Despondency and domain-specificity

Discussing the quadrants encompassed by Bandura's theorization of the relationship between outcome expectations and self-efficacy judgments really brought up a lot of things in my head. When we were discussing the things related to vicarious learning and the effects that external influences can have on the efficacy that individuals have for the things that they do, it became pretty clear to me that words, whether written, said, or typed, can have a really poignant effect on people's self-perceptions, and their receptivity to learning in a classroom. Perhaps my less than mindful, but (I assure you) good-willed blog post caused some of my peers to go from feeling self-assured to absolutely despondent because I somehow crushed their efficacy with my harsh words. While last class didn't tackle the situation head on (I was, rightfully left to do that myself), I feel that we did a really good job by discussing our own lives and observations from them; how we've seen people show the despondency that is ever so dangerous compared to resignation. That really made me think about my own actions that may have brought about similar feelings in those around me. Maybe my attempts to shove shared purpose down my peer's throats by calling them out led to this despondency for some of them, but I feel that the subtle awareness about it that has been generated among us has brought us to a good place, finally. Who knows, maybe this conflict was necessary for us to get here (some may disagree, but I'm all for tragic stories with happy endings).

Going forward from this and how it was so artfully resolved, I'd like to relate Kim's experiences with my own in the OT/PT context. Last year, I was working on several research projects with a medical research center in India in order to look at the possible demerits of screen usage for kids on the Autism Spectrum, as well as those diagnosed with ADHD, between the ages of 2 and 8. With rapid digitization in the Indian subcontinent, the technology fad has caught up with parents, who often appease their kids when they have to do something else with a screen that is laden with applications and 'educational' games. When parents would come to us and take our survey, they would think that heightened screen usage was a good thing, and hence had a high self-efficacy to give their kids screens, thinking it would have positive outcomes. However, when we would talk to them about Interhemispheric Transfer Time and the social trade-off that screens have for ASD, they would show the despondency that Bandura warns us of. The home programs that we would administer to these parents would not only consist of the controversial family-centered, parent-coaching models that Kim was speaking of, but also involved going cold turkey on screens. While we saw results from the reduction of screen use for these kids, the apprehension associated with the dissemination of therapeutic knowledge to caregivers remained constant, just like Kim's experiences go to show.

The fascinating thing to me, is that we raised arguments about the domain specificity of efficacy last class. However, when we look at these two scenarios that lie across such different spectrums, it becomes harder to really draw that barrier, at least for me, as the emotional palettes lie largely along the same lines. What do y'all think?