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Modern Applications of SCT

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The social cognitive theory suggests that repeated images presented in mass media will have a higher potential for symbolic encoding in cognitive processes, which will heighten the effect of retention of models. Many different types of media have been studied relating to the SCT such as sports and health.

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A specific study relating to this idea by Hardin and Greer (2009) show this deep connection between mass media and SCT. This paper creates a deep dive of how mass media has an effect of gender-typing in sports using underlying themes of SCT throughout. The basis of their case is that “consistent models of men or women exhibiting consistent activity is the basis of the gender typing process,” (Hardin and Greer, 2009).  What is discovered here is that children watching sports on TV and seeing the dominant gender for different sports, such as men in football, will dissuade children of the opposite sex from wanting to participate in that specific sport.  This will lead to a lowering of their self-efficacy for wanting to participate in future activities relating to the sport. 

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There are many more studies relating to this idea of a gender push in relation to what a child adheres to what society deems appropriate. For example, in a study conducted by Ling and Halim (2016), the idea of gender rigidity is explored through looking at the patterns in children on what is deemed to be appropriate to exhibit through style and activities based on a child’s gender. It is found in young children that they tend to think in black-or-white or unidimensional ways. Children pick up on cues of gender either from preschool or playmates from other children in which there a clear distinction between girls and boys. Children might pick these cues up from media such as movies where princesses are all girls while most classic superheroes are mostly boys. This will motivate boys to wear clothing such as superhero apparel or with girls, pink-colored clothing with princesses on the front. However, Ling and Halim discovered that once there is a clear baseline of models of gender for children when they start to get older, children start to step outside the boundaries of gender norms. Examples of these types of children could be tomboys, where girls have more of a fascination with boys’ activities rather than girls’ activities.

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Top Left and Right: Images of distinct boys' and girls' clothing. 

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               Moving back to the idea of mass media, there is a general relation between mass media and health for a variety of cases involving the SCT. For example, Martino et al. (2005), investigated the relationship between the sexual content on television and within movies and adolescent sexual behavior. Based on this study, primetime networks portray sexual content on average 10 per hour with many of them relating to teen activities (Martino et al., 2005). Movies such as American Pie (1999) are also effective examples of such influence. It was found in the study that among African American and white adolescents, there was strong evidence of confidence or self-efficacy in teens to perform safe sex behavior after frequently watching people talking about sex and behaving sexually on TV (Martino et al., 2005).

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               There are many studies today outside mass media as well, especially relating to the younger generation. In relation to fitness, there was one study conducted by Lee et al. (2018) in which they found a successful framework for designing physical activity intervention for adolescents based on the SCT. Self-efficacy had the strongest total effect on physical activity as “korean male high-school students with higher self-efficacy for being physically active were significantly more active than those with lower self-efficacy were,” (Lee et al., 2018). During the current COVID-19 epidemic, studies such as the one created by Alemany-Arrebola, et al. (2020), show that college students display an inversely proportional relationship between anxiety and self-efficacy in an online setting. This shows that students who show, “a higher level of anxiety (TA and SA) express more negative emotions and also perceive themselves with less academic self-efficacy. Therefore, a stressful situation (pandemic and confinement) together with a critical event (illness and death of a relative/friend due to COVID-19) increases anxiety levels and influences the perception of academic self-efficacy,” (Alemany-Arrebola, et al., 2020).

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