Reading Blog Due 9/22 @ midnight

Chapter 9 is about motivation to exercise personal control over life events. People try to predict what will happen and when trying to do influence what happens, people try to make desirable outcomes more likely to happen and undesirable outcomes less likely to happen. When people try to control their life events they are working with expectancy, which is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two types of expectancies, efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations are judgments of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. An outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome. According to Bandura, self-efficacy is defined as one’s judgment of how well (or poorly) one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces. The book states that there are four causes of self-efficacy: first, is one’s personal history in trying to execute that particular behavior; second, observations of similar others who also try to execute that behavior; third, verbal persuasion or pep talks from others; and fourth, physiological states such as a racing heart versus a calm one. Self-efficacy plays an important role in our lives. Once self-efficacy is produced, people expect that they can adequately perform an action, the more willing they are to put forth effort and persist in facing difficulties when activities require such action. For example if a person did not think they could make a free throw, then they would not be willing to shoot a free throw and end up quitting the challenge. To the book, learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that events in his or her life are uncontrollable. Humans and animals can be taught learned helplessness. The learned helplessness theory has three components which are contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is the relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcomes. This relationship can range from either a random, noncontingent outcome (uncontrollable outcomes) to an outcome that can occur in perfect synchronization with a person’s voluntary behavior (controllable outcomes). The book states that cognition includes all those mental processes the individual relies on to translate objective environmental contingencies in to subjective personal control beliefs. Behavior refers to the person’s voluntary coping behavior.
Reactance theory is how people react to uncontrollable life events. This theory predicts that people experience reactance only if they expect to have some control over what happens to them. This theory and learned helplessness both focus on how people react to uncontrollable outcomes, but they have different ideas on how people act in these situations.

The most surprising thing that I learned was that learned helplessness is similar to depression. In both cases the individual expects bad events to happen and thinks that there is nothing he or she can do to prevent their occurrence. Learned helplessness and depression also share some of the same symptoms, which include passivity, low self-esteem and loss of appetite.

Personal control beliefs serve to encourage or motivate a behavior when people believe they have what it takes to do the particular task at hand. If somebody was challenged to run a mile in under six minutes, they would be encouraged or motivated to take on this challenge if they knew they had already successfully completed this task beforehand. If somebody knew that they could not even run a mile in under ten minutes then they may be discouraged or feel bad when they are asked to complete the challenge of running a mile in under six minutes. Since the person knows they challenge will result in an undesirable outcome, they are more likely to choose not to take on such a challenge.

Terms: efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, noncontingent outcome, reactance theory, passivity, uncontrollable outcomes, and controllable outcomes.

Chapter 9 talks about our motivation to implement personal control over what happens to us. We have the power to produce favorable results and we rely on past experiences and personal resources in order to figure out how to do so. The chapter begins by discussing efficacy expectations and outcome expectations.

Efficacy expectations are a judgment of one's capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. These are an estimate of the likelihood that certain consequences will follow once we behave in a certain way. If a person has high efficacy expectations, we would expect them to be energetic and goal oriented. Outcome expectations are a person's ability to predict how their behavior will produce a certain outcome.
Next, the chapter discussed the idea of self-efficacy. This can be defined as someone's judgment of how well they will cope with situation given the skills they possess and the circumstances their environment has placed them in. Self-efficacy is not the same as ability; it is more about how you use your skills even though there are difficult circumstances. Things that form our self-efficacy include our personal history, observations of others, and our physiological state. I found it interesting and surprising that our physiological state affects our self-efficacy and therefore out performance.

People want to be in situations that they feel they can do well in and therefore self-efficacy affects our choices of activities and our selection of environments. It can also drastically affect how much effort we put into performing a task. Our quality of decision making is affected because our level of confidence in our performance determined by self-efficacy. The level of stress a task or problem puts on us is also related to our level of self-efficacy for that task or problem.

The concept of self-efficacy can also provide us with empowerment and with that empowerment we gain mastery beliefs. Mastery beliefs “…reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcome and preventing adverse ones.” Mastery modeling programs help individuals become masters of their already present skills through to use of the four sources of self-efficacy.

Learned helplessness is the opposite of mastery beliefs and it comes from our own perception that a given situation is uncontrollable. When people think their actions will have little effect on the outcomes they would like to encourage or evade, learned helplessness occurs. There are three key concepts involved in learned helplessness: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is "the objective relationship between a person's behavior and the environment's outcome". The next, cognition, involves three elements the first being biases or the “illusion of control”. The second, attributions, are an explanation of why we believe we do or do not have control. Finally, expectancies are beliefs about our level of control that we have gained through prior experiences. The last concept of learned helplessness is behavior, or what we do in order to cope with a situation. These responses can be either lethargic and passive (essentially giving up), or active and assertive. Those who have some expectation of control exhibit active and assertive behaviors.

Personal control beliefs serve to motivate or discourage behavior if we feel that we have the ability to be successful then we are more likely to actually do so. One example is how reviewing your notes every day after class is an encouraged behavior for studying for a test. This behavior builds confidence in your chances of doing well, and it is likely that past experiences have provided reinforcement. But when you wait until the last minute and cram for a test you it is likely that you will not feel as though you are going to do well. When you do not do well, you are discouraged from engaging in that behavior again.

Terms: efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, empowerment, mastery beliefs, mastery modeling program, learned helplessness, behavior, cognition, contingency, lethargic response, assertive response, attributions, expectancies,

Chapter nine tackles the incredibly complicated subject of, what I would summarize it as, self-control; how much control we all feel we have over ourselves and our lives. The reason we find personal control so appealing to us is because all individuals what to believe they have what it takes to influence the “results” of their lives. Behind all of this desire for self control, we are fueled by our self-perceived likeliness that these events will occur, or our expectancy. There are two different types of expectancy: efficacy expectations (the judgment of whether or not you are capable or doing said action) and outcome expectations (the judgment of, after having completed said action, what the outcome should be). Both of these expectations have to be high before any behavior can become energized and directed. Then we reach a very large subject in the chapter: self-efficacy or “the capacity in which the individual organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with the demands and circumstances he or she faces”. However, this is not to be mistaken with ability. Self-efficacy is the thing that makes a person translate their already learned abilities into a sufficient performance. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there is doubt. When you doubt your capacities to cope with anything unexpected or difficult, feelings of anxiety, tension, and confusion are born and they lead to poor thinking and decision making. Going back to self-efficacy, there are four sources where beliefs on self-efficacy are believed to arise from. The first, and most influential, is one's personal behavior history, or “interpretations and memories of past attempts to execute the same behavior”. Each time you do something well or do something poorly will have an effect on you participating in the activity in the future. The second source, and the second most influential, is vicarious experience. This involves watching someone else model the behavior before you attempt it. This really affects people when the person modeling the behavior is similar to the person watching and when the person is less experienced at said behavior. Both of which have a greater impact on the observer. These two sources are seen in (almost) a different category as the last two; they are seen as “promising therapeutic possibilities”. Number three is referred to as verbal persuasion. This is a fancy word for pep talk. You can convince someone, through the use of inspirational talk, to give something a try. Last one is called physiological state. This refers to any way in which your body reacts to the demands of the task at hand; fatigue, pain, tension, etc. Its our bodily feedback. We refer to these last two sources as “supplemental opportunities to alter pessimistic self-efficacy beliefs”. These acquired beliefs affect our behavior in many ways. First, being that they affect which activities we choose. This also covers the activities we avoid in order to protect ourselves from tasks that are overwhelming. Avoiding activities in this manner can have a very profound effect on our development and is seen as self-destructive. Second, being how much effort and persistence we are going to put into these activities in the face of adversity. If you persist despite obstacles in the way than you show strong self-efficacy and if you give up you show strong self-doubt. Third, being how well we make decisions and think during these activities, “doubt deteriorates, whereas efficacy buffers”. Lastly, being how we reacted emotionally. People strong in efficacy like challenges while people with low efficacy just worry about their personal faults. However! This is not the same as perceived competence although they are very similar. The book also mentions, and I feel is something important to mention, is the concept of empowerment. Since these beliefs are subject to adjustment, empowerment helps give us the tools we need to control our own lives and thus raises our self-efficacy. Moving on to the next capitalized and bolded section in the book: mastery beliefs (the extent to which we think we can control attaining the outcomes we want and preventing ones we don’t). As most things, mastery has an opposite and that is helplessness. People who want to master things don't give up in the face of adversity while someone who sees themselves as helpless they will give up pretty quickly and chop it all up to they couldn't control the outcome anyway (learned helplessness). And yes, helplessness is indeed learned and it has three components: contingency (the relationship between behavior and outcome), cognition (mental events that can cause error between truth and understanding: biases, attributions, expectancies) and behavior (preventing or attaining outcomes). Helplessness can have various effects on ones motivation, learning and emotion but when it really comes down to explaining these effects it can be summed up by saying helplessness makes someone a pessimistic, depressed person who doesn't want to try anything. BUT depressed people are not necessarily more prone to helplessness. You have to watch out for all these loop holes these theories throw at you. Anyway, the last two things to mention about the chapter is reactance theory (basically a “doing the opposite of what you said” thing as a way of exerting their own control) and hope (experienced when you have the motivation to work towards goals and know ways to achieve them). What surprised me the most is the whole study on dogs. They were shocking dogs and when I read the whole thing about how the inescapable dogs just sat there and cried, I got all sad. I know the research is needed and everything, but I feel better not knowing about it. Personal control beliefs encourage and discourage behavior by creating expectancies. Every time we go to do something we search our brains for the last time we did this activity and what was the reaction to that, the reactions of other people who have done said activity, so on and so forth so that when we go to do something we think about all these things or our “personal control beliefs” in order to determine what we are comfortable doing and what we are not comfortable doing. Past events can cause someone to give up more quickly because of failure in the past. For example, if you are learning how to snowboard and the first time you go to slide down the hill you have an instructor telling you that you will be fine and demonstrates for you how it is done and so when you try it you may fall but with the encouragement you feel like you should give it another try. However, if your instructor is being uninformative and rude and you are really cold and have a headache and the first time you go down the hill you fall might give you such a bad association with the activity that now it has become an activity to avoid and you are less likely to try again. Terms: Personal Control, Expectancy, Efficacy Expectations Outcome Expectations Self-Efficacy Doubt
Personal Behavior History Vicarious Experience Verbal Persuasion Physiological State Empowerment Mastery Beliefs. Learned Helplessness Hope Reactance.

Chapter 9 is about personal control beliefs and how the amount of control we feel we have influences our motivation. Expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two kind of expectancy: efficacy expectation and outcome expectation. Efficacy expectation is the expectation of being able to enact the behaviors one needs in order to cope effectively with the situation. An outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action will cause a particular outcome. An example of this put together is a person thinking that if they are able to study every night for a week (efficacy expectation) then they will receive an A on the test (outcome expectation). 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. If you have a high self efficacy, you will believe, “I can do it.” Self efficacy comes from our personal behavior history, vicarious experience, which is observing someone model a certain behavior and then believe we either can or can’t do it based on their experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological activity. The level of self efficacy a person has determines their behavior in choice (approach vs. avoidant), effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions (less stress if high level of self efficacy). Empowerment involves possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. If a person possesses all three of these components, they will have empowerment. Mastery beliefs are the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing aversive ones. When a person feels they have a high level of personal control, they see a strong connection between their actions and outcomes. The level of mastery one possesses influences how they will choose to cope with situations. For example, a high level of mastery might influence a person to choose approach instead of avoidance or a direct instead of indirect way of coping. A mastery motivational orientation refers to a hardy, resistant portrayal of the self during encounters of failure and sees failure feedback as helpful. On the other hand, helpless motivational orientation has a fragile view of the self during encounters of failure and views failure feedback as a sign of personal inadequacy. Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. When there is a feeling of helplessness, a person thinks that nothing they do can make an adverse situation better. Learned helplessness was demonstrated in an experiment where dogs would receive a shock. When dogs received an inescapable shock, they did not even try to escape when they received an escapable shock, because they had learned to become helpless and thought there was nothing they could do to change the situation. However, dogs who received an escapable shock first learned that they could push a button with their nose to stop the shock and felt as though they had control. When they received another escapable shock where they had to jump over a barrier to stop it, they were able to figure that out because they believed they could. There are three components to learned helplessness: contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is the objective relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcomes. If you believe what you do matters in the world, you will not feel helpless. Cognition is subjective personal control beliefs, such as biases, attributions, and expectancies. Coping behavior will be demoralized in helpless people. There are also three effects of helplessness: motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits. Helplessness will cause people to have a decreased willingness to try and energy depleting emotions. Explanatory style reflects the way people explain the reasons why bad things happen to them. There are two types of explanatory style. Optimistic explanatory style is the tendency to explain bad events with attributions that are unstable and controllable, while pessimistic explanatory style is the tendency to explain bad events with attributions that are stable and uncontrollable. Hope is the combination of self efficacy and mastery motivation. A high self efficacy will lead a person to believe they can accomplish their goals, and having mastery motivation will lead a person to believe there are multiple routes to get to their goal if one does not work out.
The most surprising thing about this chapter to me was learned helplessness. I have heard of the experiment with the dogs before, but I did not realize that the dogs who received an escapable shock the first time had to figure out another way to escape the shock the second time they received it. The fact that they worked hard enough to figure it out the second time, while the learned helplessness dogs would not even try was interesting to learn about. Personal control beliefs encourage a person’s behavior when they have a high level of self efficacy and mastery, and believe that they can accomplish a certain task. They believe that what they do matters, so they will work to succeed at the task. Personal control beliefs discourage a person’s behavior when they have a low level of self efficacy and believe that it does not matter what they do and feel that they have no control over what happens to them. An example of how personal control beliefs encourage behavior is if a person believes that if they study, they will receive an A on their finals, then they will be motivated to study. On the other hand, if a person believes that they are going to perform poorly on their finals no matter what, they will not be motivated to study because they will see that as a waste of time.
Terms: personal control, expectancy, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, self-efficacy, vicarious experience, empowerment, mastery beliefs, mastery motivational orientation, helpless motivational orientation, learned helplessness, contingency, cognitions, explanatory style, optimistic explanatory style, pessimistic explanatory style

Chapter nine focuses on personal control beliefs. It talks about exercising personal control over what happens to people. As people try to control their life events they learn expectancies about their control. There are two types of expectations. These are efficacy and outcome. An efficacy expectation is a judgment of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. (E.g. Can I do it?) An outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome. (E.g. Will what I do work?) Both of these expectations must be pretty high for a behavior to become energetic and go in a good direction. Self-efficacy is how a person thinks about his or her abilities in a given situation. This isn’t the same as ability, but instead what a person thinks his or her ability is. Self-efficacy beliefs come from one’s personal history in trying to execute that particular behavior, observations of similar others who also try to execute that behavior, verbal persuasions from others, and physiological states such as racing heart versus a calm one. This leads to a sense of empowerment where a person possesses the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. If a person doesn’t feel good about him or herself, he or she can feel helplessness or a psychological state where a person feels out of control in his or her life. Three components explain helplessness effects: contingency, cognition, and behavior. It’s better for a person to feel mastery beliefs so that he or she feels in control of life and feels more optimism to keep going. Optimism is where a person feels that things will get better and is willing to try. Pessimism is where a person feels that he or she doesn’t have control and would rather just give up. Reactance theory explains how people react to uncontrollable life events. When a person feels in control he or she is more likely to react in a positive way, whereas if a person feels out of control he or she is more likely to feel hopelessness and give up. Lastly, hope puts self-efficacy and mastery together to provide energy and direction for one’s coming efforts. People with high hope are more likely to achieve strong mastery motivation, where people with low hope are more likely to give up.

The most surprising thing I learned was about the study with depressed college students. In the study, the researchers found that people who are depressed actually judged the amount of control they had over things in their lives more accurately than those who weren’t depressed. I find this very surprising, because I would think that people who aren’t depressed would be able to judge more accurately because they are in the right state of mind. I would think that people who are depressed actually would judge their control level much lower than it actually was because they are so unhappy about their lives and would feel helpless.

Personal control beliefs help to encourage or discourage behavior when a person feels that he or she has control over what they are doing in life. A person would need to feel self-efficacy and optimism to be able to perform difficult tasks. These types of control beliefs allow a person to feel that he or she is able to or has the appropriate skills to do whatever task is at hand. If someone doesn’t feel in control or has little self-efficacy, he or she will be discouraged to do the behavior because he or she might feel that failure is the only option. An example of an encouraged behavior is to save money to pay for college. Although this behavior might be hard for teenagers to do, if they feel in control and feel as if they can accomplish that task, they will be more motivated to follow through. This behavior would be discouraged if a person doesn’t have a job or doesn’t feel in control of their behaviors. He or she might feel discouraged because he or she might feel saving money to pay for college is too hard and impossible.

Control beliefs, efficacy, outcome, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation, self-efficacy, empowerment, contingency, cognition, behavior, optimism, pessimism, reactance theory, hopelessness, mastery motivation, hope

Chapter 9 was about beliefs about our own personal control over the things that happen in our lives. The chapter pointed out that what we expect to get out of certain experiences and how we expect that we can cope with certain experiences have a strong impact on our motivation. The two types of expectancies that exist are efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. An efficacy expectation is a “judgment of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action”. Efficacy expectations address the question, “can I do it?’ Outcome expectancies, however, focus on asking the question “will what I do work?” Basically efficacy is about our confidences in our abilities and outcome expectancies are that our abilities will lead to fulfilling our goal or behavior. The chapter went into detail on efficacy defining it as the way a person “organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with the demands and circumstances that he or she faces”. The opposite of efficacy would be doubting one’s ability to cope with situational challenges. There are important sources for self efficacy that the chapter discussed. Personal history can provide a person with a sense of accomplishment or it can provide a person with self doubt in his or her ability. Vicarious experiences also influence a person’s belief that he or she can do something. For example, my younger sister were to watch me dive successfully off the high dive at a pool, this vicarious experience would increase herself efficacy because she would think “If she can do it, so can I”. Efficacy is also impacted by verbal persuasion and by a person’s physiological state. I found the physiological state section surprising because it not only matters that you are physiologically aroused but it also matters how you interpret the physiological arousal. If you interpret your fast heart rate as being terrified that you are going to die when you jump off the high dive, then this is not increasing yourself efficacy. BUT if you interpret your fast heart rate as a symptom of adrenaline and excitement, then you will likely interpret the experience as fun and you will probably perform better. When people are low on self efficacy it can have detrimental effects in their life. When you have low self efficacy you will avoid the behaviors and situations that make you feel doubt. By avoiding these situations the person will never improve or learn from experiences because they will avoid ones that they are doubtful of. This will stunt their own personal development in a number of areas. Their effort and persistence is likely to be very low because they are not self assured and they truly do not believe they are capable of succeeding. I thought it was really interesting that the chapter pointed out that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team and Decca Records turned down a Beatles contract because they “didn’t like their sound”. These examples show how important self efficacy is for effort and persistence. If Michael Jordan or The Beatles would have given up after one failed attempt, we would have missed out on one of the greatest athletes of all time and Paul McCartney would be unknown to us. After efficacy the chapter discussed empowerment, which is “possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives”. When using a mastery modeling approach involves using the four sources of self efficacy to improve a certain skill or behavior (1. personal history 2. Vicarious experience 3. Verbal persuasion 4. Physiological states). Mastery beliefs are based on a person’s perceived control over attaining desirable outcomes and avoiding aversive ones. Proactive coping means the person will approach the problem and cope with it effectively. Reactive coping means the person will avoid the problem and deal with it later. People who are highly mastery motivated will be resistant to change their image of themselves, even when they fail at a task. These people see failure as a way to learn and grow. However, people who are low on self efficacy and who do not take a mastery approach will interpret failure as indicative of their personal self. Chapter 9 also discussed learned helplessness which is a person’s psychological state that stems from them believing that they are out of control of the events that happen do them. In other words, their outcome expectancies are attributed to things that were out of their control. People who have learned helplessness will believe they have no control over the outcome of things in their lives. The chapter gave the example of how helplessness is learned by discussing a study on dogs being shocked, which we also discussed in class. The chapter then discussed the three components of learned helplessness. Contingency is the first one and it is the *objective relationship between behavior and outcomes. Cognition is the second one and it is the *subjective idea of personal control in a situation. However, cognitions can have biases, attributions, and expectancies that can influence how we think about personal control. The third component to learned helplessness is behavior. Coping can be passive or active and our behavior is based on which coping methods we choose. There are three deficits to learned helplessness: motivational, learning, and emotional deficits. The chapter also discussed reactance theory. Reactance is the psychological and behavioral attempt to reestablish an eliminated or threatened freedom. So, when we feel our control is threatened we “react” usually by being angry or aggressive. Reactance increases performance, but helplessness decreases it. The chapter ended by defining hope as the satisfaction we get when we achieve a goal that we were motivated to achieve.
The thing I found most surprising was the section on depression and learned helplessness. The study on depressed vs. non-depressed people was really interesting. The study found that non-depressed people over estimated their perceived control, whereas the depressed people were more accurate in their memories for positive and negative events and thus, they predicted their amount of control accurately. So, it wasn’t that the depressed people underestimated their amount of control, it was that the non-depressed people over estimated their amount of control. I thought that was interesting and a little surprising.
Personal control beliefs can encourage behavior when we believe we have the ability and resources to successfully complete a behavior. For example, if someone were to ask me to run a mile in under 7 minutes, I would be highly motivated or encouraged to do it because it presents a challenge, that I believe I can complete. However, if someone were to ask my dad to do the same thing he would be very discouraged because his personal control beliefs would be very low. He would not have the control over his body to run a mile in under 7 minutes; therefore, he would not be motivated to even try. Personal control beliefs depend on our past experiences, so for me I know that I have ran a mile in 5 minutes before, so I know I could do it again. They also rely on vicarious experiences, so for me if I were to watch another girl around my age and ability run a mile in under 7 minutes I would likely think that I could too. Also, someone encouraging me to try it would provide verbal persuasion which would likely increase my belief in my ability. And lastly, my physiological state would likely be fired up because I am a competitive person, so I would be excited to take on the challenge. These same four factors that would increase my belief in my ability and sense of personal control would actually be detrimental to my dad, who would likely interpret them all in a different way. These different factors can all increase or decrease the belief in personal control and thus, the likelihood of the behavior.

Terms: self efficacy, expectancy, personal control, 4 sources of self efficacy, effort, persistence, empowerment, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, coping, 3 components of helplessness: 1. Contingency 2. Cognition 3. Behavior, reactance and reactance theory, hope

Expectancy is what we believe we will be able to accomplish. There are two different types of expectancy: efficacy expectations and outcome expecations. An efficacy expectation is what we believe we are able to do or accomplish. An out come expectation is is what we believe will follow our behaviors. An example of a self efficacy outcome is believing that we have the skills and abilities to obtain a college degree. An outcome expectation would be the assumption that we will be able to find a better paying job with our degree. These two aspects of expectancy work together to produce perceived control. When we believe that we “can do something” and that it “will work”, we feel we have control over our outcomes.

This perceived control over our outcomes is referred to as self efficacy. Self efficacy is the opposite of doubt. It is our own personal judgement of how well we will cope with situations using our skills and abilities. We also take into account how well we are at improvising with the skills we have to do well in an array of different situations. This aspect of self efficacy is useful in stressful situations where we receive little instruction or feel we are unprepared. For example, while working towards a college degree we often have to take classes we know nothing about. If we have high self efficacy, we will realize that we have high reading and writing skills. These skills are what we will need in any class to get a good grade. A person with low self efficacy would believe that because they know nothing about the subject area, they will certainly fail the class.

There are various sources of self efficacy. We can obtain self efficacy through personal history. If we’ve been successful at similar tasks in the past, we will have a higher belief that we’ll be successful now. When we observe others accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish, we’re gaining self efficacy through vicarious experience. Self efficacy can be improved by encouragement from our social environment. During a task, our bodies can send us signals. If we can overcome these demands and thrive from them, we can self efficacy through our physiological states.

These levels of self efficacy will then work the effect our behaviors. Our level of self efficacy helps determine the choices we make when choosing activities. If we have low self efficacy, we will choose tasks that we feel won’t overwhelm our abilities or skills. When we believe our skills are low, we will end up choosing easier tasks. If we have high self efficacy, we will be able to choose more difficult tasks since we feel we can handle them. We witness a similar effect in thinking and decision making. Self efficacy is also positively correlated with effort and persistence. Emotionality can be controlled by self efficacy. When we feel we’re in control of sometimes stressful situations around us, we are more likely to be able to remain calm in the face of our emotions.

Knowledge, self efficacy beliefs, and skills work together to create a sense of empowerment. When someone possesses the skills and knowledge to tackle a situation, they must also possesss the self efficacy to know that they are able to complete the task. Empowerment is how much control we feel we have over our lives. We are less likely to be intimidated when stressful situations arise.

This feeling of empowerment is also associated with mastery beliefs. Mastery beliefs are how control we perceive to have over achieving desirable outcomes in our lives and avoiding the aversive ones. There are two different types of motivational orientations. Mastery motivational orientation causes us to have a hardy, resilient view on the world around us. People like this will also view failure feedback as helpful. Helpless motivational orientation have a fragile view of themselves in the face of problems. They see failure feedbak as a sign of personal inadequacy. These different types of motivational orientations will result in different ways of coping. If we lack positive ways of coping we will develop learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness is the psychological state that happens when we believe that life’s outcomes cannot be controlled. This occurs when we do not link what happens to us as a result of our behavior, but rather from outside (uncontrollable) outcomes. Learned helplessness will cause people to not even try to escape an undesirable situation when they have the skills and abilities to overcome it. Because of past situations that they were unable to help themselves out of, people stop trying to achieve what they want to do. There are three componenets of learned helplessness. Contingency, cognition, and behavior. Learned helplessness effects individuals in many ways. They will have motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits.

The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was about the different ways of coping. I found this surprising because we can usually see the various ways to cope with a situation, but it’s difficult to put a name to them. Although there is usually a clear “best” way to deal with a problem, we sometimes choose a different route. I think it’s an important and interesting thing to think about why we may choose a less effective route to deal with a problem.

If we have high personal control beliefs, we will be more likely to choose tasks that are difficult or stressful. We will believe that we have the abilities and skills to overcome the situation. We will also feel that the outcome is in our control, not the control of the situation. With low personal control beliefs, we will choose tasks that seem easy. For example, a person wants to take a class but heard that the professor is very difficult. A person with high personal control beliefs sets a goal of getting an A in the class. They know they have the writing and reading abilities to make it. They know that they have the communication abilities to talk with the professor if a problem were to arise. The professor can let them know what they’re doing wrong and how to improve. A person with low personal control beliefs makes it their goal to simply pass the class. They know that there will be a lot of reading over material that they haven’t learned much about. None of their other professors prepared them to take this course. They also believe that there is little they can do if the professor is a difficult grader. The professor has unreasonable expectations. They also believe that if do poorly, the professor will point out their short comings. These are two different ways of looking at the same situation. The first example would be of an encouraged behavior. The individual’s high personal control beliefs cause them to realize that they have what it takes to do well in a difficult class. They also know that if they do poorly, they have the ability to learn and bounce back from it. This is encouraging. The second example would be of a discouraged behavior. This individual believes that they are under prepared and that it is not their fault. They also fear failure because it will point out how much they don’t know. This individual also feels that because the professor is difficult, they will have no control over which direction their grade takes. This discourages the person from trying or taking the class at all.

Terms: expectancy, self efficacy expectancy, outcome expectancy, perceived control beliefs, personal history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, physiological activity, choice, effort/persistence, thinking/decision making, emotional reactions, empowerment, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, mastery motivational orientation, helpless motivational orientation, contingency, cognition, behavior, motivational deficits, learning deficits, emotional deficits

Oops!

MY terms: Personal control beliefs, motivation, expectancies, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, personal history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, physiological state, persistence, emotionality, decision making, helplessness, hope, contingency, cognition, behavior, motivation deficits, learning deficits, emotion deficits, explanatory style, pessimistic style, optimistic style, hope.

In chapter 9, they discuss personal control beliefs. In our life, we have the control to choose if the outcomes of our situation are desirable or undesirable. The underlying factor in achieving these desired outcomes is a person’s sureness of self-efficiency. Self-efficiency is a person’s evaluation on their ability to utilize their skills to spontaneous adapting during unexpected situations or circumstances. By obtaining self-efficiency, a person tries harder and persists when faced with difficult tasks, chooses to accomplish tasks rather than avoid them and it has a positive effect on thinking and mental process. When a person’s lacks a strong sense of self-efficiency, they acquired doubt which produces anxiety, confusion, and negative thinking. One can obtain self-efficiency in three ways. First, their own personal history plays a significant role. If previous memories of the behavior are good, it will increase their self-efficiency; however, if that behavior was judged negatively it will decrease their self-efficiency. Secondly, they can obtain self-efficiency by watching others, and see the results of their actions. Thirdly, experiencing pep talks from others or personally to motivate oneself. This will provide motive to continue in what they are trying to accomplish or to try again. Fourth, their physiological state can affect self-efficiency as well. The feeling of fear, tension, and anxiety, along with many others heightens inefficiency. Self-efficiency can be useful in prediction ways of coping, also known as empowerment. Empowerment can be broken into three areas that allow people to possess the knowledge, skills, and believes to determine control over their lives. When someone is empowered, they obtain feelings of efficiency and acceptance that replaces doubt and avoidance. One way to increase empower people is through the master modeling program. The mastery belief gives the belief of control over things around you to have better outcomes for one. There are two types of orientation in this program mastery motivational orientation and helplessness motivated orientation. Mastery motivational orientation uses feedback and failure as constructive wisdom, whereas, helpless motivation takes feedback as a sign of personal weakness and blames themselves for failure. This can translate into learned helplessness. People believe that they have no control over their outcome. There are three parts to learned helplessness contingence (relationship between behavior and environment), cognition (notions about control through bias, attribution, expectancies), behavior (coping strategies to prevent outcomes). These key factors have an impact on a person’s life through motivation, learning and emotional deficits. Reactance theory was also a key topic in this chapter. This theory suggests that people react when they harbor expectations of controllability, whereas, helplessness exerts from expectations for uncontrollability. Hope comes from a person who has both motivation and knows a way to achieve their goals.
I was surprised to learn how much of an impact one has on their outcomes of life. Many times we go through the day not thinking about how we can change a bad day in a good day, or increase the motivation of an activity. But, we can just by starting to increase our self-efficiency and empowerment. It makes a huge impact.
Personal control beliefs can encourage and discourage behavior by the perceived control over the situation. Through this, they survey the situation and asses themselves if they can accomplish the goal. Their level of self-efficiency plays a vital role in determining if the outcome is positive or negative. When a person feels as though they don’t have self-efficiency, or low skills to complete the activity, their outcomes may be pessimistic. However, when they have high efficiency, or high assessment of their skills, their outcomes may be more optimistic and beneficial for the individual. For example, a person may have self-efficiency may succeed in a class if they enjoy it. It may be difficult, but because of their high assessment that they can accomplish it though empowerment, they will do well in the class. However, if the students go in with a negative attitude that they have no control on the situation and they are going to fail either way, or learned helpless, they may not succeed or do well.

Terms: self-efficiency, doubt, empowerment, master modeling program, master belief, mastery motivation orientation, learned helplessness, contingence, cognition, behavior, reactance theory, hope

Chapter 9 was about the motivation to control your outcomes in life. Expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. There are two kinds of expectations: efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectation is more of if you think you are able to do it. An outcome expectation is when you think about whether it’s going to work or not. Self- efficacy is ones judgment of how well one is going to cope with a situation with the given skills they have and the circumstances they face. Chapter 9 also discussed empowerment, which is the knowledge, self-efficacy beliefs, and skills. There are two kinds of mastery as well: mastery belief and mastery motivational orientation. Mastery belief is the extent of perceived control one has over getting a desirable outcome and preventing the aversive ones. Mastery motivation orientation is the helpless motivation orientation. Mastery motivation is learned after one learns helplessness, which is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that events in their life are uncontrollable. There are three components of learned helplessness: contingency, the relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcomes, cognition, mental processes the individual relies on to translate objective environmental contingencies, behavior, the person’s voluntary coping behavior. There are three effects of helplessness as well: motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits. Then there is the reactance theory which explains how people will react to uncontrollable events in their life.

I thought the most interesting thing in this chapter was how learned helplessness and depression are sometimes related. They are very similar because in both cases the individual expects bad events will occur, and there is nothing they can do to prevent it. They also share common symptoms like passivity, low self-esteem, and loss of appetite. They also share therapeutic intervention strategies.

Personal control beliefs serve to encourage or motivate a behavior when people know they have what they need to do a specific job or task. Someone is going to be more motivated or encouraged to ride their bike for 10 miles if they knew that they can do this and succeed. If they did not think they could do this then they more than likely will not accept this challenge. If they do however accept the challenge knowing full well that they will not succeed they will not put all their effort into it.

Terms: efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, reactance theory, passivity, mastery believe, mastery motivation orientation.

Chapter nine discusses personal control beliefs. Self-efficacy describes how well we are able to cope with certain situations. When we have positive thoughts about how we will perform under stressful environments, we are showing self-efficacy. Sometimes self-efficacy is extremely low. Often times we create doubt in situations, such as being able to pass an exam. This creates high arousal and anxiety within one’s self. Self-efficacy has causation because of personal history with some past event. Say, for example, if I want to go swimming right now, I would remember past experiences of having fun swimming without drowning. My self-efficacy would be high since I have a lot of confidence in my abilities to be able to swim again, even though it has been a while since I’ve last done it. However, had I needed to use flotation devices and experienced trauma because of constantly drowning and swallowing water, I would express feelings of doubt in myself. Vicarious experiences also shift our self-efficacy. This may be both positive and negative. If we observe somebody similar to ourselves perform well on something often self-efficacy is strongly increased. On the other hand, self-efficacy may also be lowered if they perform terribly, we may express concern on our own abilities then. One important component to self-efficacy is how it affects our choices in life. If self-efficacy is high we approach situations head on. Sometimes we avoid situations for fear of failure and stop any negative physiological feelings from even occurring. Our control over these events is through empowerment. Going from avoidant tendencies because of low self-efficacy are many times overcome through empowerment. When the situational factors that cause low-self efficacy are worked on to improve something, we increase our personal empowerment over the situation, thus increasing self-efficacy.
The chapter also distinguishes between mastery and helplessness. Mastery involves overcoming difficult obstacles and focusing on the task to avoid failure. Helplessness is the complete opposite of mastery. When people feel a sense of helplessness they give up, take failure as it comes with negative thoughts that they are unable to escape failure, that they were destined to fail. Learned helplessness occurs when people (or animals) feel that the outcome is not controllable. This is a learned concept. It comes from previous exposure to negative stimuli in controlled situations. When the circumstances are uncontrolled, a learned helplessness is formed because of past experiences.
The most surprising thing I found in chapter nine was the importance of hope in motivation. Individuals who hope for things create pathways to seek out accomplishments. People who are hopeful have a belief in achievement. Also, high hoping individuals are thought to perform better than individuals without hope.
Personal control beliefs motivate behavior when individuals feel they are responsible for performance outcomes. Someone who believes they can accomplish a neatly written research paper, for example, gives a sense of high self-efficacy on how they perceive their abilities. Positive beliefs motivate positive outcomes and avoidance to failure. Previous papers that have received A’s may provide the encouraged behavior. Understanding and incorporating skills that have been useful in the past to achieve success continue to encourage behavior. If belief in ones abilities are low, motivation is discouraged. For example, a person who lacks proper computation skills and always writes poor research papers takes a class where, coincidentally, all grades are determined by how well papers throughout the semester are written, they are likely to experience discouraged motivation. Their personal control beliefs might even cause learned helplessness over the situation and all motivation to actually succeed and improve are completely discouraged from previous events.
Terms: Self-efficacy, personal behavior history, vicarious experiences, empowerment, mastery, learned helplessness, hope.

Chapter 9 summarized personal control beliefs. Person's beliefs are motivated by 1) having what it takes to influence their environment 2) the environment will be responsive to their influence attempts. Two types of expectancies discussed were efficacy and outcome expectancies. An efficacy expectation is whether an individual feels they are capable of executing an action. An outcome expectancy is when an individual performs a certain action, and whether it will produce a certain outcome. Self efficacy is when the performer tries to best judge their abilities and turn into effective performance. Self efficacy beliefs arise from 1) one's personal history 2) observations of similar others 3) verbal persuasions 4) physiological state. In addition, the effects of self efficacy are 1) choice (approach vs. avoid) 2) effort and persistence 3) thinking and decision making 4) emotional reactions. This chapter also discussed empowerment which is when an individual possesses the knowledge, skills and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their life. Mastery beliefs are the perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing others. Learned helplessness is when an individual expects that outcomes in life are uncontrollable. Some people have motivational deficits which decrease their willingness to try and may discourage behavior.

I thought the various parts of learned helplessness were surprising. The three components that were involved such as contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency refers the environments outcomes and the individuals behavior. Cognition deals with biases, attributions, and expectancies. Learned helplessness is similar to like self-handicapping yourself or an individual who is suffering from depression. They have constant negative thoughts and expect negative outcomes.

I believe that certain things such as mastery beliefs can help an individual by giving them confidence in achieving their desired outcome. An example of encouraged behavior is when an individual does well in perhaps a sport, then they will keep performing that behavior. For example, I excelled in tennis in high school and received various awards and medals and because of this it encouraged my behavior to continue to play. An example of discouraged behavior is when an individual receives criticism that may cause a motivational deficit. For instance, I loved playing volleyball but I didn't have a strong relationship with the coach, and because of this he discouraged my behavior to continue the activity. I feel personal control beliefs influence behavior because as previously mentioned, prior history can be a main factor in why a particular behavior is continued.

Terms used: learned helplessness, personal control beliefs, empowerment, mastery beliefs, self efficacy, efficacy expectancy, outcome expectancy, motivational deficit

This chapter was about personal control and the motivation behind it. There were two things that people think about when dealing with personal control—“ having what it takes” to influence the environment and the environment responding to the influences. This is done through our expectancy or our prediction of how likely an event may happen. There were two types of expectancy—efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy deals with the “can I do it?” type of stuff. Outcome would then deal with the “will what I do work?” or will the action cause the outcome that is wanted. These both can cause behavior to be energetic and goal directed if they are high. Then the book talked about perceived control. Perceived control is basically how one self gets to the control or self to action to control. To get from self to action is the efficacy expectation and to get from action to control is the outcome expectations. Then the book talked about a different type of efficacy—self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the ability for one to cope with a situation using skills he or she has and dealing with the circumstances that are there. Self-efficacy helps to see if someone will be able to approach or become avoidant in situations. The book then listed some sources of self-efficacy and some of the effects. Then the book talked about empowerment or knowledge, skills, and beliefs to have control over one’s life. Then talked about mastery beliefs and how they are used to have a perceived control over getting good outcome and being able to prevent bad ones. The book then talked about coping and the difference between mastery and helplessness. Mastery is the ability to deal with the situation even though it may be hard and realizing it is your fault. Helplessness would be like saying there were outside factors that always cause things to happen to you and so you don’t try to get out of them. Learned helpless was then talked about. It basically said that this is when the outcomes are thought to be completely uncontrollable. As inferred in the title helplessness is a learned thing. There are three components with learned helplessness—contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is the person’s behavior and the environmental outcomes along with that. Cognition is one’s beliefs, attributions, and expectancies. Behavior is mainly dealing with coping. This would be the ability to attain or prevent an outcome. Then, explanatory style was talked about. These styles are the personality variables that explain why an event happened. There are two styles—pessimistic and optimistic. Pessimistic is when because you do poorly then you would give up. Optimistic is the opposite, like trying harder after failing. Then, the book talked of the reactance theory. This is when one tries to reestablish a sense of freedom. Finally the book talked of hope and how confidence can be a big factor in creating more energy and direction.
The most surprising thing I learned was the differences in mastery and helplessness. It brought to my attention a few things that I do and how my behaviors can differ from time to time based off my mood.
Personal control beliefs serve to encourage behavior if we feel we are able to complete a task or be successful at something. An example could be the ability to shuffle cards. If you can do this then it might encourage you to play cards more or when playing cards offer to shuffle the cards more often. If you feel you don’t have the skills to shuffle the cards then you might not because you could be laughed at or it would take a really long time and you may feel judged.
Terms used:
Expectancy, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, perceived control, self-efficacy, empowerment, mastery, helplessness, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, explanatory style, pessimistic and optimistic, and reactance theory.

This chapter explains personal control beliefs—basically, how much control does one have over what goes on in his/her life and the outcomes that come from behavior/action. Self-efficacy is the judgment of how well, or poorly, one will cope with a situation, given the skills of a person and their circumstances. There are four sources of self-efficacy: personal behavior history, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological activity. There are also four effects of self-efficacy on behavior: choice (in avoidance vs. approach), effort & persistence, thinking & decision-making, and emotional reactions. Self-efficacy can be learned, and is a great thing. Self-efficacy beliefs foster productive thinking, feeling, and behaving. The opposite of having high self-efficacy is being doubtful, having anxiety, and behaving in an avoidance manner. Chapter nine also discusses helplessness and how it is a learned behavior, where one has a fragile view of the self during encounters of failure. Learned helplessness results when a person expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable—the person has low self-efficacy. One who exhibits helplessness also takes failure feedback as a sign of personal inadequacy, and not as constructive information and an opportunity to learn. Helplessness has three effects: motivational deficits, learning deficits, and emotional deficits. Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and preventing undesirable ones, more so than the environmental influences.

The most surprising thing I learned was about hope. Hope is such a great, big, shining, magical-type construct, that it surprised me that there is actually a definition. Hope is experienced when someone has both the motivation to work toward their goals and when the person knows ways (even if they have to generate multiple options) to achieve the goals. I just thought it was cool that there is a conceptual understanding for it—it even makes hope seem more attainable in tough situations.

If a person believes they have the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy to do something, they become empowered and thus encouraged (motivated) to do whatever it is they want to do. If a person has high efficacy expectation and high outcome expectation, his/her perceived control will be high and he/she is likely to have control over the outcome of the situation—produce a positive outcome or prevent a negative outcome. When someone believes they do not have control over outcomes, such as in learned helplessness, they are not encouraged to keep trying in aims for goal achievement.

I was able to go backpacking through Europe with my sister because I felt that I could handle the different situations that could occur while traveling abroad. My mom was a good model for what to do in tough situations in a new city. Whenever we would go on family vacations, my mom was the one who planned the logistics and acquired all of the information on the place we were going. Because I look up to her and trust her, I felt encouraged (both emotionally, and verbally from her) that I could have similar travel experiences too. Also, before the backpacking trip, my sister and I spent three weeks in Greece for a class. Through our personal behavior history and our experiences in handling things in Greece, we felt confident that we could handle things on our own for our backpacking portion of our European excursion. If I didn’t believe I could have control over the situations I might encounter while abroad, I probably wouldn’t have gone on that journey and had some of the most amazing experiences of my life. And if I did end up going, I probably would have been scared and wanted to go home most of the trip when frustrating circumstances arose.
An example of a discouraged behavior is not going on a 4-mile run because I “know” that I will be in pain afterwards and will probably have to walk at some point during my run because I am so out of shape. This pessimistic attitude would only prove right if I were to attempt the run. I haven’t been looking into my history with running (on a conference cross-country team, and 4 year track runner in high school) nor paying attention to the modeling behavior of my parents, who exercise consistently. I know I can turn this discouraged behavior around, but I have got to stop having a helpless motivational orientation because I am creating negative effects (deficits) on my motivation, emotions, and learning.

Terms from chapter used: self-efficacy, personal behavior history, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, physiological activity, choice, effort & persistence, thinking & decision-making, emotional reactions, helplessness, hope, empowerment, efficacy expectation, high outcome expectation, deficits in motivation, learning, and emotion

The chapter was about how people have certain expectations for what does or doesn’t happen in their life and how much these expectations work to control the ending results. The expectations of personal control are efficacy and outcome, meaning you’re thinking ahead about whether you can do something and whether it will work. Self-efficacy intervenes and tells the person how to feel, given the skills they possess; then creates a coping style to help the person deal with the anxieties that life throws at individuals. One might ask, how is self-efficacy even obtained? People use personal reflections, modeling, persuasion and physiological activity as many sources to obtain it. These sources are great for influencing your choices, effort and persistence, thinking and decision making and your stress levels. When someone feels really good about something and gives them a great amount of certainty it provokes a feeling of empowerment and makes a person feel as though nothing can bring them down. The opposition, helplessness is learned a different way. Helplessness is the feeling that the world is the enemy and you control nothing of what you do. When people are in this mode of thought, they tend to be the more anxious and stressed out causing great strain on motivation, learning and emotions. Hope is the use of both self-efficacy and mastery/helplessness, and depending how high or how low you are will give you outcomes for the direction you will follow. Obviously, you want to be one with high-hope for many positives in your life.

I was quite surprised how much self-efficacy plays a role in our lives. I have been in a low point and life, and looking back, I wasn’t really having much personal reflections, modeling, pep talks or anything coming in, but once I did, my life was complete flipped around. The input you receive and seek plays roles in many domains of a person’s life and I just never really realized how much it influences all my reactions/thoughts/processes.

Personal control beliefs are there to put in to action your thoughts about doing or not doing something. An encouraged behavior, that would be considered a personal control belief, would be to practice at something to get better. I am revisiting my childhood and learning how to swim with proper technique again, and since I haven’t been doing so since age 10, I’ve forgotten a lot and am having a hard time getting back into a groove. Instead of giving up, my belief that practice will make me better serves as a better motivation than giving up, which would be a discouraged behavior.

Terms: Expectations, control, efficacy, outcome, self-efficacy, skills, coping, empowerment, helplessness, mastery, hope, personal control beliefs, encouraged behavior, discouraged behavior

Chapter 9 has a lot of its main focus about personal control beliefs. It talks about how much power we believe we have in certain situations and how we can give ourselves power even though we have none at all.
When people are trying to take control of the certain situations we have two types of expectancy efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. An efficacy expectation is a judgment of one’s capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. Outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action, once performed. Then, there is self-efficacy one’s judgment of how well (or poorly), one will cope with a situation given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces. And we learn our self-efficacy through just life experiences that has built our personality as what we do good and bad things. As we grow up and develop our self-efficacy it develops more and more of our personality and effects our decisions. Empowerment involves possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people exert power over their lives. Mastery beliefs the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and prevent negative ones. Learned helplessness is the psychological state that results when an individual expects that life’s outcomes are uncontrollable. There are three components of learned helplessness contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is an objective relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcomes. Cognition are subjective personal control beliefs such as biases, attributions, and expectancies. Then the behavior you have learned is listless, demoralizing, and how you cope with things. Eventually the helplessness will lead you to what psychologists call the reactance theory, which is the psychological and behavioral attempt at reestablishing (“reacting” against) or attempting to get some control back into your life.
The most surprising thing was Prototypical learned helplessness study of how we can basically teach people or animals in a controlled environment that they have no hope or there is some hope to stop the pain if you press this or if you perform this action. Basically you’re manipulating how the animal acts and perceives how to react in that situation. Well I’m the type of person to mess with people or just to make people feel out of their place, but I’ve learned that probably during a funeral or a wedding that it would be bad to be obnoxious or loud in those types of settings because I would probably get very harsh criticisms and probably not make a lot of people happy. A encouraged behavior is that I’m a pretty optimistic person and I don’t let a lot of things bother me because my family are a lot of downers and drives me nuts because they get so pessimistic is anything bad happens to them. A discouraged behavior is that when I’m bored I start to bug people, but not intentionally I just want something to do or just want attention and I usually get people mad at me, but I don’t realize I’m bugging them until they say something.
Terms: Efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, empowerment, mastery beliefs, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, reactance theory.

Chapter 9 focuses on expectations and control over one’s life. There are two different types of expectations. Efficacy expectations are based on your how likely you are to complete something based on your abilities. In other words, it answers the question of “Am I able to do this?” The other form of expectations are outcome expectations, which is based on the likeliness you think the outcome or event will occur. This answers the question of “What are the odds of this happening?”

Self-Efficacy is a personal belief about your abilities (“Do I have what it takes?”). This is based on personal behavior history, observations of similar others, verbal persuasions (pep talks), and physiological states (like heart beat rate). Self-efficacy can impact a lot of areas, particularly a person’s empowerment. Empowerment is a person’s belief on how much control they have over their outcomes. If they do not have empowerment, then they have learned helplessness. This is when people think the events of their life are uncontrollable. This psychological state is learned from contingency, cognition, and behavior.

A person’s level of hope is determined by both their self-efficacy and their level of mastery vs helplessness.

I really enjoyed this chapter, because it gave me some new perspectives by putting definitions to some very common things. For example, hope is something I have always known what it is, but have never defined. Before reading the chapter, I would have defined it by something like “optimistic thinking.”
Also, I was “surprised” by the difference between self-efficacy and self-esteem.

I think personal control beliefs play a huge part in encouraging or deterring motivation. If someone feels like they are able to do something, they will think the desired outcome is much more within grasp. If they feel something is actually attainable, then they will be more motivated then if they do not think it is.

An encouraged behavior would be getting good grades. Personal control beliefs can affect this behavior in both positive and negative ways. If a person has high self-efficacy and control belief, then they will be more confident in their abilities and be more willing to keep exerting their efforts. However, if they get some bad grades and begin to feel hopeless, they will begin to think there is nothing they can do to get better grades, and eventually not try as hard.

A great example of a discouraged behavior would be usage of drugs. If one get addicted, then control beliefs play a huge part in their future outcomes. If they become too addicted that they do not think they can overcome it, they will give up. However, if they have hope, they will strive to overcome the addiction.

Terms: expectations, control, efficacy, outcomes, empowerment, helplessness, hope

Chapter nine is all about how our personal control beliefs and how the individual views control over life events. There are two types of expectancies associated with a person’s sense of control and those are efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations have to do with the individual’s perceived ability to perform a task, in other words do I believe that I can do it? Outcome expectations on the other hand have more to do with what final product completion of the task will bring. In order for behavior become action both efficacy and outcome expectations need to be reasonably high. Self-efficacy is also discussed and it is the belief that one possesses the knowledge and skills to perform a task or meet a demand. There are four main sources from which self-efficacy stems; one’s personal history is trying to execute that particular behavior, observations of similar others who also try to execute that behavior, verbal persuasion from others, and physiological states. Individuals with high self-efficacy expect success and therefore put forth more effort and have higher levels of persistence when performing a task. Low self-efficacy can lead to learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the belief that outcomes in life are completely random and therefore the individual has no control over them. There are three main components associated with learned helplessness; contingency, cognition, and behavior. Contingency is the “objective relationship between a person’s behavior and the environment’s outcomes.” Cognition is all about how the individual perceives environmental contingencies. There are three main elements to cognition and those are biases, attributions, and expectancies. Learned helplessness can lead to motivational deficits, learning deficits, emotional deficits and even depression. The other side of self-efficacy is mastery motivation. Mastery motivation develops when an individual possesses a high level of perceived control over their environment. Self-efficacy and mastery motivation determines hope in a person.

The most surprising thing that I learned was the amount of control people have over their abilities just by how they feel about themselves. It is all one big cycle. Simply by believing in yourself you greatly increase your chances of success. Once you have achieved success you believe in yourself more and take on new challenges. Success in these challenges leads to more confidence and higher belief in self. Once a person is on this track the possibilities increase greatly. On the other hand if someone doesn’t believe in their abilities performance suffers leading to even less confidence and even poorer performance.

An example of personal control beliefs motivating behavior can be seen in school. If a person believes that they will do well in school they may choose to continue after high school. Once they get to college this confidence inspires them to set high goals and work hard to achieve them. Having high self-efficacy could lead a person to study more, which leads to a perceived better understanding of the course content, which may lead to better scores on tests. However if a person doesn’t feel they will do well in school simply because of a random environment and little control over the outcomes, they may not choose to do anything after high school, or may even drop out.

Terms: personal control beliefs, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self-efficacy, personal history, observations of similar others , verbal persuasion, physiological states, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior, biases, attributions, expectancies, mastery motivation, hope

This chapter discusses self-efficacy and how our expectancies influence our behavior. An expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that a event will occur. This can be an outcome or a course of action that allows the outcome to occur. There are two types of expectancy, efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy expectations are described as “Can I do it?” This is the expectation of being able to enact the behaviors. Outcome expectations are described as “Will it work?” This is the expectation that one’s behavior will produce the outcome. One’s perceived control is the relationship between the self, action, and control. The self leads to the action, based on the efficacy expectation. The action then leads to the control, based on the outcome expectation. Efficacy expectations aren’t quite the same thing as self-efficacy, however. Self-efficacy is your judgment of how well – or poorly – you will cope with a situation, given the skills you have and the circumstances you face. It’s important not to just have certain skills, but to be able to transform these skills depending on the situation you are in. An example is when you are driving. You may have the skills to drive well on the interstate in perfect weather. But what’s important is being able to translate these driving skills to bad weather, such as icy roads and a snowstorm. How well you cope with the stressful situation of driving in bad weather is an indication of your self-efficacy. The opposite of self-efficacy is doubt. If you have very low self-efficacy, you will doubt your ability to drive in the snow and ice. There are many sources of self-efficacy. These include: personal behavior history; vicarious experience; verbal persuasion; and physiological activity. Self-efficacy has an effect on behavior. These effects include choice; effort and persistence; thinking and decision making; and emotional reactions. Self-efficacy then influences one’s empowerment. Empowerment involves possessing the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that allow people to exert control over their lives. Self-efficacy beliefs, knowledge, and skills all influence and contribute to empowerment. Mastery beliefs are very important to one’s behavior. Mastery beliefs is the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and perceiving adversive ones. The opposite of mastery is helplessness. Helplessness is when one expects that their life outcomes are uncontrollable. Helplessness is learned, not innate.
The most surprising thing I learned was that helplessness is learned. I had always assumed that helplessness is a quality we are all born with and there is no avoiding it. Upon reading the chapter though I was very surprised that I learned how to feel helpless. In situations where I could have either persisted and felt more in control of the situation, I instead felt that my outcome was too uncontrollable and therefore I felt helplessness. This will definitely cause me to think more in difficult situations and to realize that my beliefs have a huge influence on how well I do and how I feel about the situation. I need to stop feeling like my life is so uncontrollable and recognize the control that is present in my life. This will lead me to not feel as helpless in many situations.
Personal control beliefs serve to motivate behavior because when you feel like you have some degree of control in your life you feel much more motivated to follow through with a behavior than if you feel like you have no control. An example of an encouraged behavior is when I workout. I prefer working out in the morning, preferably around 6:30. While many people think I am crazy for doing this, I have control over my workout environment then. While the rest of the day may be crazy and hectic and unpredictable, when I go for a run first thing in the morning I have complete control over my workout. There is nothing to get in the way of my run. At this time of day I have high self-efficacy because I know I will have a good workout, as I have control over my workout situation. I am able to make my desired outcome more predictable. This is also related to a discouraged behavior. The discouraged behavior is sleeping in late. By waking up early I have control, and I don’t let my sleep patterns fall out of their set schedule. While at the moment my alarm goes off I may be very unhappy, once I get out of bed I am motivated to keep getting ready and go workout. Therefore my personal control beliefs in regards to working out early discourage my sleeping-in.
Terms used: self-efficacy, expectancies, efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, perceived control, self, action, control, doubt, sources, personal behavior history, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, physiological activity, effects, choice, effort and persistence, thinking and decision making, emotional reactions, empowerment, mastery beliefs, helplessness, personal control beliefs

This chapter discusses motivation of self control. This is done in two ways, thinking that you "have what it takes" and how the environment responds to your influences. This is done through two types of expectancies 1)efficacy expectations and 2)outcome expectations.An efficacy expectation is a judgement of ones capacity to execute a particularact or course of action. An outcome expectation is a judgment that a given action that was once performed will cause a particular outcome. self efficacy is when an individual organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with demands and circumstances he or she faces. basically it is your confidence of knowledge on handling given situations. This would also coinside with mastery belief where you feel you have control over the outcomes in your life. you link your actions and outcomes together. The opposite of this would be learned helplessness where you believe that you have no control over things in your life. An example would be if you grew up with little money and resources and you think you will never go to college because of where you come from and your money situation. This theory has three different components, 1. contingency 2. cognition and 3. behavior. contingency is the relationship between a persons behavior and the environments outcomes including controllable and noncontrollable events. cognition is a persons understanding of personal control in environments. this is broken down into 3 categories biaes( illusion of control) attrubutions(explanations of why we think we do or do not have control) and expectancies(subjective personal control beliefs we carry over from past experiences into current experiences. lastly is behavior. This is how well you cope with your experiences. Reactance theory is where we try to control something when we feel it is threatened.

control encourages people when they have some kind of skill which they use in a given situation and feel confident and incontrol of their outcome. This could be a teamwork project at work. the person works well with others and may lead their team to accomplish their goal which results in a positive outcome. This may discourage their goal because they feel like the environment in the situation will control the outcome and that there is nothing they can do. with the same example, they might not be comfortable in the teamwork environment and working with others. they may feel there team does not have what it takes and they wont succeed no matter what so why bother to try.

efficacy expectations, outcome expectations, self efficacy, mastery control, learned helplessness, contingency, cognition, behavior,reactance theory

Chapter 9 focuses on the notion of personal control beliefs, but more specifically the concepts of self-efficacy, learned helplessness, and the reactance theory. Self-efficacy is the belief of one's capabilities and the use of those capabilities in different situations. Self-efficacy develops from past experiences, others capabilities, and current situations/conditions. One's self-efficacy can influences choices of activities, effort, and reactions. Learned helplessness is the notion that we believe something is out of their control. The reactance theory is how we react to those events that elicit learned helplessness or are uncontrollable.

I had never really thought of how mastery of outcomes and coping are related, but found the relationship fairly interesting. It makes sense that if you have more experience with outcomes, you are more capable of handling the experience or a similar experience again. I can direct relate to this idea, as I tend to get anxious with situations where I don't really know what's going on or don't rally have as much control.

Personal control beliefs, like self-efficacy help motivate one's behaviors. The level of self-efficacy you possess can influence whether you believe in your capabilities and can behave in a certain way. A higher self-efficacy can be more motivating to take more action, but a lower self-efficacy can discourage one from acting or behaving in a different way. Learned helplessness would act in a similar way as low self-efficacy, as if you have the perceived notion that you aren't capable of doing something or it is out of your control, then you would be discouraged from or unmotivated to act or behave in a certain way.

When I took research methods my sophomore year, I felt fairly confident in my writing capabilities, so I was more apt to stay motivated to finish my two major writing assignments. The higher self-efficacy kept me persists to staying on track with the writing schedule and I always put full effort while writing. With the paper writing, I had an efficacy expectation that I was capable of finishing the major paper and a outcome expectation that I would be able to finish the major papers on time.

When I took Molecules in Life, I had a lower self-efficacy about my capabilities with the material and was a little more tentative to put full effort with the class. If it wasn't a liberal arts core course, I probably wouldn't have chosen the class and the environment of the science building. If I wasn't driven by grades, I probably would have gone into the class with learned helplessness and could have struggled even more.

Terms: self-efficacy, learned helplessness, reactance theory, mastery, coping, efficacy expectation, outcome expectation

Chapter 9 discussed personal control beliefs. The motivation to exercise personal control comes from expectancy. Expectancy is how likely an event will occur. There are two types of expectancy, efficacy and outcome. Efficacy expectancy is how well you expect that you can do something while outcome expectancy is how well you expect something to work. Both efficacy expectancy and outcome expectancy must be relatively high in order for coping efforts and control to take effect. Self-efficacy is how well or poorly one will cope with a situation given the skills that person has and the circumstances. It is developed through past experiences and memories of similar behaviors. Watching or hearing about others’ (whom you can relate to) experiences (vicarious experiences) are another way to develop self-efficacy. Verbal persuasion or a pep talk can also help motivate a person to attempt certain behaviors. Physiological activity also affects the performer’s ability to cope with demands. Those four sources of self-efficacy influence the performer’s choice (approach vs. avoidance), effort or persistence, thinking and decision making, and emotional reactions. Self-efficacy then serves as a model for personal empowerment. Personal empowerment is the sense of personal power. This comes from knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy. A mastery belief is the extent to which you think you have control over something or an outcome. Learned helplessness is that psychological state that results when an individual feels there is no other options available and has lost hope. The three concepts of learned helplessness are contingency (behavior and environmental outcomes), cognition (biases, attributions, expectations), and behavior (listless, and coping behavior). The effects of helplessness can result in motivational deficits (doesn’t see the point in trying at all), learning deficits (negative attitudes towards learning will prevent further learning), and emotional deficits (depression or apathy). Someone who has an optimistic explanatory style is more likely to have improved performance and higher self-esteem. A pessimistic explanatory style may be more inclined to accept negative outcomes as being normal. This in turn affects academic failure, social distress, and impaired job performance.
The most surprising thing that I learned was the amount of control people have over their abilities just by how they feel about themselves. By believing in your abilities, you are able to greatly improve your chances of success. Achieving these successes will enhance your belief in yourself and lead you to take on new challenges. Achievement in those challenges again raises your belief in yourself and propels you further and further. With that being said, if a person has a negative view in their abilities, they are less likely perform well which leads them into a downward spiral into low self-efficacy and poor performance.
One example of how personal control beliefs serve to encourage behavior is empowerment. This involves having knowledge, skills and beliefs which give people the choice to exert control in their lives. In Waterloo, the Family and Child Council has a program called Women’s Empowerment Group. This group helps to educate women on different life skills to help them better their life. Some of the subjects that the program covers is parenting tips, financial education (like how to raise your credit score and budget your money), and the power of believing in yourself. After completing the program, the women in the group feel more empowered in their abilities to be successful within their life.
An example of how personal control beliefs could discourage behavior would be learned helplessness. During my internship, I sometimes saw people who were obviously suffering from this. They were told daily that they would amount to nothing or that they were monsters. Soon, they internalized this negative belief and gave up trying to be any better.

Terms: personal control beliefs, self efficacy, expectancy, efficacy expectancy, outcome expectancy, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, mastery belief, learned helplessness, coping, motivational deficits, learning deficits, emotional deficits, optimistic explanatory style, pessimistic explanatory style