacy as impacting my openness to new opportunities and/or creating anxiety.

The second area that interested me was about learned helplessness. This concept caught my eye because I had never considered helplessness as a learned construct. Due to this, it was interesting to learn that this is a belief that can occur out of believing that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. I instantly could draw a comparison between this definition and my experience with depression. Funnily enough, the textbook drew this comparison as well by explaining that learned helplessness and people with depression share similar thought processes, symptoms, and similar intervention strategies are used to combat both. Despite this, the textbook explains that people with depression are not more prone to learned helplessness. Rather, depressed individuals may actual have a more balanced view of life events because they consider both positive and negative life events whereas non-depressed individuals may be biased to only focus on positive events.

Next, I will consider how personal control beliefs work to encourage and discourage behavior. This system works to effect behavior because of the person-behavior-outcome model presented on page 252. This model shows that behaviors are motivated by perceived self-efficacy and the likelihood of a favorable outcome. To illustrate this, I will consider the use of this model in its ability to motivate an encourage and discouraged behavior. Firstly, an encouraged behavior would be to do my homework early so that I will not have to worry about it over spring break. In this example, my perceived self-efficacy is high because I know I am capable of the task. Similarly, the outcome is favorable. Due to this, personal control beliefs work to motivate my behavior to fulfill this task. On the other hand, a behavior that should be discouraged is choosing to watch Netflix, instead of doing homework, and being left with homework over spring break. In this example, my self-efficacy is still high because I am capable of watching TV but the outcome is less favorable than the former so the behavior is discouraged through the person-behavior-outcome model.

Terms:
Personal Control Beliefs
Self-Efficacy
Personal Behavior History
Learned Helplessness
Person-Behavior-Outcome Model

Whether and how we respond to external stimuli and opportunities can be impacted by a combination of our personal expectation that we can handle a situation (self-efficacy, or efficacy expectation) and our expectation of the outcome of the particular behaviors we engage in to address an opportunity or challenge (outcome expectation). If I believe my taking action will produce positive results, I am more likely to take action. What action I take depends on my expectation that it will actually produce the desired response. Our sense of self-efficacy grows out not in feeling good about ourselves, but our sense that we can handle or cope with situations as they arise in an area. My sense of personal efficacy grows out of my personal history (do I experience positive outcomes from my efforts more often than not and have an experience of being able to cope with the negative outcomes), modeling of successful behavior (I gain confidence from seeing skillful behavior modeled by others in a way that I feel I can emulate), being encouraged verbally, and the body sensations that arise when I am in a situation (do I feel calm vs. anxious and overly uncomfortable from the stress response?). A healthy sense of self-efficacy means that I have realistic match between my abilities to rise to challenges and the external conditions I find myself in. Therefore, it helps to direct my behavior. If I feel that I can respond to the challenge in a way that produces a good outcome or with confidence that I can cope with setbacks, I will be more likely to exhibit approach behavior, whereas I will exhibit avoidance behavior if I realistically detect that I would be better off withdrawing from the challenge due to too great a mismatch between challenge and skill level and meaningful gains through effort that lead to good outcomes. The more efficacious I feel, the longer I will persist at a challenge or behavior, and I am more likely to remain moderately challenged but calm enough to engage in effective and efficient analytical thinking and decision making. Further, my emotional response will be maintained in an alert but not too uncomfortable or in panic mode, so that I will be able to maintain my confidence, desire to persist, and capacity for effective cognitions. A sense of efficacy can lastly be distinguished from the drive for competence in that the latter is marked by a desire to challenge myself whereas the former is more about my belief that I am up for the challenge.

Building off self-efficacy, humans are more likely to attempt challenges if they have a healthy efficacy expectation, knowledge of the situation, and skills to employ to chose how to navigate the challenge. Motivating people requires that we attend to all three aspects, which ultimately builds mastery beliefs. Mastery beliefs are connected with an optimistic explanatory style in which we believe we are capable of succeeding and that our successes are connected directly to our abilities and actions. These produce a sense of well-being, even if the belief is not entirely warranted by the reality of the situation. A more pessimistic explanatory style can be more realistic in the match between ability to control a situation and actual outcomes, but it is also associated with higher incidences of depression.

When individuals experience prolonged or repeated situations in which they have no control over outcomes, particularly the ability to relieve an unpleasant situation, they develop a tendency to give up trying even when there may be a relatively easy solution. This learned helplessness is seen in situations of intimate partner violence and abuse, in situations in which structural oppression occurs, or highly chaotic environments (e.g., high crime areas or war zones). The individual comes to associate outcomes with external forces rather than their own capacity, which leads to lethargy, apathy, and despair. It arises from not grasping the alternatives that might be available or worth exploring (contingency), lack of recognizing the actual situation (cognition), and a loss of motivation to initiate and sustain behaviors in the face of environmental stimuli.

Ultimately, self-efficacy, knowledge, and skills produce positive agentic thinking as well as more effective pathways thinking, which produce greater levels of realistic hope. The realistic should be underlined, as this is not false hope, but hope developed through experience of being able to rise through challenges and capacities to explore options, assess situations, make skillful choices, and perform the chosen actions effectively in a range of similar situations.

We see personal control beliefs encourage behavior in little children. They may never have engage in an activity, but through watching adults perform the activity (including mirror neuron related learning from seeing), encouragement from important adults, and watching peers practicing as well as practicing, getting feedback and more encouragement, they are more likely to persist in the activity. As they experience successes and learn that setbacks are not too distressing, they slowly build belief in their capacity to cope and improve skills. Discouraging behavior can be seen in the abuse situations mentioned above, where the individual experiences persistent negative outcomes that they have little capacity to stop, receive discouraging reinforcement from others, and do not see others they can relate to performing behaviors that show likely relief from painful situations that they can learn from.

I had heard about the realistic quality of pessimists and the connection to depression, but this was still the most surprising. I definitely fall on the realist side, and definitely struggle with depression at times, but the positive well-being that comes from being unrealistically optimistic still surprises a bit, and annoys the crap out of me. But I also suspect, seeing these two explanatory styles put side-by-side this way, that being too realistic annoys they hell out of the optimists, only not for as long. As with several previous chapters, I was surprised that more was not said on the role of trauma, abuse, and chaotic social environments when it comes to learned helplessness and lack of efficacy. While it is implicit in the discussion, I was both surprised and frustrated (as someone who is looking for clinical application with my clients) that these aspects were not developed.

Terms: efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, self-efficacy, modeling, choice, persistence, effort, mastery belief, coping, learned helplessness, optimistic explanatory style, pessimistic explanatory style, depression, hope.

Chapter nine focuses on personal control beliefs and the motivation for these. This chapter goes into detail to explore the idea of personal control and how it affects an individual. In this chapter, it first explains the two types of expectancy, which include efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. An efficacy expectation can be defined as a judgement of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. The other one, an outcome expectation, can be defined as a judgement that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome. Another main focus of this chapter are mastery beliefs, different ways of coping, and learned helplessness. It goes into a deeper understanding of learned helplessness, explaining that that is a psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. This has a huge part in both encouraging and discouraging behaviors. The end of this chapter focuses with the theme of reactance theory. In this last part, it explains that reactance has to do with reestablishing an eliminated or threatened freedom.
One thing I found interesting was the part about depressed individuals. This was interesting to see how people with depression judge control verse people who do not have depression. Stated in the book, people who are depressed think that they more accurately judge whether or not they have control, more than the people who do not have depression. People who do not suffer from depression typically over judge and think that they have more personal control than they truly do. This is interesting to me because I would have probably guessed it would be the other way around. I would have assumed that the person with depression would just automatically have assumed that they do not have any control, which is wrong.
Personal control helps an individual both motivate and discourage behaviors. One way that personal control helps to motivate an individual is that they give the individual a sense of hope. An example of this from the book is that an individual can be motivated when a mastery motivational orientation where the individual can respond to failure by remaining task focused and by being bent on achieving mastery in spite of difficulties and setbacks. For me, and example of this could be when I had an illness that prevented me from going to school for a little bit. I was set that I was going to go back better and stronger, and not miss any assignments. On the other hand, they discourage the behavior when they individual does not have any hope, and they feel hopeless. The text states that individuals feel helpless when the motivational orientation where the individual responds to failure by giving up and withdrawing, acting as if the situation were out of his or her control. An example of this for me was when I first started applying to colleges. I knew which colleges I could easily get into, and which would be a bit more challenging. I immediately stopped applying to the colleges that had more requirements in fear of failure.

Terms: efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, motivation, learned helplessness, reactance, mastery beliefs, psychological states, hope, motivational orientation

I recently lost track of my textbook and haven’t been able to read the chapter so my chapter 9 blog will be based on today’s notes and through information found on the web.
Chapter 9 is about personal control. Some of the terms covered throughout chapter 9 that I will discuss in post include; self-efficacy, learned helplessness, coping, and stress.
Self-efficacy is one’s judgement of how ell one will cope with a situation and predicts the motivational balance between wanting to give it a try vs. anxiety, doubt, and avoidance. An example of how having a high self-efficacy can encourage behavior is when someone first begins to play a sport and fails. Instead of giving up after failing, someone with high self-efficacy will be encouraging them to keep giving the sport another tries. They will ask their coaches for feedback, practice more, and will also train harder. When you add their positive/encouraging self-efficacy beliefs with the improved knowledge and skills they will experience empowerment.
Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when someone expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. Some of the components of learned helplessness include contingency, cognition or “subjective personal control beliefs”, and listless demoralized coping behavior. Some of the effects of helplessness include motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits. For students who have poor study skills or lack effective study strategies learned helplessness can discourage and negatively influence behavior. Say Scott is one of these types of studiers and is faced with the task of studying for his Psychology exam and experiences learned helplessness. Because Scott knows that he has poor studying skills he experiences a lack of energy and a demoralized sense of coping behavior. Scott might then ask himself, “Why should I even try to study?” because he has experienced failure due to having poor study skills. He also becomes very pessimistic because he views that due to the uncontrollable outcome, which in result gets in the way of acquiring the abilities to learn how to improve his studying skills. The result is that Scott will lack the energy and interest in studying and will feel depressed.
When surfing the web for something interesting that had to do with personal control I stubbled across a TED Talk given by Psychologist Kelly McGonigal called “How to Make Stress Your Friend”. As a health psychologist McGonigal has been telling people for years that stress is a terrible thing, but after doing more research she has found that stress isn’t. After completing a social stress test Harvard University found out that people who learn to view their stress response as helpful to their performance were not as stressed, less anxious, and were also more confident. In terms of their physical stress response, when they viewed it as helpful their blood vessels stayed relax. McGonigal’s speech reminded me of problem approach vs. avoidance focused way of coping because by changing your view of stress as positive and helpful for your performance you are able to move toward and interact with the problems that stress creates. The main reason I thought this was very interesting was because it helped me understand how important it is to find positive ways to cope with the stress in your life. A quote from the Ted Talk that proves how important it is to find positive ways is “This one biological change could be the difference between stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s.

Self-efficacy
Mastery beliefs
Learned helplessness
Hope
Coping
Stress
Approach vs Avoidance
https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend/transcript

Chapter nine talked about beliefs of personal control and its effects on motivation. Personal control is brought to us through expectancy. Expectancy is a prediction of if the event is likely to occur. There are two types of expectancy, efficiency expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations explores the how can this happen while outcome expectancy answers the question of if it is doable. You’re asking yourself if it is possible, and if so how will you go about doing it. If you have high efficacy expectation and high outcome expectation you will have a higher level of motivation.
Next the chapter talks about mastery beliefs and learned helplessness. Mastery beliefs are crucial for you opinion and control over situations. Learned helplessness is people who often give up easily on tasks. Learned helplessness focused on different ways that people cope with stressful situations.
What I thought was the most interesting part of this chapter was when it discussed hope. Hope is a very common word that I though I had a grasp on the meaning of, but this chapter took it into a different perspective for me. Hope to me was something that we hold on to, to make situations better or seem better. It was something that inspires people to keep on keeping on. However this chapter showed us that hope is scientific and looks at two different ways of thinking about things. First, there is agentic thinking which is a mindset of thinking that you can achieve something. You tell yourself you are able to accomplish the task. Pathway thinking is producing multiple ways/solutions for you to reach your goal. It’s more of a “I will figure this out no matter what it takes” vs “This is something I can/will do”. When you put together the thought of being able to do something and being able to do it no matter what obstacles stand in your way you are more likely to reach your goal or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish, this is hope.
How personal beliefs encourage or discourage behavior is by expectations. When someone has the expectation of performing a task and they combine it with hope they come up with a solution of how they will do it and have the motivation to do it by believing that they can. If I believe that I can get an A in this class, I will do all the things to make it possible. I will tell myself that I can do it, and then I will identify the obstacles in the way and come up with a plan of how I will over come those. This means I will do the assigned readings, try hard on my blogs, and make sure to watch the assigned movies. If I expect myself to not do well in this class then I won’t have the motivation to do the blogs, watch the movies, or attend class. I will feel discouraged from the beginning and be unwilling to change the behavior into something where I will get the A.

Terms:
Personal Control
Expectancy
Efficacy Expectations
Outcome Expectations
Mastery Beliefs
Hope
Encouraged/Discouraged Behavior

Ch 9 covered personal control and the aspects involved in it. There are several factors that go into personal control, and each is different for each individual, which leads some people to have greater personal control than others. Another aspect of this chapter is self-efficacy and how it affects people’s desires to complete a task. When someone is a master of a subject, they have learned they can do whatever it is they need to do, even if they fail at a task involved in said field.

There are two kinds of expectancy. Efficacy expectations are how likely a person can complete a task, and outcome expectations are how likely it is perceived there will be a consequence once an action is completed. These serve to regulate behavior because if there are consequences to completing a task, such as a grade, we are more likely to do it. Self-efficacy is how well someone can cope with a situation, with the skills and talents they have. The higher the self-efficacy, the better a person will perform in a difficult situation because they are able to apply their skills in a manner to succeed, instead of just having the individual skill to do parts of the task. Mastery beliefs are those beliefs that allow a person to feel confident in doing a task, that they can do it and do it well. These beliefs are developed through practice, teaching, and working on skill areas that are lacking.

The most surprising thing to me was the section on learned helplessness. The dogs that could escape but had learned a shock was coming did not choose to escape the shock, and instead just took it. This was surprising to me because they could escape pain, but chose not to because that is what they had learned how to do. This can be applied to humans because people who have learned to be helpless will make no effort to better their situation. This tipping point is different for each person. People who are in this situation could be identified, and help could be given to show them they are able to better themselves.

Personal beliefs encourage and discourage behavior in very strong ways. These are beliefs that people adopt because of their life experiences or they picked up from growing up in a certain environment. These beliefs tend to come from the parents or caregivers, and are why people turn out to be more like their parents than they would like to admit. People who are religious will avoid meat on Fridays during Lent because they believe it is bad in a religious sense, but not physically bad. A religious encouraged behavior would be attending services every week, because it is a necessity for them. If they do not go, they may get in trouble from parents, or get in trouble at home. These behaviors are not necessary for survival, but are done anyway because either people enjoy them or they make life easier for them, boosting their self-efficacy.

Terms:
Efficacy expectations
Outcome expectations
Self-efficacy
Learned helplessness


In this ninth chapter of the textbook, the content includes the motivation to exercise personal control. This personal control is defined as how much or how little influence an individual has in producing or preventing certain events or outcomes in the environment. The concept is that people can learn expectancies about their individual control as they try to control events in their lives. These behaviors can be influenced by personal control, self efficacy, and personal growth. Besides personal control, self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in their own ability to carry out behaviors that are crucial in both social and behavioral environment. There are four different aspects of self-efficacy that specifically affect those beliefs. These four include the choice of activities and selecting environments, which affects the performance of the behavior based on the environment and activity chosen by the individual. The second of these includes the degree in which a person will exert persistence and effort toward the ideal goal or performance. The amount of effort a person will or will not apply over a period of time is a good measure of an individual’s self-efficacy within a goal. The third aspect of self-efficacy is the thinking and decision making that goes into the motivation behind the performance, and how task-focused the individual is. The fourth and final aspect is emotionality, which is psychological reaction to the task at hand that may look more optimistic or more pessimistic. Two individuals might be doing the same task and experiencing the same pressures of the task, but one might react more anxiously than the other. Those four aspects were the effects of self-efficacy, but the four sources of self-efficacy include a person’s behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological activity. These things display the root of an individual’s self-efficacy. Furthermore, empowerment towards an individual is necessary to provide cognitive-motivational foundations to improve that person’s self-efficacy expectations the can allow more control of their lives.

What was surprising thing to me in the chapter, was the varied ways in which people cope and react to failure within a mastery motivation versus a learned helplessness motivation. In failure, a person might feel challenged to continue in their efforts to achieve mastery in spite of the difficulty, or a person might withdraw from the activity and choose to give up control of the situation.

Obtaining personal control beliefs could empower a personal to organize and identify specific behaviors that an individual can change or avoid for their own success, or an individual could feel overwhelmed by the failure of behaviors and continue in the same habits in a state of learned helplessness. For example, if a set of twins are both taking piano lessons at the same time to master the skill, but are both receiving feedback from the instructor to improve and advance in a particular song, one sibling could be motivated by that to practice more and find ways in which to improve and the other sibling could see that as immediate failure and choose to quit taking lessons altogether. This differentiation could be cause by their individual behavior history in how they each usually respond to hard feedback.

self-efficacy
personal control beliefs
personal behavior history
empowerment
mastery
learned helplessness


Chapter 9 focused on Personal Control Beliefs, basically the motivation to control what happens to you. As people try to control events, they learn expectancies about their control. There are two types of expectations including efficacy and outcome. Efficacy and outcome expectations are separate, causal determinants to the initiation and regulation of behavior. The two questions that run through the mind are the efficacy expectation of “Can I do it?” and the outcome expectation of “Will it work?” An example of this would be if I were to go on a diet and exercise plan the person would say “I will run 4 miles every three days for the next 5 weeks.” Then I would take on the behavior and then say to myself “I will lose 7 pounds” and then check the outcome. There are many different ways to focus on self-efficacy beliefs. There is a history, verbal persuasion, physiological state, the effects on behavior, efforts, and more.
Learned helplessness is the psychological state that happens when an individual expects that behavior has stronger influence over their outcomes than do outside influences.
Learned helplessness was one of the most surprising things I learned through this chapter. For example, if a mother and father are always buying into what their child wants, the child has no ways of learning to do anything on their own. One thing that learned helplessness has taken out of this, is when the child does not know what to do in a situation that they have never been taught how to be in before, they will ask their parents to help them. When they do this, they are learning to ask for help in difficult times.
Personal control beliefs encourage or discourage behavior with expectations. This means that when a person has a desirable outcome of a situation they create and the motivations behind it to make it a success. For example, if I were to set a goal of running in a half marathon by the time I am 21, I would have four months to train for this. (Note that I am the worst long-distance runner.) I would engrave this situation into my head and picture myself running and completing a half marathon. This means that seeing the success in my head would motivate to keep up with my goal of running the half marathon.

Terms:
Personal control beliefs, psychological state, personal control beliefs, learned helplessness, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation,

Chapter 9, like the previous chapter did, focuses on mental constructs that function as cognitive sources of motivation and casual determinants to action. One of the main topics covered is control: people try to exercise personal control over what happens around them in order to make desirable outcomes likely and undesirable outcomes less likely. In order to achieve this, people have to believe that they have “what it takes” to change the environment and that the environment will be responsive to them. When people think whether or not they have “what it takes”, they may be thinking about their own capacity to execute a particular behavior, this is defined as efficacy expectation. The judgment of the possible outcomes of a given action is called outcome expectation, and it estimates the likelihood of certain consequences after the behavior is enacted. Personal control beliefs can encourage or discourage motivation if people have high outcome and efficacy expectations. When facing an important soccer game, people with encouraged behavior would train harder because they think they have the necessary ability and that the outcomes of the training will be reflected on the game. People with discouraged behavior would think that they do not have “what it takes” to win the soccer game and/or they would not see a relation between training hard and performing better in the match day.
Another topic discussed in the chapter is self-efficacy, defined as one’s judgment of how well one will cope with a situation. Self efficacy is an important determinant of competence functioning because it helps us to deal with stressful, ambiguous, and unpredictable situations. If there is a lack of self-efficacy, doubt appears, which can create anxiety, negative thinking, confusion, and tension. This shows that self-efficacy is the emotional variable that determines how well people perform when their skills and abilities are stressed. Self- efficacy beliefs come from different sources like: one’s personal history, observations of others who try to execute a certain behavior, verbal persuasions, and psychological states. The effects of self efficacy shape our effort and persistence, choices, thinking, decision making processes, and emotional reactions towards the demands.
This chapter also talks about mastery beliefs and learned helplessness. Mastery beliefs are a reflection of one’s perceived control over a situation, and people differ in different ways of coping. Some examples of coping are: being approachable to the problem, being social, proactive, direct, or emotion focused. Learned helplessness is the psychological state where an individual expects that an outcome is uncontrollable, it has its components (contingency, cognition, and behavior), its effects (motivational, learning, and emotional deficits), and its explanatory style (pessimistic and optimistic).
The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter and that I have never heard of, is the Reactance theory. I found interesting how we react against some events when we perceive that they eliminate or threaten our freedom. Now that I think about it, I have probably disobeyed some of my parents restrictions or punishments because they interfered with my sense of freedom.
Terms used:
Mental constructs
Efficacy expectation
Outcome expectation
Personal control beliefs
Encouraged behavior
Discouraged behavior
Self-efficacy
Mastery beliefs
Learned helplessness
Reactance theory

Chapter 9 discusses the importance of our personal control beliefs and our motivation toward these beliefs. This occurs when people believe that they have control or at least some influence on their personal outcomes. Our self-efficacy plays a huge role in these kind of situations, because this is also our belief that we not only have the ability to have control over or outcomes, but also that we have the ability to be successful in these outcomes. Self-efficacy has a lot to do with how we approach certain tasks, how we go about goals we have set, and challenges we may have to overcome. Learned helplessness was also thoroughly discussed in chapter 9, because it is almost an extreme version of self-doubt. Learned helplessness is basically when a person not only believes that do not have personal control over their outcomes, but that even if they try, the outcome with be unsuccessful. These people generally have a negative outlook in life with a pessimistic explanatory style. They believe nothing good happens to them and even if they try they are never going to overcome their goals, challenges, or tasks.
The idea of hope is discussed in chapter 9 and how it can be a scientific measure amongst two different ways of thinking about it. One way is the agentic thinking which is the thoughts that you have the ability to be successful at completing a task. Hope comes in when we really want to do something and do it well. The other way is the pathway thinking which is coming up with different methods that can be done in order to do well at the task. We have hope that we can come up with some solution to a problem and accomplish it. If we have a plan ahead of time we can have a lot more hope for a successful outcome and be aware of any roadblocks that may be in the way. Hope can also be one of the things that have to do with encouraged behaviors to want to be successful at a task. No one hopes that they are going to do bad at something or that they are going to try hard for not positive outcome. This chapter has provided much more insight than I originally had about hope in general. I know what it is and it has always been one of my favorite words/concepts. I just never knew that it was something that could be measure or kind of standardized, because I thought of it as more spiritual or more like an intense emotion.
The most interesting thing I learned in this chapter was about learned helplessness and how it relates so closely to depression. This is something that I know about and have learned from other psychology courses that I have taken. The research and explanation behind the two working together never fails to amaze me and make so much sense. It amazes me so much, because it is so true and relatable. I struggle with depression and I can agree that when you are depressed you truly do not want to try at anything. You have this negative outlook such as “nothing will ever get better” or “good things do not happen to me so it doesn’t matter to try.” It is interesting that these people including myself are usually more realistic and accurate in our perceived beliefs. Those with high self-efficacy usually overshoot their expectations and fall short whereas those with self-doubt know our limits, but may underestimate them.
Reactance theory is discussed in this chapter and its importance in encouraged and discouraged behaviors. Reactance theory occurs when an individual acts a certain way toward a situation. Encouraged behavior is when an individual believes in a task and will therefore do the things that it takes to accomplish these tasks. Discouraged behavior is when and individual does not believe in a tasks and will therefore not do what it takes to complete the task. An example of encouraged behavior may be when an individual wants to get all A’s in a semester. In order to do so and be successful, they will continue to engage in behavior that will make that happen. These things could consist of studying, getting help from professors, getting more sleep in order to complete assignments, etc. An example of a discouraged behavior may be when an individual believes that they are going to fail a test. They would feel that even if they studied hard they would still not do well on the test; therefore, they do not study or even ask for help. They think that no matter what action they may take they will still end up failing so they would rather not put in the effort at all.

Terms:
Self-efficacy
Self-doubt
Perceived control
Pessimistic explanatory style
Optimistic explanatory style
Learned helplessness
Expectancy
Mastery beliefs
Attributions
Personal control beliefs

Chapter 9 covered very important points about the motivation to exercise personal control. It also talked about why personal control is very important and how it works in someone’s life. One of the main focus in this chapter that I thought was very interesting was the expectancy. This chapter mentions that there are two kinds of expectancies known as, efficiency expectations and outcome expectations.
First type of expectancy that is mentioned in the chapter is efficiency expectation. Efficiency expectations can be defined as the judgement of an individual’s capacity to execute a certain action. Efficiency expectations in real life can be shown as saying “May I do this”. Whereas, outcome expectations are the judgment of a certain action after it is already performed. This type of action can be applied by saying “what I did, will it work”?. Personally, I can relate to self efficiency very easily. An anticipated self-efficiency is the understanding of their competence in future and how they choose to show it. It is kind of like thinking in your mind how you’ll perform a certain task and how you actually end up showing that. For example, selecting your career goal etc. Self-efficiency highly depends on someone being mentally stress and anxiety free and feeling good emotionally.
Another main point that I was really interested in was learning about learned helplessness. Helplessness is a situation when someone starts thinking that their actions or behavior won’t have any impact on the environment around them. It is kind of sad to see people who actually experience learned helplessness because they think that whatever they do, won’t make any difference. This can lead them to feel uninspired and demotivated which can later lead them to feel depressed and them to have such a lower self-esteem in future. They will also stop trying at some point of their lives. Seligman determined the outcomes of learned helplessness in the textbook by performing an experiment. This experiment was done with three different dog groups. The first dog group was situated in a room in a strap and was then removed. Then, it was placed in the box and was given electric shocks which made them escape. The next dog group was also put in a room in harness and was given electric shocks. The second group was able to press the lever to stop the electric shocking. When the dog was placed in the box and was exposed to the electrical shock, it also escaped quickly. However, when group 3 of dog was placed in a box with the strap, it was also bare to the electrical shock. The different here was that the shock could start and stop anyhow and the dog can pull the lever but surprisingly it doesn’t do anything. And when it was put in the box and was exposed to the shock, it doesn’t try to escape. This I thought was very interesting because the book mentions that this is psychologically based trait variable that shows why people say when certain things that are not good happened to them.
One of the first style that book mentions is called an optimistic explanatory style. Optimistic explanatory style can be defined as someone who explain tragic crisis as the attributions that are ambiguous and manageable. Whereas, the second style which is known as pessimistic explanatory style demonstrate someone explaining the horrible event with the attributions that are stable and unmanageable.
I personally can see myself relating to optimistic explanatory style than the pessimistic because when I do something good and achieve a goal, I always try to praise myself but take my failures or unachieved goals and attribute to something but myself. I also think that this is something that is very common because people tend to give themselves credit for their success but when they fail at something, they will try to pin it on someone/something else other than themselves. Overall, I thought this chapter was very interesting to read and I really enjoyed and learning about a lot of things I did not know.

Terms Used:
Pessimistic Explanatory Style
Optimistic Explanatory Style
Personal Control
Behavior
Learned Helplessness
Self Efficiency

Chapter 9 elaborates on personal control beliefs. Within the chapter, Reeve, the author elaborates on several key components. As discussed in class as well, we see in this chapter two kinds of expectancy. Those being, Efficacy expectations, which asks “can I do it?” And also outcome expectation, “ will what I do work. This can be related into real life by how we constantly have plans to achieve certain goals. For example, I have the goal to make it onto the deans list this semester. I ask myself if I can do it, I then make the plan, and ask “will what I do actually work to help me reach the goal. With self efficacy we see how we tend to create a judgement for how well we think we will perform on a certain task. This is not to be mistaken with ability or self esteem. Self efficacy highlights the idea that if we were to try to reach a goal. When someone, according to the chapter, believes that they are going to better perform a task successful, they are more likely to put more effort into that particular task. This ties back into my example where I truly believe that I can get the grades I want, so I can actually see myself trying harder and focusing so much more on homework and studying for quizzes than I have in the past.
Along with self-efficacy the chapter elaborates on mastery beliefs. From class, Maclin explained how this term, in definition, is the extent that we believe we have the control over having good things happen to us and how we are better able to prevent bad things from happening. The chapter continues to explain learned helplessness which can be broken down by the ideas that helplessness is a learned thing. We explained this concept in class with the rats that were being shocked. Another example can be seen that we can learn helplessness as children and even adults. If a significant other constantly tells us that we are ugly or stupid or they take physical harm towards us for a long duration of time, we tend to feel completely helpless and feel as though it will never go back to normal even if the person or thing is gone.
When we discussed this particular topic, helplessness, in class I was very surprised at what I learned. I found it very interesting that with motivational deficit we lose the willingness to even try. This goes back to the example of physical abuse. When there is a strong motivational deficit we can see how individuals under abuse or neglect can lose the will to try and escape.

Overall, when we have certain beliefs about ourselves we can either motivate or discourage our behaviors. With encouraged behavior, if we have the encouraged behavior to, for example, lose weight. We will start with a positive stride to reach that goal and motivate ourselves to be successful. With negative or discouraging behaviors, we can see how personal control beliefs can have an effect here as well. If we make the goal to lose weight but tell ourselves that the goal is too hard or have a lower level of self-efficacy, we will have a harder time achieving that goal.

Terms:
Self-Efficacy
Motivation
Control Beliefs
Outcome expectation
Efficacy expectation
Mastery beliefs
Helplessness

The focus throughout chapter nine is the motivation to exercise personal control over what happens to you. This desire to exercise personal control is predicated on a person’s belief that they have the power to produce favorable results. Expectancy in this chapter is divided between two types: efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. The type of question usually asked with efficacy is, “Can I do it?” These expectations are judgements of a person’s capability to execute a particular act or course of action. An example of this would be to ask myself if I can run a mile every day this week. The question usually asked with outcome expectations is, “Will what I do work?” These expectations are judgements that when a particular action is performed, it will cause a specific outcome. The example of the outcome expectation would be to lose 2 pounds if I indeed can run a mile every day this week. Together, these expectations are causal determinants to the initiation and regulation of behavior.
Another concept this chapter introduced was perceived control. This concept has three divisions: Self, Action, and Control. The self is the agent of the action, the action is the means to a certain outcome, and the control is the outcome itself. Perceived control revolves around how the self (agent) can exert the control (outcome).
One final concept I will summarize from the chapter is self efficacy. This concept shows how people’s behaviors and ideas can eventually affect them down the line in their future. Self-efficacy is not the same thing as ability. This competent functioning requires not only ability but also the capacity to translate those skills into effective performance. For example, someone may be an excellent football player, but still perform poorly if it is either raining or snowing, it is windy, or the field is not in good condition. Self efficacy drives further than ability with the fact that it includes the capacity to perform well even under poor situations that are out of our control.
One of the most interesting parts of this chapter for me was the section on learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. It was interesting to learn about the relationship between my behavior and the outcomes. Learned helplessness is when there is a strong relationship between uncontrollable influences and outcomes that happen to me. Mastery orientation is when there is a direct relationship between my own behavior and outcomes that happen to me.
Personal control beliefs can serve to either encourage or discourage behavior. An example of it discouraging behavior is learned helplessness. This results in feeling helpless and that one’s actions having no meaning because the outcomes are out of his or her control. An example of how it can encourage behavior is seeking help when trying to get a better grade for a class. By doing this, the individual puts the power in their own hands and they feel as though the outcome is totally in their control.
Terms:
Efficacy expectation
Outcome Expectation
Self-efficacy
Perceived control
Learned helplessness
Mastery Orientation

Chapter nine is titles personal control beliefs. This chapter focuses on and highlights four main concepts such as motivation to exercise personal control, self-efficacy, mastery beliefs, and learned helplessness. This chapter states that there are two types of expectancies: efficacy and outcomes. The chapter also states that efficacy and outcome expectations are separate, casual determinants to the initiation and regulation of behavior (pg. 231). This means that even though they are separate entities, both forms of expectancies must be high before one can experience the motivation required in order to complete a certain goal. From reading this chapter, I can conclude that self-efficacy and learned helplessness are in a sense, opposites of each other. If someone has a high self-efficacy, they believe in themselves and their ability to overcome difficult situations. On the other hand, if someone has a “case” of learned helplessness it implies they view minor inconveniences as life altering hardships that they will not be able to handle.

The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was that the learned helplessness theory involves three areas which are contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is the relationship a person has between their behavior and the outcomes the environment is capable of producing. People who struggle with contingency do not know how to handle their emotions when an unfavorable situation occurs. Next, cognition, is the action of analyzing the situation and how they are going to react. Bias, attributions, and expectancies are all valuable components of cognition because they all add up to determine how in control a person feels over a certain situation. Lastly, behavior is a critical part of learned helplessness because if someone loses begins to act lazy and stops working towards their goals they will form a habit of bad behavior.

Personal control beliefs serve to encourage or discourage behavior because if someone believes they can succeed at a task chances are they will; however, on the other hand, if someone believes they are not capable of accomplishing a certain task, they are most likely to fail or fall short of where they would have finished ideally. One task that shows encouraged behavior is over coming an athletic related injury. I, myself, have fractured my left femoral bone twice within a six-month period. Giving up and telling myself, “I’ll never dance again. I should just give up”, is much easier than partaking in hours of physical therapy a week to regain strength and stretching every day in order to regain lost flexibility. However, I want my bone and muscle to heal properly so I can dance again. If I tell myself, “I will dance again”, it will happen. I have to keep my self-efficacy high in order to accomplish this goal. An example of discouraged behavior could be applying to a school such as Harvard. If you tell yourself, “I’ll never get accepted. I’m not smart enough”, chances are you will start to believe that, and a self-fulfilling prophecy will occur. Learned helplessness also plays a starring role here. If you stop trying to earn good grades in school because you do not believe you will get into Harvard, then you are playing the victim and have done yourself a great disservice.

TERMS USED:
Behavior
Competence
Contingency
Goal
Learned Helplessness
Mastery Beliefs
Motivation
Personal Control
Self-Efficacy
Two Types of Expectancies

Chapter nine focuses on personal control and being able to control get the results that we want out of a given situation. According to the chapter, there are two expectancies surrounding personal control: efficacy expectation and outcome expectation. Efficacy outcome has to do with judging if a person can actually complete whatever their goal is, while outcome expectation has more to do with having a clear plan in place, but not being sure if the plan will provide the intended end goal. It goes on to define self-efficacy as how a person develops skills or defense mechanisms in order to meet their goal. Self-efficacy comes from personal history mainly, such as how a person has completed said goal in the past. It can also stem from vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and a physiological state. Self-efficacy affects behavior in terms of choosing activities and environments, the effort put into an activity, coming up with HOW to complete their goal, and a person’s emotional reactions. The chapter goes on to talk about empowerment, which is believing that a person has the qualities to take and keep control of their own lives. We hear about empowerment a lot today in the media, especially in terms of women. We are at as place in the world where we talk a lot about women empowering each other, so empowerment is lifting not only others up, but yourselves as well.
What surprised me the most in this chapter were the amount of ways that people can cope: approaching, avoidance, social, proactive, solitary, reactive, direct, indirect, control, escape, alloplastic, autoplastic, problem focused, and emotion focused. I realize that everybody copes in their own ways, but I did not realize that there were so many categories that you could fit into at the same time. I also was surprised that mastery motivation orientation and helpless motivation orientation. When a person fails, they can choose one of the two options—to “master” it, they would remain focused and continue trying, and in “helpless” mode, a person would give up after failing at their goal. While I have always understood that both of those orientations are available, I never realized that there could be environmental and motivational factors behind which option we choose!
As personal control has to do with helplessness as I mentioned above, that can also help to discourage motivation in the long run. For example, feelings of helplessness can cause learning deficits such as pessimistic behavior and a lack of willingness to try once they have failed one time. It can also deter motivation in terms of emotional problems, because if a person fails and they already did not have a positive outlook, the book says people may feel more lethargic or depressed. Much of the former falls under the pessimistic explanatory style, which is giving up when there are setbacks. The opposite—optimistic explanatory style—can help to encouraged motivated behavior. Optimistic explanatory style has to do with not placing blame on people when failing and remaining positive enough to try again.


Personal control
Efficacy expectation
Outcome expectation
Self-efficacy
Empowerment
Coping
Mastery motivation orientation
Helpless motivation orientation
Pessimistic explanatory style
Optimistic explanatory style

Chapter nine is about control beliefs, people exerting control over the predictable aspects of the environment and making desirable outcomes more likely. Self-efficacy beliefs were key to this chapter, also discussing efficacy expectation and outcome expectation. Four elements (personal behavior history, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological activity) bring about self-efficacy beliefs. Self-efficacy beliefs affect a person’s choice, effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions. Helplessness is learned, yet a mastery motivational orientation could still be adopted, which would switch the person from helpless and fragile to hardy and resilient.

I was surprised to learn about resiliency in this chapter. In the Postsecondary Education: Student Affairs program, we talk a lot about resiliency, and most of last year’s resiliency discussions were started by my friend Brooke. She took Motivation and Emotion several years ago as a psychology major, so this class is likely where some of her resiliency material was discovered. Like we discussed in class this morning, failure is important to learning, yet resiliency is crucial to this process. If a person is more resilient and accepts a mastery motivational orientation, the person will learn, grow from failure, continue trying, and hopefully experience success. When a person becomes helpless, they’ve tried something, didn’t succeed, then eventually became fragile and pessimistic, feeling inadequate. It is important to teach people how to be more resilient, so they are more likely to take on a mastery motivational orientation and have a more hopeful, successful life.

Personal control beliefs encourage behavior through empowerment. If a person has knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs, and skills in an area, they feel empowered. I empower people through my work in student affairs, especially in career services. When a student walks into my office and says, “I have no idea what I want to do,” I see it as an opportunity. I provide students with resources and self-assessments, explaining how their interests, skills, and values can guide them toward a career (knowledge). Next, I lead them to do informational interviews, where they basically interview others in the field (self-efficacy beliefs: vicarious experiences and verbal persuasion). I also promote internships and classes that provide students with the knowledge and experience to be successful in their future career (skills). By bringing the knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs, and skills together, people experience hope and begin feeling empowered to seek a career that will hopefully bring them a sense of competency in the future.

Personal control beliefs discourage behavior through learned helplessness. When a person believes their behavior is not affecting their desired outcome, they experiences helplessness. Whether a person achieves success or failure, the person feels disconnected from the process of achieving or failing to reach the outcome. Helpless people often blame other uncontrollable influences (as opposed to their own behavior) for the outcomes they experience. An example could be a college student who needs to complete an assignment. The college student had 20 hours of “free time” to complete the assignment; 10 of which she spent working, which is an expected weekly occurrence. After working, the college student had 10 hours to complete the assignment, but she squandered the time and didn’t complete the assignment. Instead of taking responsibility and being better about time management in the future, she blamed other influences and took no responsibility. She viewed the other influences as uncontrollable, yet she ultimately controls how she spends her own free time. This cycle continues for an entire semester; she is portraying learned helplessness.

Terms: Resiliency, optimistic, hope, personal control beliefs, desirable outcomes, self-efficacy beliefs, desirable outcomes, empowerment, uncontrollable influences, learned helplessness, resilience, mastery motivational orientation


This chapter discussed personal control beliefs and how they can influence our actions and behaviors. An individual’s perception of their control can be traced back to their belief that they are able to perform a certain behavior. Two different types of expectancies exist, which are efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations were defined as is a judgment of an individuals capacity to execute a particular outcome. Essentially, this is the “can I do it?” question that an individual asks themselves. Outcome expectations refers to the judgment that a given action will cause a particular outcome once that action is performed. This is the question of “will what I do work?” For an individual’s behavior to perform a certain task to become energetic and goal directed, both types of expectations must be reasonably high.
Self-efficacy is an important factor of perceived control. Self-efficacy is the individual’s skills to cope with demands and circumstances that they face, and to use the personal resources available well under diverse and trying circumstances. This chapter discussed how self-efficacy comes from factors such as one’s personal history with that behavior, the observation and modeling of others who performed that behavior, verbal persuasions such as pep talks, and physiological states. Of these factors that influence self-efficacy, personal behavior history and vicarious experience have been found to be the strongest source of efficacy beliefs. The level of self-efficacy a person feels can predict ways of coping, which can be defined as competent functioning or personal empowerment.
Empowerment was another important concept discussed in chapter 9. Empowerment is the possession of knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. This empowerment can be achieved through mastery beliefs. Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of perceived control an individual has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing undesirable ones. Mastery motivational orientation refers to a hardy, resistant portrayal of the self during failures in life. This type of motivational orientation allows the person to respond to the failure in a positive and persistent way that overcomes the challenges. On the opposite side of this motivational orientation is the helplessness motivational orientation. This type of orientation refers to a fragile view of the self during failures in life and a response of giving up. Helplessness motivational orientation reflects on having no control over the situation and withdrawing from failures.
This leads into learned helplessness. Learned helplessness can be defined as the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. Helplessness is learned, and after being learned can cause a person to no longer look for solutions to their problems due to the belief that there is no solution (even if one is present). Learned helplessness has three components. These components are contingency, cognition, and behavior.
Personal control beliefs serve to encourage or discourage behavior because if a person has a mastery motivational orientation, they will be encouraged to perform a behavior because they perceive themselves as having control over their life, actions, and outcomes. On the other hand, helplessness motivational orientation can cause a person to be discouraged to perform a behavior because they believe they have little or no control over the outcomes of events in their life. For example, if a person had a difficult exam coming up and possessed a mastery motivational orientation, they would be encouraged to study hard because they believe their actions can control the outcome of the test (their studying will earn them a good grade). People with helpless motivational orientation who had the same difficult test coming up would be discouraged to study for it because they believe that their actions will not make a difference to the outcome of the test (whether they study for the test or not, they will not receive a good grade). In this example, the perceived personal control was the factor that determined whether they studied or not.
TERMS:
Personal control beliefs
Efficacy expectations
Outcome expectations
Self-efficacy
Competent functioning
Empowerment
Mastery motivational orientation
Helplessness motivational orientation
Learned helplessness
Contingency
Cognition
Behavior

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