Understand what self-efficacy is and its impact on personal behavior and mental health. This article explores in depth the definition, influencing factors, and improvement strategies of self-efficacy, and introduces the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) and its online test to help you evaluate and improve your confidence in dealing with challenges.
What is self-efficacy?
Self-efficacy (Self-Efficacy) refers to an individual’s confidence in his or her ability to successfully complete a specific task or goal. It was first proposed by psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977 and is defined as ’the degree of confidence people have in their ability to use the skills they possess to complete a certain work behavior.’ Simply put, self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in their ability to overcome challenges and achieve goals.
For example, there is a question in the ‘Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale’ (GSES): ‘Even if others oppose me, I still have ways to get what I want.’ This reflects a person’s ability to face external resistance. time, confidence in one’s own abilities.
Factors affecting self-efficacy
According to Bandura’s theory, self-efficacy is influenced by four main factors:
- Personal experience of success and failure: Successful experiences will enhance self-efficacy, while failures will weaken confidence. Experiencing success in challenging tasks will give individuals confidence in future tasks.
- Vicarious Experience: Self-efficacy can be enhanced or weakened by observing the successes or failures of others, especially those who are similar to oneself. If you see people around you succeed, you think you can succeed too.
- Verbal Encouragement: Positive feedback and encouragement from others, especially friends, family, teachers, etc., can significantly improve an individual’s self-efficacy.
- Emotional and physiological state: Positive emotions and healthy physical state help to improve self-efficacy, while negative emotions and poor physical state can easily weaken an individual’s self-confidence.
Function of self-efficacy
Self-efficacy plays a vital role in an individual’s behavior and mental health:
- Behavioral Selection: People with high self-efficacy are more willing to choose challenging tasks and persist in completing them; people with low self-efficacy tend to avoid challenges.
- Motivation: People with high self-efficacy are more motivated to overcome difficulties and can recover from failures; on the contrary, people with low self-efficacy give up easily.
- Thinking Patterns and Reactions: People with high self-efficacy can usually maintain a positive attitude and believe that they can overcome difficulties; while people with low self-efficacy are prone to negative emotions and self-doubt.
- Health: People with high self-efficacy are more likely to adopt healthy lifestyles, such as exercising regularly and maintaining a healthy diet, whereas people with low self-efficacy are more likely to develop health problems.
- Academic and Career Achievement: Self-efficacy is closely related to academic and career achievement. People with high self-efficacy are more likely to achieve success.
Strategies to improve self-efficacy
- Set reasonable goals: Start with small goals, gradually accumulate successful experience, and enhance self-confidence.
- Learn from role models: Improve your own self-efficacy by observing and imitating the behaviors and ways of thinking of successful people.
- Seek positive support: Support and encouragement from relatives, friends, colleagues or teachers can help improve self-confidence.
- Maintain positive emotions and good physiological state: Maintain physical and mental health and improve self-efficacy through exercise, rest and cultivating positive thinking.
Introduction to the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES)
Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) is a scale compiled by German psychologist Professor Ralf Schwarzer and his colleagues in 1981. It is designed to measure individuals’ ability to face various challenges. confidence in one’s abilities. This scale has been translated into many languages and is widely used in psychological research and clinical practice around the world.
The GSES has 10 questions covering people’s self-efficacy in dealing with different situations. Each question is scored on a 4-point Likert scale, ranging from “not at all true” to “completely true” to indicate the individual’s self-efficacy. The results of the test help individuals understand their level of confidence in different situations.
GSES test content mainly focuses on the following two aspects:
- Outcome Expectation: An individual’s estimate of the likely consequences of his or her actions.
- Efficacy Expectations: An individual’s belief in the successful implementation of his or her behavior.
Generally speaking, people with a high sense of self-efficacy are more proactive in facing challenges in life, have the courage to try new things, and can persist in pursuing goals.
Self-efficacy and mental health
Self-efficacy not only affects behavior, but also plays an important role in mental health. People with high self-efficacy are usually able to maintain an optimistic and positive attitude and show strong resilience in the face of pressure and challenges. Research shows that higher self-efficacy is closely related to individual mental health and can effectively prevent and alleviate psychological problems such as anxiety and depression.
The concept of collective efficacy
In addition to individual self-efficacy, Bandura also proposed the concept of collective efficacy. Collective efficacy refers to a group’s judgment of its own capabilities, especially its collective belief in facing a common goal or challenge. The introduction of this concept makes the research on self-efficacy not only limited to the individual level, but also expanded to the team and organizational level.
Summarize
Self-efficacy plays a vital role in an individual’s mental health and behavioral performance. By understanding the definition, influencing factors, functions and improvement strategies of self-efficacy, we can more effectively enhance our self-confidence, actively respond to challenges in life, and achieve personal goals.
If you want to know how confident you are when facing life’s challenges, you can try the free online test of the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) provided by the PsycTest official website. This test will help you assess your self-efficacy in different situations and provide personalized suggestions for improvement.
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