Recent work suggests that the links between religious belief and behavior with a variety of positive outcomes (e.g., longer life, more marital satisfaction, scholastic achievement, better health behaviors) may be partially explained by religious belief systems' ability to foster self-control and self-regulation. The current investigation sought to explore this hypothesis by determining if induction of religious cognition (through a supraliminal religious prime) could increase behavioral self-control, operationalized as performance on a maintained grip task. Using 118 participants, the author tested whether nonconscious exposure to religious content would increase the amount of time that participants were willing to physically persist at two rounds of the maintained grip task as compared to a control group. A within-subjects trial-by-prime interaction was found (the prime appeared to cause participants to persist at the task for less time during the first trial, but not the second) and a between-subjects sex-by-prime interaction was found (on average, men given the religious prime held their grip for less time than did men in the control group, whereas no differences were found between women). Findings are discussed in terms of the link between religion and self-control and future directions are suggested.

For the past twenty years, environmental organizations have been the main force in Taiwan¡¦s environmental movement. Meanwhile, the institutionalization of environmental organizations had placed them in a dilemma of organizational sustaining and mission pursuing. To continue its influence on public policy and environmental awareness, environmental organizations need to perform harder and better. In recent years, the government has cast environmental organizations in more roles, as well as allowed them to play a more important role in policy consulting. Many environmental organizations have thus become intermediate social institutions and should be held accountable. Moreover, since all environmental organizations have ecology as its stakeholder and many organizations are advocacy-orientated, their process performance needs to be evaluated in the accountability procedure. From a self-regulation perspective, environmental organizations should also develop behavioral norms for self-governance to earn social recognition and trust. In practice, however, laws concerning the accountability of environmental organizations or other NPOs are not well formulated. The intent of this study is mainly to develop an accountability framework workable for self-assessment in environmental organizations. Taking a broad perspective, accountability is here defined as ¡§accounts for the results and process of organizational activities are provided, by which nonprofit organizations are responsive to expectations generated within and outside the organization so as to gain legitimacy in society.¡¨ Synthesizing large literature on theoretical, practical accountability and role expectancy on environmental organizations, the framework, based on institutional theory, was constructed to evaluate accountability in ¡§regulative¡¨, ¡§normative¡¨, ¡§cognitive¡¨ and ¡§organizational characteristics¡¨ dimensions, totally consisting of 92 items. Survey data from the leaders of environmental organizations were collected to examine the evaluative framework¡¦s feasibility by their assessing each item¡¦s reasonability, acceptability, practicability, and importance. As a result, 45 priority items out of 92 were selected, which identify the evaluative contents for an ¡§accountable¡¨ environmental organization, and can be taken as a useful checklist in future to scrutinize organizations¡¦ accountability and performance. Moreover, additional results from in-depth interviewing environmental organizations¡¦ leaders showed that they generally regard regulative accountability as acceptable, normative accountability as reasonable but difficult to achieve, and cognitive accountability as important in delineate organizations¡¦ mission and identity as well as adapting themselves to the society. Among the major findings of this studyare that environmental organizations accept their social responsibility and acknowledge the benefit of performance evaluation, but organizations and the society know little about the concept of accountability. These organizations also believed that the present social institutions and organizational conditions are unhelpful or even harmful for them to take accountability actions. These reasons incline environmental organizations to agree to more external regulation than self-regulation. In the meantime, the above situations mostly hinder launching accountability and performance evaluation in organizations. To drive self-regulation in environmental organizations, institutional building is suggested; that is to couple organizations¡¦ performance evaluation and advancement with self-assessment by expanding knowledge on accountability among the society and making institutional incentives available.

People with high (HSEs) and low self-esteem (LSEs) often react differently to interpersonal risk. When concerns about their relationship are salient, HSEs seek connection with their partners to quell feelings of vulnerability whereas LSEs distance themselves from their partners to minimize the impact of potential rejection. In the present research, I investigate the extent to which these regulatory dynamics reflect executive-based processes that govern broader regulatory responses. In Studies 1 and 2, HSEs exhibited stronger approach goals (i.e., a greater tendency to pursue rewards and ignore risks) in non-social domains when faced with interpersonal risk whereas LSEs inhibited approach goals and made more conservative decisions. In Studies 3 and 4, I demonstrated that HSEs’ and LSEs’ divergent regulatory responses to risk were contingent on executive control. When participants were cognitively busy, HSEs were less likely to bolster relationship evaluations in the face of interpersonal risk whereas LSEs were more likely to do so. Finally, Study 5 demonstrated that these global regulatory strategies govern HSEs’ and LSEs’ responses to non-interpersonal risk as well. HSEs were more willing to engage in risky social comparison following failure than they were when they received neutral feedback about their performance, whereas LSEs were less willing to compare themselves with others after failure. These effects did not emerge when cognitive resources were depleted. Taken together, the results suggest that HSEs’ and LSEs’ self-regulatory responses to risk are broader and more controlled than previously theorized.

Individuals who are members of stigmatized groups, such as lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, have cognitive deficits in situations that are threatening or hostile to the group in question. Stereotype threat and stigma threat research suggests these cognitive deficits occur in people who identify with stigmatized groups as a result of anxiety. Yet regulating impulses may also create cognitive deficits because it is effortful and diminishes the ability to perform cognitive tasks. This study investigates whether the regulation of undesired sexual impulses causes cognitive deficits in threatening situations even in people who do not identify with a stigmatized group. An implicit measure of sexual attraction to the same gender was administered to participants who self-identified as heterosexual (n = 317). Sexual impulses were primed by asking participants to write about an attractive person of the same or opposite sex or a neutral object. An interaction was found between implicit same sex attraction and the salience of same sex attraction in predicting self-control performance. Participants with a higher level of implicit same sex attraction performed worse on a self-control task after writing about the attractiveness of a same sex person. People with implicit same sex attraction who identify as heterosexual may have more difficulty with tasks requiring self-control or regulatory abilities as well as worse performance outcomes in work and school settings.

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Today, many privacy abuses can be traced to the lack of organization policies governing the conduct of the personnel who are in charge of managing the information systems. IT professionals, who are the most important gatekeepers to the information privacy practices, have the oversight responsibility for information privacy since they have the most extensive knowledge of their organization¡¦s systems and data. In this research, we have studied the impact of managerial policies concerning ethical codes and rewards/penalty perception on IS professionals¡¦ self-regulation capacity against privacy abuses. Specificially, based upon the Moment-of-Truth model and paradigm of self-regulation, we investigated how IS professionals¡¦ ethical judgment, subjective norm, privacy self-efficacy and intention may reciprocally interact with their business environment that was characterized by its use of ethical codes and the rewards/penalty system. We first proposed an ethical dicision model based on the paradigm of self-regulation and validated the appropriateness of this model for studying information privacy. We then demonstrated how the perception of the rewards/penalty may impact the ethical judgment, subjective norm, privacy self-efficay, and ethical intention. We discovered that the rewards/penalty perception had a moderating effect on the relationship between ethical judgment and intention, and that the ethical codes had the moderating effect on the relationship between privacy self-efficacy and intention.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of self-regulation on the acquisition of academic vocabulary of ELLs with learning difficulties. Participants were four third-grade Spanish-speaking ELLs who performed below grade level on a vocabulary test in English and scored below 25% accuracy on a science vocabulary measure. This study employed a multiple probe design across subjects and it consisted of four phases: (a) baseline, (b) self-regulation training, (c) self-regulation, and (d) maintenance. During baseline, participants were provided direct vocabulary instruction. During training, self-regulation with prompts was added to the direct instruction and, during intervention, prompts were removed. The intervention continued until the maintenance phase. Each lesson included instruction of six target words followed by daily tests of those six words. Each session lasted 30-35 minutes, divided into 26-30 minutes for the lesson, followed by 4-5 minutes for testing. This study was conducted over 15 weeks; all lessons were implemented using a script. To document students’ progress on the acquisition of science vocabulary, two daily vocabulary tests were administered during every session. One was a receptive word-knowledge test to measure how many words students understood. The other was an expressive word-knowledge test to measure how well the students understood the words. Furthermore, student interviews were conducted after completion of the study. Results revealed that self-regulation in conjunction with direct instruction was more effective than direct instruction alone not only on receptive word knowledge, but also on expressive word knowledge. Also, students showed a long-term effect in the acquisition of the both types word knowledge. Students had a positive perception of self-regulation, although they preferred different sub-strategies (self-goal setting, self-monitoring, and self-recording). These findings suggest that ELLs with learning difficulties need an intensive intervention beyond direct instruction alone and self-regulation is a critical strategy in formulating such an intensive intervention. / text

College-aged individuals experience verbal and physical dating aggression at high rates, which is troubling given the associated deleterious consequences. Verbal and physical aggression are highly correlated, with verbal aggression often serving as a precursor to physical aggression. The current studies examined factors that may influence the likelihood and escalation of dating aggression in response to a dating conflict scenario, including alcohol intoxication, self-regulation, and trait aggressivity. Study 1 assessed the construct validity of a newly developed audio-taped scenario of mutual aggression as well as a hot sauce task. Men and women with (n=31) and without (n=30) a history of past-year dating aggression provided responses to the conflict scenario using the Articulated Thoughts in Simulated Situations (ATSS) procedure. Under the guise of an assessment of sensitivity, participants allocated hot sauce for a fictitious participant to consume. Results supported the construct validity of the conflict scenario but not the hot sauce task, which was therefore not included in Study 2. Study 2 examined the influence of alcohol's pharmacological and expectancy effects as well as one’s ability to self-regulate thoughts, feelings, and behavior on aggression intentions in response to the mutual aggression conflict scenario. Participants were randomized to either receive alcohol (n=48; blood alcohol content M = .082%), placebo (n=48), or no alcohol (n=48). Using ATSS procedures identical to Study 1, intoxicated individuals articulated more verbal aggression intentions overall and exhibited a greater increase across the conflict scenario than those who did not receive alcohol, but did not differ from those who received placebo. There were no effects of alcohol on physical aggression intentions. Individuals who received placebo and who were poorer at suppressing emotions articulated more verbal aggression intentions than intoxicated individuals. Additionally, individuals higher in trait aggressivity articulated more physical aggression intentions and intoxicated individuals with lower relationship satisfaction articulated more verbal aggression intentions. Results suggest that both the pharmacological and expectancy effects of alcohol were important to the occurrence of aggression. Whereas higher trait aggressivity and lower relationship satisfaction may be risk  factors  for  aggression,  regulating  one’s  emotions  may  reduce  the frequency of aggression. / text

A great expansion is underway in the Saudi higher education system as it moves from an elite to a mass form of higher education. The number of universities, for example, has jumped from eight universities in 2000 to more than 24 in 2011. Given the scale of investment called for, questions are being increasingly asked about the effectiveness of the higher education system. As a contribution to those processes of greater scrutiny, the present study explores the perceptions of Saudi students of learning and teaching in translation studies. The broad aim of the study is to throw some light on how students learn and regulate their learning in translation studies, and how they are influenced by the course design. While the strongest emphasis of this study was on students’ self-regulation of their learning, this is presented as one aspect of their approaches to learning, and in order to illuminate these self-regulated approaches to learning, students’ perceptions of the teaching and learning environments (TLEs), and their orientations to learning were examined as well. Three contrasting undergraduate courses were examined using a mixed method approach combining Likert-style questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. A total of 352 students were surveyed using an adapted version of Vermunt’s Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS). This was complemented by interviews with 34 students. Six case studies were drawn out from the interview data for indepth analysis of students’ experience of studying in this particular context. In order to capture the richness and distinctiveness of the learning in translation studies, it was necessary to distinguish two contrasting approaches; one of them is a deep self-regulated approach, and the other is a surface unregulated approach to studying. Each of these approaches is contextualised within the learning in translation studies. There were some important environmental influences on these approaches including: course characteristics, classroom teaching, and feedback and assessment. In addition to this, four types of orientations were discerned among those group of students; academic, personal, vocational, and social. All of these types have intrinsic and extrinsic forms except the personal and the social which had intrinsic forms only. The study concludes with conceptual, methodological, and practical implications drawn from the findings. Perhaps the most important implication is the need to improve students’ skills in self-regulation over the course of their studies. This research provides insights into the experience of learning of this group of students, at the same time it emphasises the need for more studies on this under-researched group of students.

Recent research has demonstrated that over time, consecutive high performance goals can increase unethical behavior by depleting one's self-regulatory resources (Welsh & Ordóñez, 2014). In this study, I extend the mediated model connecting goals, depletion, and unethical behavior. First, I propose that the depleting effects associated with a single goal can increase depletion and facilitate unethicality both in pursuit of the goal and also in unrelated areas. Second, I draw from the goal-setting literature to hypothesize that high levels of goal commitment will moderate the relationship between high performance goals and depletion by strengthening this effect. Third, I integrate research related to information processing to hypothesize that because automatic processing influences behavior more when participants are depleted, subconscious ethical priming will moderate the relationship between depletion and unethical behavior by attenuating this effect. A laboratory study is presented to test the expanded model combining mediation and moderation, adding to our understanding of the factors that influence the strength of the relationship connecting high performance goals and unethical behavior. Results generally did not support the developed model and a number of potential limitations and directions for future research are discussed.