A Quantitative Meta-Analysis and Qualitative Meta-Synthesis of Aged Care Residents' Experiences of Autonomy, Being Controlled, and Optimal Functioning.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The poor mental health of adults living in aged care needs addressing. Improvements to nutrition and exercise are important, but mental health requires a psychological approach. Self-determination theory finds that autonomy is essential to wellbeing while experiences of being controlled undermine it. A review of existing quantitative data could underscore the importance of autonomy in aged care, and a review of the qualitative literature could inform ways to promote autonomy and avoid control. Testing these possibilities was the objective of this research. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We conducted a mixed-methods systematic review of studies investigating autonomy, control, and indices of optimal functioning in aged care settings. The search identified 30 eligible reports (19 quantitative, 11 qualitative), including 141 quantitative effect sizes, 84 qualitative data items, and N = 2,668. Quantitative effects were pooled using three-level meta-analytic structural equation models, and the qualitative data were meta-synthesized using a grounded theory approach. RESULTS: As predicted, the meta-analysis showed a positive effect of aged care residents' autonomy and their wellness, r = 0.33 [95% CI: 0.27, 0.39], and a negative effect of control, r = -0.16 [95% CI: -0.27, -0.06]. The meta-synthesis revealed seven primary and three sub-themes describing the nuanced ways autonomy, control, and help seeking are manifest in residential aged care settings. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: The results suggest that autonomy should be supported, and unnecessary external control should be minimized in residential aged care, and we discuss ways the sector could strive for both aims.

The Dimensionality of Reading Self-Concept: Examining Its Stability Using Local Structural Equation Models.

For results from large-scale surveys to inform policy and practice appropriately, all participants must interpret and respond to items similarly. While organizers of surveys assessing student outcomes often ensure this for achievement measures, doing so for psychological questionnaires is also critical. We demonstrate this by examining the dimensionality of reading self-concept-a crucial psychological construct for several outcomes-across reading achievement levels. We use Programme for International Student Assessment 2018 data (N = 529,966) and local structural equation models (LSEMs) to do so. Results reveal that reading self-concept dimensions (assessed through reading competence and difficulty) vary across reading achievement levels. Students with low reading achievement show differentiated responses to the two item sets (high competence-high difficulty). In contrast, students with high reading achievement have reconciled responses (high competence-low difficulty). Our results highlight the value of LSEMs in examining factor structure generalizability of constructs in large-scale surveys and call for greater cognitive testing during item development.

The roles of social-emotional skills in students' academic and life success: A multi-informant and multicohort perspective.

Social-emotional skills have been shown to be beneficial for many important life outcomes for students. However, previous studies on the topic have suffered from many issues (e.g., consideration of only a small subset of skills, single-informant, and single-cohort design). To address these limitations, this study used a multi-informant (self, teacher, and parent) and multicohort (ages 10-15 from Finland, N = 5,533) perspective to study the association between 15 social-emotional skills and 20 educational (e.g., school grades), social (e.g., relationships with teachers), psychological health (e.g., life satisfaction), and physical health outcomes (e.g., sleep trouble). Results showed that (a) there was a modest level of interrater agreement on social-emotional skills, with the highest agreement between students and parents (mean r = .41); (b) inclusion of multi-informant ratings substantially enhanced the ability of social-emotional skills in predicting outcome variables, with parent- and self-rated skills playing important, unique roles; (c) by modeling skills at the facet level rather than at the domain level, we identified the key skills for different outcomes and found significant variation in facets' predictive utility even within the same domain; and (d) although the older cohort showed lower levels of most social-emotional skills (9/15), there were only minor changes in the interrater agreement and predictive utility on outcomes. Overall, self-control, trust, optimism, and energy were found among the four most important skills for academic and life success. We further identified the unique contribution of each skill for specific outcomes, pointing the way to effective and precise interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

School principals' mental health and well-being under threat: A longitudinal analysis of workplace demands, resources, burnout, and well-being.

Schools are critical organisational settings, and school principals face extreme stress levels. However, there are few large-scale, longitudinal studies of demands and resources that drive principals' health and well-being. Using the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework, we evaluated longitudinal reciprocal effects over 3 years relating to job demands, job resources (resilience), job-related outcomes (burnout and job satisfaction), and personal outcomes (happiness and physical health) for a nationally representative sample of 3683 Australian school principals. Prior demands and resources led to small changes in subsequent outcomes, beneficial effects of resources, and adverse effects of demands, particularly for job-related outcomes. Furthermore, we also found reverse-reciprocal effects, prior outcomes (burnout and job satisfaction) influencing subsequent job characteristics. However, in response to substantively and theoretically important research questions, we found no support for Yerkes-Dodson Law (nonlinear effects of demands) or Nietzsche effects and inoculation effects (that which does not kill you, makes you stronger; manageable levels of demands build resilience). Relating our study to new and evolving issues in JD-R research, we offer limitations of our research-and JD-R theory and research more generally-and directions for further research in this essentially unstudied application of JD-R to school principals' mental health and well-being.

Overcoming Limitations in Peer-Victimization Research That Impede Successful Intervention: Challenges and New Directions.

Peer victimization at school is a worldwide problem with profound implications for victims, bullies, and whole-school communities. Yet the 50-year quest to solve the problem has produced mostly disappointing results. A critical examination of current research reveals both pivotal limitations and potential solutions. Solutions include introducing psychometrically sound measures to assess the parallel components of bullying and victimization, analyzing cross-national data sets, and embracing a social-ecological perspective emphasizing the motivation of bullies, importance of bystanders, pro-defending and antibullying attitudes, classroom climate, and a multilevel perspective. These solutions have been integrated into a series of recent interventions. Teachers can be professionally trained to create a highly supportive climate that allows student-bystanders to overcome their otherwise normative tendency to reinforce bullies. Once established, this intervention-enabled classroom climate impedes bully-victim episodes. The take-home message is to work with teachers on how to develop an interpersonally supportive classroom climate at the beginning of the school year to catalyze student-bystanders' volitional internalization of pro-defending and antibullying attitudes and social norms. Recommendations for future research include studying bullying and victimization simultaneously, testing multilevel models, targeting classroom climate and bystander roles as critical intervention outcomes, and integrating school-wide and individual student interventions only after improving social norms and the school climate.

Mastery-approach goals: A large-scale cross-cultural analysis of antecedents and consequences.

Mastery-approach (MAP) goals, focusing on developing competence and acquiring task mastery, are posited to be the most optimal, beneficial type of achievement goal for academic and life outcomes. Although there is meta-analytic evidence supporting this finding, such evidence does not allow us to conclude that the extant MAP goal findings generalize across cultures. Meta-analyses have often suffered from overrepresentation of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples; reliance on bivariate correlations; and lack the ability to directly control individual-level background variables. To address these limitations, this study used nationally representative data from 77 countries/regions (N = 595,444 adolescents) to examine the relations of MAP goals to four antecedents (workmastery, competitiveness, fear of failure, fixed mindset) and 16 consequences (task-specific motivational, achievement-related, and well-being outcomes), and tested the cross-cultural generalizability of these relations. Results showed that MAP goals were: (a) grounded primarily in positive but not negative achievement motives/beliefs; (b) most strongly predictive of well-being outcomes, followed by adaptive motivation; (c) positively but consistently weakly associated with achievement-related outcomes, particularly for academic performance (ß = .069); (d) negatively and weakly associated with maladaptive outcomes; and (e) uniquely predictive of various consequences, controlling for the antecedents and covariates. Further, the MAP goal predictions were generalizable across countries/regions for 13 of 16 consequences. While directions of effect sizes were slightly mixed for academic performance, perceived reading, and PISA test difficulty, the effect sizes were consistently small for most countries/regions. This generalizability points to quite strong cross-cultural support for the observed patterns. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Development of the Shift Smartphone App to Support the Emotional Well-Being of Junior Physicians: Design of a Prototype and Results of Usability and Acceptability Testing.

BACKGROUND: Junior physicians report higher levels of psychological distress than senior doctors and report several barriers to seeking professional mental health support, including concerns about confidentiality and career progression. Mobile health (mHealth) apps may be utilized to help overcome these barriers to assist the emotional well-being of this population and encourage help-seeking. OBJECTIVE: This study describes the development and pilot trial of the Shift mHealth app to provide an unobtrusive avenue for junior physicians to seek information about, and help for, well-being and mental health concerns, which is sensitive to workplace settings. METHODS: A 4-phase iterative development process was undertaken to create the content and features of Shift involving junior physicians using the principles of user-centered design. These 4 phases were-needs assessment, on the basis of interviews with 12 junior physicians; prototype development with user experience feedback from 2 junior physicians; evaluation, consisting of a pilot trial with 22 junior physicians to assess the usability and acceptability of the initial prototype; and redesign, including user experience workshops with 51 junior physicians. RESULTS: Qualitative results informed the content and design of Shift to ensure that the app was tailored to junior physicians' needs. The Shift app prototype contained cognitive behavioral, mindfulness, value-based actions, and psychoeducational modules, as well as a tracking function that visualized patterns of daily variations in mood and health behaviors. Pilot-testing revealed possible issues with the organization of the app content, which were addressed through a thorough restructuring and redesign of Shift with the help of junior physicians across 3 user experience workshops. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates the importance of ongoing end user involvement in the creation of a specialized mHealth app for a unique working population experiencing profession-specific stressors and barriers to help-seeking. The development and pilot trial of this novel Shift mHealth app are the first steps in addressing the mental health and support-seeking needs of junior physicians, although further research is required to validate its effectiveness and appropriateness on a larger scale.

Illusory gender-equality paradox, math self-concept, and frame-of-reference effects: New integrative explanations for multiple paradoxes.

Gender-equality paradoxes (GEPs) posit that gender gaps in math self-concepts (MSCs) are larger-not smaller-in countries with greater gender equality. These paradoxical results suggest that efforts to improve gender equality might be counterproductive. However, we show that this currently popular explanation of gender differences is an illusory, epi-phenomenon (485,490 students, 18,292 schools, 68 countries/regions). Between-country (absolute) measures of gender equality are confounded with achievement and socioeconomic-status; tiny GEPs disappear when controlling achievement and socioeconomic-status. Critically, even without controls GEPs are not supported when using true gender-gap measures-within-country (relative) female-male differences, that hold many confounds constant. This absolute/relative-gap distinction is more important than the composite/domain-specific distinction for understanding why even tiny GEPs are illusory. Recent developments in academic self-concept theory are relevant to GEPs and gender differences, but also explain other, related paradoxes. The big-fish little pond effect posits that attending schools with high school-average math achievements leads to lower MSCs. Extending this theoretical model to the country-level, we show that countries with high country-average math achievements also have lower MSCs. Dimensional comparison theory predicts that MSCs are positively predicted by math achievements but negatively predicted by verbal achievements. Extending this theoretical model, we show that girls' low MSCs are due more to girls' high verbal achievements that detract from their MSCs than to their low math achievements. In support of the pan-human wide generalizability of our findings, our cross-national results generalize over 68 country/regions as well as multiple math self-belief constructs (self-efficacy, anxiety, interest, utility, future plans) and multiple gender-equality measures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Development in relationship self-concept from high school to university predicts adjustment.

Helping students adjust to university life is a critical developmental issue. Using longitudinal data from 1652 German late adolescents, this research tested the effect of initial high-school parent, same-sex, and opposite sex self-concept and its change on university dropout intentions, study stress, and study satisfaction. High-school self-concept predicted all outcomes. Change across the postschool transition in parent and same self-concept also predicted most outcomes. Change in opposite sex self-concept predicted no outcome. We argue young people's relationship self-beliefs are critical for successful developmental transitions. Consistent with previous research, we argue that parents remain a vital relationship for late adolescents. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Mindfulness and Its Association With Varied Types of Motivation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Using Self-Determination Theory.

Mindfulness has been shown to have varied associations with different forms of motivation, leading to a lack of clarity as to how and when it may foster healthy motivational states. Grounded in self-determination theory, the present study proposes a theoretical model for how mindfulness supports different forms of human motivation, and then tests this via meta-analysis. A systematic review identified 89 relevant studies (N = 25,176), comprising 104 independent data sets and 200 effect sizes. We used a three-level modeling approach to meta-analyze these data. Across both correlational and intervention studies, we found consistent support for mindfulness predicting more autonomous forms of motivation and, among correlational studies, less controlled motivation and amotivation. We conducted moderation analyses to probe heterogeneity in the effects, including bias within studies. We conclude by highlighting substantive and methodological issues that need to be addressed in future research in this area.

Body Image-Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-5: An Abbreviation Using Genetic Algorithms.

Body image concerns are typically linked with negative outcomes such as disordered eating and diminished well-being, but some people can exhibit psychological flexibility and remain committed to their valued goals despite being dissatisfied about their bodies. Such flexibility is most frequently measured by the Body Image-Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (BI-AAQ). This study used a recently validated, fully automated method based on genetic algorithms (GAs) on data from an American community sample (N1=538, 71.5% female, Age: M = 40.87, SD = 13.5) to abbreviate the 12-item BI-AAQ to a 5-item short form, BI-AAQ-5. Validation tests were conducted on data from an independent community sample (N2= 762, 44.6% female, Age: M = 40.65, SD = 13.06). The short form performed comparably to the long form in terms of its factor structure and correlations with theoretically relevant constructs, including body image dissatisfaction, stigma, internalization of societal norms of appearance, self-compassion, and poor mental health. Further, preliminary analyses using structural equation modeling showed that body image flexibility, as measured by either the long or short form, was associated with almost all the criterion variables, even while controlling for a highly related construct of body image dissatisfaction. These results demonstrate the potential discriminant validity of both the long and short form of the BI-AAQ, and show that the BI-AAQ-5 is a suitable alternative to its long form. We discuss how psychological flexibility with respect to body image dissatisfaction can be conducive to positive functioning.