Financial literacy among Finnish adolescents in PISA 2018: the role of financial learning and dispositional factors

The aim or the present study was to examine the relative importance of financial education in school and families and dispositional factors (competitiveness, work mastery, meta-cognition) in predicting financial literacy among Finnish adolescents. The data on the 4328 Finnish 15-year-olds was drawn from the PISA 2018 assessment. Financial literacy was measured by tests, and financial education and dispositional factors were assessed by adolescent questionnaires. First, the results showed that financial education in school was positively associated with adolescents’ financial literacy skills, whereas parental involvement in financial matters did not relate or related negatively to financial literacy scores. Second, dispositional factors, such as competitiveness, work mastery, and meta-cognition (effective strategies to understand/remember information, to summarize information, and to evaluate source credibility) were the strongest positive predictors of the financial literacy scores. Overall, the present study emphasizes that certain social factors (schools and families) and especially dispositional characteristics (personality/motivation and critical thinking/learning strategies) may shape the development of the financial skills of adolescents.

PROACTIVE RESOURCES FOR COPING WITH ACADEMIC STRESS

The article presents the results of a study of proactive coping resources. Proactive coping is currently a new term in the Kazakhstan psychological and pedagogical literature. It can be defined as future-oriented coping, associated with anticipating potential stressors and the early accumulation of resources to identify a possible problem situation and a proactive mindset to resolve it. An analytical review of the literature on the problem under study revealed that proactive coping is associated with the presence in the coping subject of certain environmental conditions and dispositional characteristics that allow him to recognize a potential threat and plan strategies for its removal. The ambiguity in the classification and understanding of academic coping resources directs the attention of researchers to the search for situational and personal parameters that can help the student cope with the stress arising in educational activities. It was revealed that proactive coping with academic stress is provided by reflexive, motivational-volitional, cognitive, affective and communicative resources.

Social bonding in diplomacy

It is widely recognized among state leaders and diplomats that personal relations play an important role in international politics. Recent work at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and sociology has highlighted the critical importance of face-to-face interactions in generating intention understanding and building trust. Yet, a key question remains as to why some leaders are able to ‘hit it off,’ generating a positive social bond, while other interactions ‘fall flat,’ or worse, are mired in negativity. To answer, we turn to micro-sociology – the study of everyday human interactions at the smallest scales – an approach that has theorized this question in other domains. Drawing directly from US sociologist Randall Collins, and related empirical studies on the determinants of social bonding, we develop a model of diplomatic social bonding that privileges interaction elements rather than the dispositional characteristics of the actors involved or the material environment in which the interaction takes place. We conclude with a discussion of how the study of interpersonal dyadic bonding interaction may move forward.

The Self

This chapter examines how the self both creates and results from experience. Metatheoretically, it examines how social and personality psychologists conceive of and study the self, using the topic of self-esteem to illustrate typical views of the self as dispositional characteristics of persons, the product of situations, or the interaction between them. The Person × Situation framework has stimulated research and had heuristic value for social and personality psychologists who study the self. But because it views both the person and the situation as static rather than the result of dynamic processes, it fails to account for how people and situations mutually create each other in a process that unfolds over time. Through dynamic processes of reciprocal influence, the self can change rapidly—change sustained by the situations people create for themselves over time. Methodological approaches in personality and social psychology to test these dynamic models of the self are considered.