Purpose: The purpose of this study was to apply the theory of reasoned action and self-efficacy in order to explore nursing students’ behavioral intention and predict its effects on the practice of spiritual health promotion. Design: An exploratory research design was adopted. Methods: In total, 191 5th-year nursing students participated in the curriculum on professional care. A self-reported o...

OBJECTIVES To identify different components of smoking normative beliefs and determine if each component is independently associated with 2 clinically relevant measures of smoking in adolescents. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey. SETTING One large suburban high school. PARTICIPANTS A total of 1211 high school students aged 14 to 18 years. OUTCOME MEASURES Current smoking and susceptibility...

The use of belief functions has recently been advocated as an alternative to the use of probability functions in order to represent quantified beliefs. Such a proposal lacked justification. We present a set of requirements that justify the use of belief functions. The assessment of the validity of these requirements provides a tool for assessing the relative value of normative models of subject...

In this paper, we consider the design of normative multiagent systems composed of both constitutive and regulative norms. We analyze the properties of constitutive norms, in particular their lack of reflexivity, and the trade-off between constitutive and regulative norms in the design of normative systems. As methodology we use the metaphor of describing social entities as agents and of attribu...

An agent’s behaviour is governed by multiple factors, including its beliefs/desires/intentions, its reasoning processes and societal influences acting upon it, such as norms. In this paper we propose an extensible argumentation inspired reasoning procedure, and show how it may be used to perform normative reasoning. . The language used by our procedure is built around defeasible, nonmonotonic r...

Why does it strike us as absurd to believe that it is raining and that one doesn’t believe that it is raining? Some argue that it strikes us as absurd because belief is normative. The beliefs that it is raining and that one doesn’t believe that it is are, it is suggested, self-falsifying. But, so it is argued, it is essential to belief that beliefs ought not, among other things, be self-falsify...

Recently Elqayam and Evans (2011) have proposed that researchers studying human thinking should be moving away from normative accounts that specify how we “ought” to reason to a more descriptivist framework that describes how we reason. This is an approach that I very much support. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate how this can be applied to the study of mental state reasoning in...