Self-based goals, underlying reasons, performance and discrete emotions among parkrunners.

Introduction: A temporal sequence of hypothesized relationships was tested between self-based goals and their underlying reasons → stress appraisals → performance and emotions, among UK parkrunners. A conditional process model was also examined to ascertain the potential moderating role of self-determined reasons in explaining the indirect relationship of self-based goals predicting performance and emotions via stress appraisals. Methods: Utilizing a prospective design, 324 parkrunners (Mage = 45.27; SD = 10.73 years) completed online measures of self-based goals, their underlying reasons at 7 days (T1), and stress appraisals at 24 h (T2), prior to their next UK parkrun. Performance data and discrete emotions (pride and shame) were reported 24 h post-parkrun (T3). Results: Structural Equation Modeling revealed partial support for the hypothesized model. More specifically, findings suggested that: (1) T1 self-determined reasons underpinning a self-approach goal positively predicted T2 challenge appraisals and T3 pride, (2) T1 self-determined reasons for pursuing a self-avoidance goal corresponded to reduced T3 performance and shame, (3) T2 challenge and threat appraisals were found to positively relate to T3 pride, and (4) the slower parkrunners ran, the more shame they felt post-event. T2 challenge and threat appraisals were found to mediate the relationship between T1 self-determined reasons underlying a self-approach goal and T3 pride. Further analysis failed to support a conditional process model. Discussion: Our findings suggest the intensity of pursuing a self-based goal does not matter at all, but underlying self-determined reasons are a key driver influencing stress appraisals, performance and subsequent emotions among parkrunners.

Older Individuals Convicted of Sexual Offenses: A Literature Review.

The population of older individuals convicted of sexual offenses (OSOs) is rapidly increasing. However, we have little understanding of their characteristics (e.g., demographic, psychological, individual, offense, and risk) and needs. To identify any similarities or differences that are unique to older individuals convicted of sexual offending, it is important to compare such characteristics across the adult lifespan. Therefore, the aim of this systematic review was to specify and synthesize the current knowledge of characteristics across the adult lifespan of the population of individuals convicted of sexual offenses. Five databases were searched and 10,680 results were screened, resulting in 100 studies included in the final review. The findings were grouped into four emergent themes: age of onset and prevalence; offender and offense characteristics; age and the risk of reoffending; and treatment. Implications of the findings from this review are discussed in relation to future research and clinical practice.

Development and validation of the e-Work Self-Efficacy Scale to assess digital competencies in remote working.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of remote working practices worldwide. This has focussed attention on the need to identify the competencies employers and employees should train and develop to build digital resilience, enabling the benefits of remote working to be realised while mitigating potential risks. This contribution presents a multifaceted e-Work Self-Efficacy Scale, which supports a recently developed Digital Resilience Competency Framework (DRCF), assessing e-skills, trust building, self-care, remote social skills, and remote emotional self-efficacy beliefs. Data from 670 non-managerial employees (54.0% males) from a telecommunications company based in the Czech Republic were analysed, providing support for a bi-factor model. Latent Profile Analysis identified three clusters, characterised by different profiles: the Well-adjusted (with a reasonably good balance in engagement, satisfaction, and productivity), the Unhealthily dedicated (suffering some difficulties in setting boundaries), and the Distrustful self-shielding (the most compromised) remote workers. The results reinforce the importance of focusing on digital resilience competencies to promote sustainable, productive, engaging and healthy remote working. The e-Work Self-Efficacy Scale is a practical and effective organisational tool for managers and employees to use to assess and build digital resilience and sits alongside the Digital Resilience Competency Framework.

Measuring Prosocial Behaviors: Psychometric Properties and Cross-National Validation of the Prosociality Scale in Five Countries.

This research investigated the psychometric properties of the Prosociality Scale and its cross-cultural validation and generalizability across five different western and non-western countries (China, Chile, Italy, Spain, and the United States). The scale was designed to measure individual differences in a global tendency to behave in prosocial ways during late adolescence and adulthood. Study 1 was designed to identify the best factorial structure of the Prosociality Scale and Study 2 tested the model's equivalence across five countries (N = 1,630 young adults coming from China, Chile, Italy, Spain and the United States; general M age = 21.34; SD = 3.34). Findings supported a bifactor model in which prosocial responding was characterized by a general latent factor (i.e., prosociality) and two other specific factors (prosocial actions and prosocial feelings). New evidence of construct validity of the Prosociality Scale was provided.

The Prevalence and Typologies of Controlling Behaviors in a General Population Sample.

The aim of this study was to examine the prevalence and typologies of controlling behaviors within a general population sample. Participants (N = 427) completed the Revised Controlling Behaviors Scale and the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale. Prevalence of perpetration and victimization of controlling behaviors was relatively high, although the frequency and severity of the behaviors was mainly low level. Five clusters were established based on the use of five types of controlling behaviors: economic, threatening, intimidating, emotional, and isolating. Significant differences were found between the perpetration clusters and (a) minor physical assault, (b) severe physical assault, (c) minor psychological aggression, and (d) severe psychological aggression. Furthermore, significant differences were found between the victimization clusters and (a) physical assault, (b) minor psychological aggression, and (c) severe psychological aggression. It is clear that controlling behaviors are a feature within general population relationships, and further research is required to understand when such behaviors become problematic, and what needs to be done to prevent this from happening.

Mapping community, social, and economic risks to investigate the association with school violence and bullying in Italy.

BACKGROUND: School violence and bullying are a pandemic issue. The academic literature underlined the need to investigate social-contextual risk factors. The United Nations called for more comprehensive and disaggregated data to inform prevention strategies. OBJECTIVE: The present study comprises a set of secondary analyses on Italian data from the International Civic and Citizenship Study 2016. We adopted an innovative 'bottom-up' approach to identify the level of disaggregation for national data. The researchers focused on community, social, and economic risk indicators at school-level, and investigated whether it was possible to aggregate schools in different classes, depending on their risk profile. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTINGS: Analyses were implemented on a nationally representative sample of 170 Principals of lower secondary schools, 2,527 teachers and 3,766 students at grade 8. METHODS AND ANALYSES: A Latent Class Analyses was conducted on risk indicators and four classes of risk were identified: No Risk, Community Risk, Socio-economic Risk, Multi-Risk (entropy = .786). No significant differences were found across classes in relation to urban/rural location, school size, and geographical macro-partition. On the contrary, significant differences emerged when considering teachers' perception of bullying, social problem, and students' behavior at school. Furthermore significant differences were found for the quality of relationship with teachers as reported by students. CONCLUSIONS: Results a) suggested a potential gradient of increasing risk moving across the classes; b) provided a contribution to address the gap in the investigation of contextual factors and bullying; c) offered a new lens to tailor interventions to prevent school violence and bullying.

'First, Do No Harm': The Role of Negative Emotions and Moral Disengagement in Understanding the Relationship Between Workplace Aggression and Misbehavior.

Workplace aggression is a critical phenomenon particularly in the healthcare sector, where nurses are especially at risk of bullying and third-party aggression. While workplace aggression has been frequently examined in relation to health problems, less is known about the possible negative impact such aggression may have on the (un)ethical behavior of victims. Our research aims to fill this gap. Drawing on literature on counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and the social-cognitive literature on aggression we investigated in two independent studies (NStudy1 = 439; NStudy2 = 416), the role of negative emotions - in particular anger, fear, and sadness, - and of moral disengagement (MD) in the paths between workplace aggression, CWB and health symptoms. The focus on these relationships is rooted in two reasons. First, misbehavior at work is a pervasive phenomenon worldwide and second, little research has been conducted in the healthcare sector on this type of behavior despite the potential importance of the issue in this context. We empirically tested our hypotheses considering a specific form of workplace aggression in each study: workplace bullying or third-party aggression. Results from the two empirical studies confirm the hypotheses that being target of workplace aggression (bullying or third-party aggression) is not only associated with health symptoms but also with misbehavior. In addition, the results of structural equation modeling attest the importance of examining specific discrete negative emotions and MD for better understanding misbehavior at work. In particular, this research shows for the first time that anger, fear, and sadness, generally aggregated into a single dimension, are indeed differently associated with MD, misbehavior and health symptoms. Specifically, in line with the literature on discrete emotions, while sadness is only associated with health symptoms, anger and fear are related to both health and misbehavior.

Machiavellian Ways to Academic Cheating: A Mediational and Interactional Model.

Academic cheating has become a pervasive practice from primary schools to university. This study aims at investigating this phenomenon through a nomological network which integrates different theoretical frameworks and models, such as trait and social-cognitive theories and models regarding the approaches to learning and contextual/normative environment. Results on a sample of more than 200 Italian university students show that the Amoral Manipulation facet of Machiavellianism, Academic Moral Disengagement, Deep Approach to Learning, and Normative Academic Cheating are significantly associated with Individual Academic Cheating. Moreover, results show a significant latent interaction effect between Normative Academic Cheating and Amoral Manipulation Machiavellianism: "amoral Machiavellians" students are more prone to resort to Academic Cheating in contexts where Academic Cheating is adopted as a practice by their peers, while this effect is not significant in contexts where Academic Cheating is not normative. Results also show that Academic Moral Disengagement and Deep Approach to learning partially mediate the relationship between Amoral Manipulation and Academic Cheating. Practical implications of these results are discussed.

Relating Therapist Characteristics to Client Engagement and the Therapeutic Alliance in an Adolescent Custodial Group Substance Misuse Treatment Program.

BACKGROUND: Client engagement in substance misuse treatment programs is directly associated with positive treatment outcomes. The nature of these programs means there are often difficulties engaging and retaining clients, but authors have consistently found a strong therapeutic alliance is associated with client engagement. While research has focused on the association between the alliance and engagement, the factors that influence the therapeutic alliance have received less attention. OBJECTIVE: To examine therapists' characteristics, namely therapists' stress and empathy levels, as potential predictors of client engagement and the therapeutic alliance, within an adolescent substance misuse group treatment program. METHOD: The sample included 84 adolescent clients and 14 therapists from a Secure Training Centre in England. Client engagement in the treatment program was observed, while self-reporting measures assessed the therapeutic alliance (client and therapist-rated), and therapists' stress and empathy levels. RESULTS: Multiple regression analysis revealed that therapists' stress levels negatively influenced the therapeutic alliance and had a curvilinear relationship with client engagement, indicating that stress is not exclusively negatively related to engagement. Although stress was found to negatively impact both cognitive and affective empathy, neither cognitive nor affective empathy were significantly related to client engagement or the therapeutic alliance. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates the importance of therapist characteristics on client engagement and the therapeutic alliance. Within practice stress can have a positive impact on clients' engagement. Nevertheless, therapists may need additional support to deal with stress effectively. Therapists' empathy may too be fundamental to client engagement, but only it if is perceived by clients.

Nurse moral disengagement.

BACKGROUND: Ethics is a founding component of the nursing profession; however, nurses sometimes find it difficult to constantly adhere to the required ethical standards. There is limited knowledge about the factors that cause a committed nurse to violate standards; moral disengagement, originally developed by Bandura, is an essential variable to consider. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES: This study aimed at developing and validating a nursing moral disengagement scale and investigated how moral disengagement is associated with counterproductive and citizenship behaviour at work. RESEARCH DESIGN: The research comprised a qualitative study and a quantitative study, combining a cross-validation approach and a structural equation model. PARTICIPANTS AND RESEARCH CONTEXT: A total of 60 Italian nurses (63% female) involved in clinical work and enrolled as students in a postgraduate master's programme took part in the qualitative study. In 2012, the researchers recruited 434 nurses (76% female) from different Italian hospitals using a convenience sampling method to take part in the quantitative study. ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS: All the organisations involved and the university gave ethical approval; all respondents participated on a voluntary basis and did not receive any form of compensation. FINDINGS: The nursing moral disengagement scale comprised a total of 22 items. Results attested the mono-dimensionality of the scale and its good psychometric properties. In addition, results highlighted a significant association between moral disengagement and both counterproductive and citizenship behaviours. DISCUSSION: Results showed that nurses sometimes resort to moral disengagement in their daily practice, bypassing moral and ethical codes that would normally prevent them from enacting behaviours that violate their norms and protocols. CONCLUSION: The nursing moral disengagement scale can complement personnel monitoring and assessment procedures already in place and provide additional information to nursing management for designing interventions aimed at increasing compliance with ethical codes by improving the quality of the nurses' work environment.

"Yes, I Can": the protective role of personal self-efficacy in hindering counterproductive work behavior under stressful conditions.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Within the stressor-emotion model, counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is considered a possible result of stress. It is well-known that self-efficacy mitigates the detrimental effects of stress and the stressor-strain relation. We aim to extend the stressor-emotion model of CWB by examining the additive and moderating role of work and regulatory emotional self-efficacy dimensions. DESIGN AND METHODS: A structural equation model and a set of hierarchical regressions were conducted on a convenience sample of 1147 Italian workers. RESULTS: Individuals who believed in their capabilities to manage work activities had a lower propensity to act counterproductively. Workers who believed in their capabilities to cope with negative feelings had a lower propensity to react with negative emotions under stressful conditions. Finally, results showed that self-efficacy moderates at least some of the relationships between stressors and negative emotions, and also between stressors and CWB, but did not moderate the relationship between negative emotions and these types of conduct. CONCLUSIONS: Self-efficacy beliefs proved to be a protective factor that can reduce the impact of stressful working conditions.

Assessing Perceived Empathic and Social Self-Efficacy Across Countries.

The Perceived Empathic Self-Efficacy Scale (PESE) and the Perceived Social Self-Efficacy Scale (PSSE) were developed to assess, respectively, individuals' self-efficacy beliefs regarding both empathic responding to others' needs or feelings and managing interpersonal relationships. In this study of young adults, a unidimensional factorial structure of both scales was found in Italy, the United States, and Bolivia. Complete invariance at the metric level and partial invariance at the scalar level were found across gender and countries for both scales. The construct and incremental validity of both PESE and PSSE were further examined in a different sample of Italian young adults. Patterns of association of the PESE or PSSE with self-esteem, psychological well-being, and the use of adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies were found, often over and beyond their associations with empathy or extraversion, respectively.

Stability and change of moral disengagement and its impact on aggression and violence in late adolescence.

Stability and change of moral disengagement were examined in a sample of 366 adolescents from ages 14 to 20 years. Four developmental trajectories were identified: (a) nondisengaged group that started with initially low levels followed by an important decline, (b) normative group that started with initially moderate levels followed by a decline, (c) later desister group that started with initially high-medium levels followed by an increase from 14 to 16 years and an even steeper decline from 16 to 20 years, and (d) chronic group that started with and maintained medium-high levels. The results attest that adolescents who maintained higher levels of moral disengagement were more likely to show frequent aggressive and violent acts in late adolescence.

Assessing regulatory emotional self-efficacy in three countries.

The Regulatory Emotional Self-Efficacy (RESE) scale was developed to assess perceived self-efficacy in managing negative (NEG) and in expressing positive (POS) affect (G. V. Caprara & M. Gerbino, 2001). In this study of young adults, the factorial structure of the RESE scale was found to be similar in Italy, the United States, and Bolivia. In addition to a factor for POS, NEG was represented by a second-order factor of 2 different negative affects: despondency-distress (DES) and anger-irritation (ANG). Overall, there was partial invariance at both metric and scalar levels across gender and countries. Discriminant and convergent validity of the RESE scale was further examined in the Italian sample. Stronger patterns of association of POS with prosocial behavior, of ANG with low aggressive behavior problems and irritability, and of DES with low anxiety/depressive problems and shyness and high self-esteem were found.