Embodied and Embedded Learning: Child, Caregiver, and Context

<p><strong>The IPCC states in its latest, 6th synthesis report that human activities have ‘unequivocally’ resulted in a rise in the surface temperature of the earth, inducing changes in the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and biosphere which have had adverse effects on both the natural world and humanity (IPCC, 2023). In order to limit warming to 1.5oC, the IPCC posits that annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must decrease by 45% of their 2010 levels by 2030, and drop to net zero by 2050 (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2019). At present, 65% of global GHG emissions can be directly and indirectly linked to consumption within households (Ivanova et al., 2016). Consequently, individuals can have a profound effect on the levels of GHG’s emitted into the atmosphere. Thus, changing individual behaviour within households represents a significant leverage point (Ivanova et al., 2016; Pörtner et al., 2022). It is known that further actions may be taken by individuals to reduce the carbon footprint of households (Hall et al., 2018; Steg, 2018). However, it remains unclear how to induce individuals to undertake such additional pro-environmental behaviours.</strong></p><p>Currently, climate change policies have recruited economic understandings of behaviour to design interventions that incorporate fiscal motivations and deterrents as part of their structure (Cooper, 2011). For example, emission trading schemes (ETS), initially envisaged within the Kyoto Protocol, have been separately engineered in different regions of the world (Leining et al., 2020; Skjærseth & Wettestad, 2008; X.-Q. Wang et al., 2022). These policies have had negative consequences in the form of furthering existing inequities between countries (Liverman, 2009), as well as issues in quantifying their additionality as compared to a business-as-usual scenario (Teixidó et al., 2019; Verde, 2020). Furthermore, ETS are necessarily targeted at the social actors who participate in the engineered markets, rendering such policies ineffective for directly targeting the 65% of global GHG emissions embodied in individual/household behaviours.</p><p>The research in this PhD steps away from economic understandings of (environmental) behaviour, to explore the utility of other conceptualizations of human action. The work done here examines theories from environmental psychology and behavioural economics, to explore how psychological phenomena such as attitudes, and binds on rationality such as the recruitment of heuristics, direct decision making in relation to environmental issues. By examining alternative drivers of behaviour, it is hoped that different environmental policies directly targeting behaviour within households could be designed in the future.</p><p>Prior to the work undertaken here, the multitude of hypothesised determinates of environmental behaviour precluded the effective integration of alternative perspectives from environmental psychology and behavioural economics into policy discourses. As Shove (2010, pp. 1275) pointed put there was no ‘obvious limit to the number of possible determinants and no method of establishing their…precise role in promoting or preventing different behaviours’. Through the course of this research, multiple models of human behaviour from within and between the disciplines of environmental psychology and behavioural economics have been interrogated. These models have been examined in relation to both self-reported and observed measures of individuals’ environmental action, in an effort to delimit the critical determinates of pro-environmental behaviour - and curtail the number of possible pre-cursors lamented by Shove.</p><p>The first set of studies undertaken as part of this doctoral research focused on models of behaviour from environmental psychology. The numeracy of the models recruited within environmental psychology to explain behaviour ensured there existed considerable redundancy between these concerning the variables they incorporated into their structures. For example, biospheric values are cited in the norm activation model (Schwartz, 1977), value belief norm theory (Stern, 2000), and recent models concerning an individual’s connection to nature (Martin & Czellar, 2017). Work was initially undertaken to create a database documenting solely the variables from within these models. This was done for clarity, and to eliminate the aforementioned redundancy. Individual meta-analyses were run for each of the psychological variables to generate an effect size estimate for each. Effects size estimates were then compared between the psychological variables, to determine which of these correlated most strongly with pro-environmental actions and intentions. The five key variables with the largest (lower-bound) effect size estimates for both pro-environmental intentions and behaviour were revealed to be: attitudes, perceived behavioural control, injunctive norms, descriptive norms, and personal moral norms. Following the meta-analyses, an online study was run to investigate whether participants’ reported: attitudes, perceived behavioural control, injunctive norms, descriptive norms, and personal moral norms, were related to an observed (as opposed to a self-reported) measure of pro-environmental action. This was done to determine whether the results obtained in the meta-analyses were robust when participants could not simply report their own actions. In the online study, participants were asked how much (real) money they would like to donate to an environmental charity (the ‘Clean Air Task Force’), to observed directly whether they behaved in alignment with their proclaimed environmental beliefs, attitudes and norms. Regression analyses and structural equation modelling revealed that personal moral norms were the most critical antecedent to the observed measure of pro-environmental behaviour, with attitudes and injunctive norms also demonstrating strong relationships with monetary donations. Perceived behavioural control and descriptive norms did not demonstrate a significant direct association with participants’ charitable donation behaviours.</p><p>In a final online experiment, insights regarding human behaviour from behavioural economics were introduced. The experiment took place over two time points. At the first point in time, the three psychological variables that previously exhibited significant direct relationships with participants’ observed monetary donations (attitudes, injunctive norms and personal norms), were elicited from participants’, and their influence over behaviour was assessed in comparison with the effects of a social norms nudge. This investigation was undertaken to evaluate whether critical ingrained psychological variables (attitudes, injunctive norms and personal norms) were associated with environmental behaviour to a lesser or greater extent than an applied nudge, which manipulated the salient social norm and thus operated through the activation of a simple imitation heuristic within participants. At the second point in time the longevity of the effect of the social norms manipulation was investigated. This was done by comparing the subsequent behaviour of participants who were, and were not, exposed to the social norm nudge in part one. At time two, behaviour was evaluated in relation to the same action as before, and also in relation to a second action from a different domain of environmental behaviour. Discrepancies between participants’ who had, or had no prior exposure to the social norms manipulation at time one, were used to comment on the temporal and behavioural spillover effects of the social norms manipulation. At the first point in time, only the three psychological variables (attitudes, injunctive norms and personal norms) exhibited a significant association with the observed environmental behaviour. No effect over behaviour of the social norms nudge was observed at time one. The lack of significant influence demonstrated by the social norms nudge at time one, portended the lack of spillover effects detected for the nudge at time two. This research demonstrated the central importance of personal moral norms, attitudes, and injunctive norms for determining individuals’ substantive pro-environmental behaviours. This thesis advanced previous work by (i) using meta-analyses to summarise and compare the relationships between numerous heterogeneous psychological determinates of pro-environmental action, and self-reported environmental intentions and behaviours; (ii) advancing theory by using structural equation modelling to demonstrated that personal moral norms were more closely affiliated with an observed measure of environmental behaviour than other variables such as attitudes; and (iii) revealing the critical determinates of pro-environmental action in order to design appropriately targeted behaviour change intervention policies: the variables that most closely correlated with observed pro-environmental acts were not nudge interventions, but instead individuals internalised moral norms and attitudes. The results of this work are necessarily limited to some extent by the methodological decisions made in service of achieving the ambitions of this doctoral research. The chosen observed behaviour (charitable giving), the selected nudge (provision of information concerning a social norm), and the techniques used to elicit participant responses (online questionnaire), all represent valid techniques and constraints on the broader applicability of my findings. These should be taken into consideration when extrapolating any results of this work to alternative scenarios.</p>

In this chapter we examine the learning that children of (im)migrants do in their everyday lives in home and community contexts. Using a sociocultural lens on learning as shaped by relationships, tasks, purposes, goals and contexts, we focus on a core set of everyday and routine activities that are common to and/or shaped by experiences of migration. This practice, which has been called "language brokering," calls on children to use their knowledge of linguistic and sociocultural processes to read, write, listen, speak and do things for others. Drawing on our own and others' ethnographic research on this practice, we identify the kinds of learning these experiences foster. Our aim is to illustrate how common immigrant children's daily life experiences can support the development of knowledge, skills, dispositions and competencies that are not typically recognized or valued in school. We highlight how this everyday learning could be recognized, sustained, and critically expanded in schools, in contrast with the more common approach to treating immigrant youth's everyday experiences as obstacles to be overcome, deficits to be remedied, or mere token stepping stones to academic skills.

Mapping and change information between structural and behavioural domain – Behaviour prediction framework

Children at risk for ADHD frequently experience difficulties in developing pre-reading skills due to challenges with attention regulation and executive function. This study investigated the effectiveness of play-based contextual learning methods in enhancing pre-reading abilities among preschool children exhibiting ADHD risk characteristics. A classroom action research design following the Kemmis and McTaggart model was implemented over two cycles with two children (aged 5-6 years) identified as at risk for ADHD at State Kindergarten 2 Kaubun. The intervention integrated Contextual Teaching and Learning (CTL) principles through play-based activities using familiar materials (vegetables) to teach letter recognition, phonemic awareness, and word formation. Data collection employed pre-reading ability assessments, structured observations, and documentation of behavioral changes across baseline, Cycle 1, and Cycle 2 phases. Substantial improvements were observed from baseline to final assessment: Subject AY progressed from 27.77% to 83.33%, while Subject AL advanced from 30.55% to 88.88% proficiency. Both participants exceeded the 75% threshold for independent skill demonstration. Qualitative observations revealed enhanced attention regulation, increased engagement, and improved self-regulation behaviors throughout the intervention period. The findings demonstrate that culturally responsive, multisensory play-based approaches effectively address both cognitive and behavioral domains in children at risk for ADHD. The intervention's success supports the integration of constructivist learning principles with inclusive educational practices, providing evidence for combined treatment approaches addressing reading difficulties and attention challenges simultaneously.

Natural behavior in everyday settings.

Vaccine hesitancy and refusal have undermined COVID-19 vaccination efforts of nursing staff. This study aimed to identify behavioral factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine uptake among unvaccinated nursing staff in long-term care facilities (LTCF) in Finland. Methodology: The study was based on the Theoretical Domains Framework. Data were collected through qualitative in-depth interviews among nursing staff and managers of LTCFs. The analysis was based on thematic analysis. We identified seven behavioral domains, with several themes, that reduced the staff’s intention to get vaccinated: knowledge (information overload, inability to identify trustworthy information sources, lack of vaccine-specific and understandable scientific information), beliefs about consequences (incorrect perceptions about the vaccine effectiveness, and lack of trust in the safety of the vaccine), social influences (influence of family and friends), reinforcement (limited abilities of the management to encourage vaccination), beliefs about capabilities (pregnancy or desire to get pregnant), psychological factors (coping with changing opinion), and emotions (confusion, suspicion, disappointment, and fatigue). We also identified three behavioral domains that encouraged vaccine uptake: social influences (trust in health authorities), environmental context and resources (vaccination logistics), and work and professional role (professional pride). The study findings can help authorities to develop tailored vaccine promotion strategies for healthcare workers in LTCFs.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into online education has transformed the digital learning space, offering new ways to enhance learner satisfaction and engagement. This systematic literature review, covering a five-year span from 2020 to 2025, explores how AI technologies, such as chatbots, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), sentiment analysis, gaze tracking and predictive analytics, support learner engagement across cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social dimensions. Drawing from 30 peer-reviewed studies, the current review addresses three central research questions: (1) What aspects of AI positively influence learner satisfaction and engagement in online courses within higher education institutions; (2) What potential challenges from using these technologies may arise; and (3) What research approaches are most commonly used to assess AI’s impact in such learning contexts? The findings highlight that adaptive learning, real-time feedback, and emotion-aware systems contribute positively to personalized learning and motivation. However, concerns persist around data privacy, algorithmic bias, over-reliance on automation, and system usability. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs, as well as machine learning, mixed methods, and survey-based approaches are found to dominate in reviewed studies. Based on these insights, this work offers a foundation for future AI-enhanced learning management systems designed primarily to enhance learner engagement across cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social domains.

Background and Aims: Air pollution is a critical environmental and public health issue. Children are especially vulnerable to air pollution in their surroundings as they have higher ventilation rates, spend more time outdoors, and are more constrained in their mobility than adults. Most research relating health-related outcomes (e.g., asthma) to environmental factors (e.g., land uses) identifies correlations, but stops short of understanding how individuals interact with their surroundings. For example, PM2.5 is traditionally assessed using fixed or ‘passive’ monitors which assume homogeneity in pollution distribution over large areas, and have consistently under-reported actual personal exposure. Methods: We address methodological shortcomings by providing a fuller understanding of the daily spatial and temporal routines of children in the spaces they inhabit. Using an innovative suite of portable, high-precision, personal monitoring tools (air pollution monitors, accelerometers, and GPS) we are able to combine ‘active’ measurements of PM2.5 exposure, energy expenditure, and geographic location at 1-second intervals throughout a child’s day; in turn, we can identify environmental influences on children’s activities and exposure to PM2.5. These tools were used to continuously monitor 36 children in a Canadian city (London) for one week; time-activity diaries, questionnaires, and interviews were used to provide additional context. GIS was used to visualize and analyze spatial-temporal patterns. Results: This presentation will describe the innovative protocol and preliminary findings on how variations in children’s levels of exposure to PM2.5 varies in relation to spatio-temporal variations in their activities and characteristics of their everyday environments (e.g., land use patterns, greenspace). Conclusions: This study highlights the importance of ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ monitoring for more accurate assessments of exposure to air pollution. A better understanding of the spatial and temporal aspects of children’s exposure to air pollution and the environmental context provides necessary evidence for formulating interventions to promote the health of children.

The fourth industrial revolution has brought new challenges to the production workers in so-called smart factories. The flexible production process and many different product variants call for well-trained human workers. This paper contributes towards a better understanding of manual assembly workers in their everyday environment, since most advances in the production environment are technologically driven. Findings based on the Contextual Design methodology will be discussed and further analyzed in the crosscutting aspects of user, work, social, and environmental context.

Outcome expectancy: A key factor to understanding childhood exposure to nature and children's pro-environmental behavior

Facing the surge in malicious behaviors in the network environment, the existing cybersecurity knowledge graph suffers from fragmented security knowledge and limited application scenarios, making it challenging to collaborative malicious behavior analysis. To address this, we propose a cybersecurity behavior knowledge base (CSBKB) framework for comprehensive malicious behavior analysis. Based on knowledge of user behavior, attack traffic, and attack paths, we construct six types of knowledge graphs to characterize malicious behavior, including user behavior perception, user behavior mapping, malicious behavior association, malicious behavior category, domain attack, and malicious behavior path traceability graph. These graphs characterize malicious behaviors and form a comprehensive security behavior knowledge base. To fully utilize the graph structure information, we design a reasoning module based on the graph neural network further to explore the relationship between entities in the graph. Using DDoS attacks as a case study, we demonstrate this framework's construction and knowledge-reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CSBKB framework effectively realizes a comprehensive malicious behavior analysis mechanism encompassing "malicious user behavior monitoring, malicious behavior type detection, and malicious behavior path tracing." It can effectively analyze malicious behaviors, with an accuracy of more than 0.97 in detecting abnormal users, more than 0.97 in inferring DDoS attack types, and an identification rate of more than 0.92 for malicious behavior paths.

China is currently the largest CO2 emitter in the world and demonstrates one of the highest levels of energy consumption. The sustainable consumption behavior has increased in China, especially in urban cities. Some clear evidence of this includes food purchasing behavior. Recent studies have also suggested that considering full product information transparency, consumers are willing to pay premium prices for products. With this in mind, sustainable consumption must still be facilitated by related policies, regulations, and tools. This study focuses on sustainable consumption behavior in China and collects and analyzes the literature from the last decade (2007–2017) on the topic. In so doing, it highlights new trends and research topics against the background of circular economy development. The method of systematic review is applied. The review is categorized into several main groups: national policies and regulations, the green awareness of consumers, the definition of related concepts, the barriers between sustainable consumption and the circular economy, and the indicators for circular economy assessment in China. Future research directions are discussed. Furthermore, future challenges are addressed from three perspectives: sustainable consumption facilitating the circular economy, “cradle‐to‐cradle” practices, and the link between the European Union and China. This is a fundamental study in the research domain of sustainable consumption behavior. It provides added value that benefits both academic researchers and decision makers. It also sheds light on the further study of sustainable consumption behavior in China from a macroeconomic perspective.

While previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identified multiple risk loci for suicide ideation (SI) and suicide attempt (SA), there is still a limited understanding of the genetic predisposition underlying suicidal behaviors in diverse populations. This study aimed to conduct a large-scale investigation of the suicidality spectrum (SP) to generate new insights into its biology and epidemiology. Leveraging ancestrally diverse participants (SI N case/control =179 881/1 013 900; SA N case/control =66 867/1 654 798) from the UK Biobank, All of Us Research Program, Million Veteran Program, FinnGen, and Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, we performed GWAS meta-analyses for SI and SA, and a multivariate GWAS of SP. We applied multiple analytical approaches to identify genomic loci associated with suicide traits and to functionally annotate these significant signals. Phenome-wide genetic correlation and genetically informed causal analyses were further conducted to provide convergent evidence on the relationships of suicidal behaviors with health outcomes, brain imaging-derived phenotypes, and metabolomic traits. We identified 90 independent lead single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for suicidal behaviors, of which 49 were novel. SNP-based heritability was higher for SA (SNP-h 2 =0.115±0.005) than for SI (SNP-h 2 =0.040±0.002) and SP (SNP-h 2 =0.050±0.002), and their genetic correlations ranged from 0.639 to 0.960. Functional annotation analyses highlighted associated genes (e.g., UGGT2 , GMPPB , BRWD1 ), enriched gene sets (e.g., cellular response to stress), and potential therapeutic drug candidates (e.g., cariprazine, paliperidone, droperidol), with some signals shared across suicide traits but more specific to SI or SA. Suicide behaviors were genetically associated with a broad spectrum of complex traits, primarily in the domains of mental health, physical health, behaviors, and socioeconomic factors, some of which revealed causal relationships. This study provides convergent genetic evidence for both shared and phenotype-specific components of suicidal behaviors and delineates their associated factors spanning from proximal clinical and behavioral traits to more distal social determinants. These findings refine our understanding of the etiology of suicidal behaviors and may inform targeted strategies for suicide prevention in both clinical and public health settings. Evidence before this study: Suicidal behaviors remain a serious public health concern and contribute to substantial mortality globally. However, their genetic predisposition and risk profiles associated with them are not yet fully established although multiple approaches, including genome-wide association studies (GWAS), have been applied. We searched PubMed, medRxiv, and bioRxiv for publications and preprints in English from Jan 1, 2000, to Nov 1, 2025, using the search terms "suicid*" and "GWAS". The largest previously published GWASs identified four genome-wide loci for suicide ideation and 12 for suicide attempt, and a recent preprint reported 77 loci for suicidal behaviors. These associations were mainly derived from individuals of European ancestry, with only one significant locus for suicide ideation reported in East Asian ancestry. Previous studies also attempted to prioritize putative risk genes, but most did not leverage multi-omic approaches, such as transcriptome-wide and proteome-wide association studies. Moreover, earlier work investigated the relationships between suicidal behaviors and psychiatric and behavioral traits mainly through genetic correlation analysis, without conducting phenome-wide genetically informed causal analysis.Added value of this study: Our study identified 90 genome-wide significant associations for suicidality. These associations were distributed across European, African, Admixed American, and Asian ancestries for both suicide ideation and suicide attempt. SNP-based heritability for suicidal behaviors ranged from 4% to 12% and remained significant after conditioning on major psychiatric disorders. We prioritized 1052 genes associated with suicidal behaviors and identified 33 loci with convergent evidence across five or more gene-discovery analyses. Sixteen genes were shared across suicide ideation, suicide attempt, and suicidality spectrum, while most other loci appeared to be phenotype-specific. Drug-repurposing analysis suggested five potential therapeutic drug candidates: cariprazine, droperidol, molindone, paliperidone, and chlorprothixene. Using phenome-wide genetically informed analyses, we identified loneliness, medical abortion, and age at first sexual intercourse as putative causal risk factors for suicidal behaviors. Suicidal behaviors were also associated with adverse consequences, including hospital admissions and multiple mental health and physical conditions.Implications of all the available evidence: The predisposition to suicidal behaviors is due to genetic mechanisms acting through molecular changes across multiple omic domains in brain and peripheral systems. Although psychiatric disorders may mediate the genetic liability of suicidal behaviors, a proportion of the risk appears to be independent of psychiatric diagnosis. Suicidal behaviors are influenced by diverse genetic and causal risk factors, and can also lead to broad adverse health consequences.

This book contains a wide range of information of huge complexity on rat behavior. The book has three objectives. The first objective is to present an introduction of rat behavior. In choosing the rat as the subject species, the book has made the assumption that this species will remain, as it has in the past, the primary subject used the laboratory investigations of behavior. The second objective is to describe the organization and complexity of rat behavior. The major theme emerging from many lines of research on rat behavior is that understanding the rules of behavioral organization will be central in understanding the structural basis of behavior. The third objective is to update, as much as is possible, previous compendiums of rat behavior. Behavioral neuroscience continues to be a diverse field of research in which there remain many competing experimental methods and hypotheses. The behavioral descriptions in this book are closely tied to the laboratory methods from which they were derived, thus allowing investigators to exploit both the behavior and the methods for their own research. The first part of the book includes sections on natural history, sensory systems, motor systems, regulatory systems, development and parental behavior, social behavior, cognitive functions, and models. The second section is comprised by the major tests used by scientists interested in each domain of behavior.

Part 1 The development of concepts and research in health behaviour: historical origins of health behaviour, David Armstrong the development of the concept of health behaviour and its application in recent research, Robert Anderson. Part 2 Approaches to the study of health behaviour: ethnographic approaches to health, Una Maclean what social groups think they can do about health, Janine Pierret the role of socio-structural factors in health behaviour, Horst Noack risk factors investigation of health behaviour - Hungarian experiences, Mihaly Kokeny et al. Part 3 National surveys of health behaviour: methodological issues in the study of health-related behaviour, Kathryn Dean health-behaviour measurement in the evaluation of community based health-promotion programmes, Don Nutbeam the behavioural risk factor surveys in the United States 1981-1983, Gary Hogelin national surveys of health behaviour in Finland, Esko Kalimo. Part 4 Research on health behaviour in local environments: health beliefs and behaviour in the home, Roisin Pill the evolution of the juvenile health habit study 1977-1985, Matti Rimpela et al health beliefs and behaviour in the workplace, Lamberto Briziarelli health promotion and the concept of community, John Ashton. Part 5 The application of research in health behaviour: the autonomous region of Madrid, Rose Martinez and Armando Perruga Urrea the Canadian experience, Irving Rootman national health education programmes, John K.Davies. Part 6 Discussion papers on a new agenda for research in health behaviour: new perspectives for research in health behaviour, Ilona Kickbusch the need for new social policy perspectives in health-behaviour research, Pierpaolo Donati directions for research in health behaviour related to health promotion - an overview, David V.McQueen a note on research priorities from participants in the Symposium on Health Behaviour, Pitlochry.