How is the social cognitive perspective of personality different from the other perspectives?

1 Definition of Social Cognition

The basic goal of a social cognitive perspective is to understand how individuals make sense of themselves, others, and events in everyday life. These goals are reflected in the study of (a) cognitive mechanisms that may explain social cognitive processes (as illustrated above); (b) the content and structure of social knowledge; and (c) the influence of social situational and individual demands on social information processes and social knowledge.

To illustrate these points within an adult development and aging perspective, first consider the well-documented finding that age-related decline in processing capacity correlates with age-related decline in cognitive performance. The question is whether age-related changes in working memory, attentional capacity, and speed of processing also relate to and/or explain age changes in social cognitive processes (Hess 1999, Schwarz et al. 1999). Researchers have suggested that age-related decline in processing capacity could explain the finding that older adults rely more on easily accessible trait-based information when making social judgments as opposed to more elaborative processing (Hess 1999).

However, from the second goal perspective listed above, age-related change in content and structure of social knowledge, accessibility of this knowledge held in memory, and related motivation and goals of the individual in the context of concurrent processing resources may offer competing explanations of age differences in social reasoning. Finally, personal and situational factors associated with aging could also explain a reliance on easily accessible social knowledge and beliefs. For example, older adulthood has been associated with a decrease in personal characteristics such as tolerance for ambiguity and attitudinal flexibility (Blanchard-Fields 1999). It may be the case that such decreases in cognitive flexibility may lead to social processing biases (Hess 1999). Alternatively, older adulthood is associated with changing situational factors, which influence social goals such as an increase in the importance of emotional considerations. In this case such an increase in emotional salience influences how information is processed (see Turk-Charles and Carstensen 1999 for a review). Let us now turn to each of these goal perspectives in more detail.

8 Coda

Since Schwartz's (1992) circular model was first published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology almost 20 years ago, our understanding of the psychological nature of values and their functioning has significantly grown. During this time, the application of a social cognitive perspective to values has helped to discover more about their roles at different levels of mental representation. At the system level, the circular model has facilitated the discovery of patterns in a variety of value-relevant processes, including value accessibility, value change, and effects of value priming. At the level of individual, abstract values, the theory that values function as truisms has led to the discovery that emotion plays a dominant role in judgments of value importance. At the level of value instantiations, we have learned more about how the elaboration of cognitive support for values influences subsequent behavior. These advances have important implications for social psychological theories that cite values and for major theories in psychology. The continued development of research on values will help our psychological understanding of them to become more commensurate with their importance to other social sciences (e.g., philosophy, sociology, history) and to political organizations like the United Nations, which require a more complete understanding of the psychological vicissitudes of the “shared values” they seek.

Cognitive Influences in Social Contexts

Although the origin of social psychology can be traced to Western intellectual traditions that emphasize social-situational influences on the individual, social psychologists who specialize in social cognition have contributed to our understanding of violence by identifying mental processes involved in social behavior. From a social cognitive perspective, social behavior is viewed as a function of cognitive processes that accompany situational variables. Hence, violent behavior takes place in a social context and is largely a product of the way in which the individual interprets and processes social information. The bully in the schoolyard, for example, may be particularly attentive to threatening cues in the social environment and have a repertoire of violent mental scripts that can be readily accessed from memory and quickly executed behaviorally.

The importance of social cognition is highly visible in the use of political propaganda by groups in armed conflict. These groups tend to create mirror enemy images that portray the “other” as thoroughly aggressive, diabolical, and untrustworthy. Often, the images are dehumanizing, depicting the other as subhuman and rapacious. In World War II, for example, both the United States and Japan used enemy images of each other to prepare troops to kill. After all, it is easier to kill someone who seems savage and subhuman. In the Rwandan genocide, enemy images were conspicuous in the calls over the radio for Hutus to kill their implacable enemies, the Tutsis, who were described as “cockroaches.”

Cognitive factors also influence the decisions made by leaders. In situations in which there are high levels of fear and threat, the complexity of thought tends to decline. People tend to be cognitive misers who limit potential burdens on their mental resources by adopting simplified views of the world. In violent conflict, groups tend to adopt black-and-white views of the Good Us versus the Bad Them, with each group typically deemphasizing the diversity of views that may in fact exist among the members of the opposition. Leaders, too, show a marked propensity to simplify when under stress. In analyzing the complexity of leaders' speeches and writing before and during crises, Philip Tetlock has established that in the heat of a crisis, leaders show less tolerance of ambiguity, tend not to explore diverse arguments regarding the crisis, and tend to overlook differences that exist among the opposition. The net result can be oversimplification and misguided action (Tetlock, 1985).

When facing a complex situation involving much uncertainty, people use, without conscious planning, fallible heuristics or shortcuts for making difficult decisions. Leaders, for example, may judge a current threatening situation by its similarity to the patterns of conflict that are most available in memory. If the Hitler-at-Munich pattern is highly salient and available in memory, then leaders may judge attempts at negotiation as inappropriate since attempts to negotiate with or to appease Hitler had disastrous consequences.

Overview of Social Cognitive Theory

With the publication of Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory in 1986, Albert Bandura advanced a view of human functioning that accords a central role to cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory, and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and change(Bandura, 1986). From this social cognitive perspective, human thought and action are viewed as products of a dynamic interplay among personal, behavioral, and environmental influences. How people interpret the results of their own behaviors informs and alters their environments and the personal factors they possess that, in turn, inform and alter subsequent behaviors. The view that (1) personal factors in the form of cognition, affect, and biological events; (2) behaviors; and (3) environmental influences create interactions that result in a triadic reciprocality is the foundation of Bandura's conception of reciprocal determinism.

The reciprocal nature of the determinants of human functioning in social cognitive theory makes it possible for therapeutic and counseling efforts to be directed at personal, environmental, or behavioral factors. Strategies for increasing well-being can be aimed at improving emotional, cognitive, or motivational processes; increasing behavioral competencies; or altering the social conditions under which people live and work. In school, for example, teachers face the challenge of improving the academic learning and confidence of their students. Using social cognitive theory as a framework, teachers can work to improve their students’ emotional states, correct their faulty self-beliefs and habits of thinking (personal factors), improve their academic skills and self-regulatory practices (behaviors), and alter the school and classroom structures that may work to undermine student success (environmental factors).

Social cognitive theory is rooted in a view of human agency in which individuals are proactively engaged in their own development and can make things happen by their actions. Individuals are imbued with certain capabilities that define what it is to be human. Primary among these are the capabilities to symbolize, plan alternative strategies (forethought), learn through vicarious experience, self-regulate, and self-reflect. For Bandura, however, the capability that is most distinctly human is that of self-reflection; hence, it is a prominent feature of social cognitive theory. Through self-reflection, people make sense of their experiences, explore their own cognitions and self-beliefs, engage in self-evaluation, and alter their thinking and behavior accordingly.

Interventions for Social Recovery: The State of the Art

Currently, specific treatments aiming at a functional recovery of social cognition are divided into two groups: (1) SST, derived from behaviorism; and (2) skills training based on promoting social cognition through specific exercises. SST aims at developing social skills through a systematic training in the production of skillful social behaviors. The SST model is based on theories of behavior modification (Bandura, 1969) and social learning (Bandura, 1977). In this theoretical context, social behavior shares many aspects with other types of behavior: learning occurs through repetition and imitation, is sensitive to reinforcement, and can be decomposed into molecular units of behavior. For example, the social behavior involved in greeting others can be divided into units such as: smiling, opening the eyes widely, reducing the interpersonal space, making greeting gestures (e.g., shaking hands, hugging, and so on), or displaying formal greetings.

In a typical SST session the target skill (e.g., ‘greeting others’) has been divided into behavioral units; practiced role-plays through modeling; and finally carried out in role-plays using the classical techniques of behavior modification: prompting, shaping, chaining, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and, of course, differential reinforcement. The effectiveness of SST is controversial: some past meta-analyses confirm its validity (Benton and Schroeder, 1990; Dilk and Bond, 1996), whereas other more recent meta-analyses reveal its limitations and weaknesses (Kurtz and Mueser, 2008; Pilling et al., 2002; Tungpunkom et al., 2012).

In contrast to SST, a number of more recent treatments have sought to address deficits in social behavior from a social cognitive perspective (Penn et al., 2007; Moritz and Woodward, 2007). Social cognition refers to a number of different abilities involved in thinking about social exchanges. In schizophrenia research, these include affect recognition, theory of mind, and attributional style (Brekke and Nakagami, 2010; Kern et al., 2009). To date, one of the most studied social cognition interventions is the Social Cognition and Interaction Training (SCIT). SCIT is a 20–24 weekly group manualized intervention that uses psychoeducation, drill-and-repeat practice, heuristic rehearsal, strategy games, and homework assignments to remediate social cognitive impairments (e.g., emotion perception and theory of mind) and biases (e.g., attributional style) often present in schizophrenia. Further, SCIT offers laboratory-based exercises in which people learn to recognize emotions in faces presented on a computer better (Penn et al., 2007; see Chapter 9; Social Cognition and Interaction Training: The Role of Metacognition). Although several studies have shown the efficacy of SCIT and other methods, we suggest that these interventions may not go far enough in two different ways.

First, the skills SCIT targets, such as recognizing a specific emotion or evaluating how a conclusion was reached, are necessary, but not sufficient for social understanding. Beyond identifying others’ mental states and reasoning about them, social awareness also requires self-reflectivity, care about others, and the management of emotional arousal that often follows intersubjective experience. To understand another person, one has to do more than recognize emotion in an expression; one has to also think about how one may have been in a similar situation as the other person, empathize with the other person in the sense of caring about him/her beyond just guessing his/her emotion, and then managing any resulting feelings.

Second, computer-based social cognition learning does not bring with it the emotional experiences that real life carries. We suggest that learning about the thoughts and feelings of others has to take place in person in order to be ecologically valid. In order for one to develop his/her abilities to make sense of social situations more effectively, one needs to practice those abilities in complex and stimulating interpersonal situations that can be practically related to the real world. Clinicians may need to help patients with schizophrenia work to recover or develop the abilities to make sense of social interactions through practice in contexts with actual people who have different feelings in the moment, and to adopt new ways of behaving through an understanding of mental states in situations where they are emotionally involved. We emphasize that our approach is not antithetical to other social cognition treatments, but perhaps could complement that approach.

Antisocial thinking, attitudes and criminal thinking

Attitudes can be important determinants of behavior. In the theory, research, assessment, and treatment of violent offenders, attitude is often used as a synonym for other terms, such as excuses, justifications, rationalizations, neutralizations, and moral disengagement. There is a growing interest in the potential influence of attitude on violent behavior (e.g., Maruna & Mann, 2006; Polaschek, Collie, & Walkey, 2004). More specifically, attitudes are typically defined as evaluations of people, events, or behaviors (e.g., Fazio, 2007). In a metaanalysis of criminal-behavior prediction, it was found that antisocial attitudes and associates provided the strongest correlations with criminal conduct of the six groups of risk factors. In addition to community criminal behavior, antisocial attitudes were found to be among the strongest of 16 domains in the prediction of prison misconduct (Gendreau, Goggin, & Law, 1997). There is limited understanding of the developmental relationship between antisocial beliefs and attitudes and antisocial behavior in childhood and adolescence. Initial findings from cross-sectional, correlational studies demonstrate significant increases in antisocial beliefs and attitudes through late childhood and adolescence (Butler, Leschied, & Fearon, 2007).

From a social–cognitive perspective, deviant cognitions that develop in youth play a significant role in the development of stable antisocial tendencies (Fontaine, 2008). Integrated social–cognitive information-processing models elaborate two distinct but interacting domains that are essential to the development and preservation of antisocial behavior in youth (Fontaine, Rijsdijk, McCrory, & Viding, 2010): Off-line latent cognitive structures comprise beliefs, attitudes, and values that endorse antisocial behavior. On-line cognitive decision-making processes comprise a series of mental operations that occur “in the here and now” and within a specific context, such as making a biased hostile attribution (Dodge & Coie, 1987); while the influence of off-line latent cognitive structures is believed to be indirect, “on-line” processes have a direct impact on a young person’s emotions and behavior (Fontaine, 2008; Li, Fraser, & Wike, 2013).

Another factor that is central to criminal behavior is antisocial cognitions (Andrews, Bonta, & Hoge, 1990a; Andrews et al., 1990b), and specifically criminal thinking (i.e., a generally irresponsible way of thinking that promotes a criminal lifestyle) (e.g., Mandracchia, Morgan, Garos, & Garland, 2007). Generally, criminals think differently from noncriminals in that criminals demonstrate antisocial thinking, as well as errors in how they process information. Morgan, Batastini, Murray, Serna, and Porras (2015) examined whether criminal thinking is a process dependent on changing internal or external states (i.e., whether criminal thinking is fluid or static). Their findings provided support for criminal thinking as a fixed, trait-dependent construct.

Beck (1976) suggested that dysfunctional thinking operates specifically in automatic thoughts. He posited that automatic thoughts occur reflexively (i.e., spontaneously and unintentionally) and are characterized by negative self-evaluations and self-perceptions. Ellis (1974), on the other hand, posited that maladaptive behavior stems from irrational beliefs. He described irrational beliefs as being dogmatically held, logically unfounded, and absolutistic, and that they create a sense of catastrophe. Building on these early conceptualizations, more recent literature on the potential negative impact of cognitive errors has included a focus on identifying and modifying assumptions (Beck, 2005), core beliefs (Beck, 1995, 2005), schemas (Martin & Young, 2010), and attributions (Laird & Metalsky, 2009).

Research has shown that individuals brought up in an environment encouraging antisocial behavior and criminal acts are more likely to incorporate criminal thinking and attitudes into their cognitive style and consequently are more likely to commit crime (e.g., Holsinger, 1999). Evidence has indicated that criminal thinking and antisocial attitudes and cognitions predict criminal behavior (Holsinger, 1999; Walters, 2005). Various aspects of proactive and reactive criminal thinking have been differentially linked to certain types of criminal behavior. For example, it appears that sexual offenses are primarily associated with proactive criminal thinking styles.

The identification of specific thinking patterns associated with problematic emotional reactions and dysfunctional behaviors is at the core of CBT interventions. Cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBT) are considered as the most empirically validated treatments for a large number of disorders (Butler, Chapman, Forman, & Beck, 2006).

The Creative Personality in Organizations

Research has been undertaken within the organizational context to investigate what personality components are more conducive to creative team work. In general, organizations rely more and more on the use of teams for problem-solving and product development (Baer, Oldham, Costa-Jacobsohn, & Hollingshead, 2008). In the research literature, there are indications that team diversity is conducive to creativity (often diversity in competence more than in personality, e.g., described in Paulus & Nijstad, 2003), but also that more homogenous teams are superior (Baer et al., 2008; Taggar, 2001). However, regardless of the composition of the team, several studies have emphasized the importance of the beliefs of the members, group norms and the processes taking place during the creative group work, and indicated that these will affect the group’s performance as much as the individuals’ personalities. These studies thus combine ideas from the social-cognitive perspective and the trait approach. Adarves-Yorno, Postmes, and Haslam (2007) showed that group identity made individuals produce creative products in line with group norms, whereas those members who had a stronger personal identity went against the group norm. Another research group demonstrated that group norms can be oriented towards originality or conformity and that this fact influenced to what extent creative work was actually performed (Bechtoldt, De Dreu, Nijstad, Choi, & Nijstad, 2010).

Concerning research on what specific personalities are more likely to produce creative team work, Taggar (2001) found that the more creative group members that were included in a team, the more creative results were obtained. However, again this was only true if the processes taking place in the group were team creativity-relevant ones, such as efficient management, communication and conflict resolution. In accordance with what is said about the five-factor traits, scholars have also demonstrated that people with certain traits (high in openness, extraversion, and low in conscientiousness) contribute to group creativity to a greater extent (Baer et al., 2008; Robert & Cheung, 2010). However, Baer et al.’s study also showed that the belief concerning the effectiveness of the group was important for the increase of creativity level. When team creative confidence was high, the creativity of the group increased quadratically as the number of members characterized by high openness, high extraversion or low conscientiousness increased. There is also contradicting evidence put forward by other research groups, who assert that a combination of different personalities is conducive to creativity—in other words group diversity stimulates creativity (West, 2003).

Organizational creativity has also been studied from the perspective of the Dynamic Process Approach. In a project studying 149 teachers at a new university in Sweden (Andersson & Ryhammar, 1999; Ekvall & Ryhammar, 1999; Ryhammar & Andersson, 2001; Ryhammar & Smith, 1999), variables related to the individual (creativity, defense mechanisms, extroversion) and to the organization (for example creative climate) were investigated. Both questionnaires and percept-genetic, process instruments were used. One of the results found that individual creativity as measured by the CFT was associated with opinions of the organization as a place of openness and with experiences of diversity. Also, anxiety and defense repression correlated positively with creativity, while so-called identity defense, for example denial, was negatively correlated. In a perceptual test measuring the subjective/objective dimension, people with high creativity more often got scores on the two extreme poles in this test, that is, they were reacting either very subjectively, or with extreme objectification of their perceptual world. Another result was that the creative people regarded a high workload as stimulating to their creativity. Maybe the fact that it was a new, expanding workplace contributed to the positive experience of workload (as discussed in Smith & Carlsson, 2006).

The discussion of whether changing an environment or organizational climate will make people more creative has been dealt with in more detail in another chapter of this handbook (West & Sacramen, this volume), but here we may ask the question whether a change of creativity can be produced through interventions with the goal to change personality.

In a comparison between 70 studies of different creativity training programs, Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004) found that those aimed at problem-solving training and divergent thinking training were the most effective. Those creativity training efforts with the goal of changing people’s personalities into more creative ones were less effective, even though all the creativity training that Scott and colleagues analyzed had some effect, meaning that the sessions indeed improved the creative capabilities of the participants. Creativity training sessions in work life were more successful than those set up in schools in this comparison. The largest effects were seen in training sessions in small groups (with a maximum of 12). In Karwowski and Soszynski’s (2008) comparison between 137 different creativity development programs in Poland, the largest effect was demonstrated by those programs focusing on the development of imaginative skills and verbal skills.

Situational Precipitation of Aggressive Behavior

Aggressive behavior varies not only between individuals, but also between situations. Four major influences will be summarized briefly in this section: alcohol consumption, exposure to violence in the media, high temperatures, and availability of firearms (for a full review of the situational variables affecting the likelihood of aggression see Krahé, 2021).

9 Future directions and conclusions

As humans are complex and dynamic, the explanations for many behaviours (including physical activity) are likely to be equally complex. For example, a child may engage in physical activity due to some combination of the positive reinforcement she receives from her parents (i.e., operant conditioning influences), her attitudes toward exercise (i.e., from a social-cognitive perspective), the opportunities within her surrounding environment to be active (i.e., social-ecological influences), and her level of self-determined motivation to be active (i.e., from an organismic/humanistic perspective). Thus, integrated theoretical frameworks across the traditions noted above likely serve physical activity science best. In essence, all of the above noted frameworks have some integration, yet several new models and adapted frameworks continue to serve this purpose. For example, one of the cornerstones of the social cognitive framework is the intention construct as the primary antecedent of behaviour, yet this relationship is modest (McEachan et al., 2011) and asymmetrical (Rhodes & de Bruijn, 2013). Specifically, while nearly all people who engage in physical activity have positive intentions to do so, only half of those with good intentions succeed in actually performing the behaviour (Rhodes & de Bruijn, 2013). The need to bridge intention into behaviour, has thus spawned several recent theoretical models that include the merging of different traditions, such as the health action process approach (Schwarzer, 2008), action phases model (Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987), integrated behaviour change model (Hagger & Chatzisarantis, 2014), multi-process action control framework (Rhodes, 2017), I-Change model (de Vries, Mesters, van de Steeg, & Honing, 2005) and temporal self-regulation theory (Hall & Fong, 2007), among others. All of these approaches have shown some preliminary effectiveness (Rhodes & Yao, 2015) and may be useful for physical activity promotion in the next decade.

In particular, the health action process approach (HAPA; Schwarzer, 2008) has seen considerable application in the physical activity domain over the last several years. HAPA was developed to address the intention-behaviour gap with pre-intentional constructs identical to the traditional social cognitive approach, yet it includes volitional constructs of action (where, when, how) and coping (contingencies when barriers may arise) planning as well as self-efficacy to maintain the behaviour and recover from relapse. Observational and experimental evidence suggests that the volitional constructs of HAPA, in particular, may help augment physical activity intentions as well as maintenance self-efficacy (Carraro & Gaudreau, 2011; Rhodes & Yao, 2015; Zhang, Zhang, Schwarzer, & Hagger, 2018). For example, Carraro and Gaudreau (2013) found that interventions focused on action (φ = 0.43) and coping (φ = 0.39) planning amounted to small effect size changes in physical activity compared to control groups who did not receive the intervention.

Theoretical frameworks are also developing by their level of abstraction and the functions they serve for physical activity science. The social cognitive tradition or humanistic tradition, for example are generally micro-theories, focused on critical interrelationships among their key constructs (i.e., all variables defined and paths accounted for, high detail). The socioecological framework, by contrast, is a macro-theory that has breadth at the expense of precision (i.e., amorphous and all-inclusive with few defined paths). As our discipline matures, these approaches differentiate some of the basic and applied science needs required to understand and promote physical activity. For example, micro-theories, with their focus on mediating pathways among constructs to explain the chain of events and conditions for why physical activity occurs, are often not a critical focus for health promoters, who merely want to know how and what to use to change the behaviour. In our observations, this has often created a derision toward theory among the community of applied health promoters. On the other hand, macro-level theoretical approaches, in our observations, are derided by basic scientists as being too simplistic or invalid due to a lack of mechanistic (internal) validity. The most noteworthy example of this case in physical activity science has been the transtheoretical model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1982), which has arguably been the most successful framework to upscale to the applied sector of physical activity promotion but has seen due criticism among basic scientists (Nigg et al., 2011).

A recognition of the level of scale and purpose of the theoretical framework in physical activity may alleviate these previous critiques. Indeed, what may be most useful to bridge the basic and applied sectors of physical activity are meso-level theoretical frameworks (Rebar & Rhodes, in press; Rhodes, 2017). Meso-level theoretical approaches contain constructs with a strong evidence base and some operational paths for understanding behaviour change but they are built for applied science and health promoters more than basic scientists. The behaviour change wheel is an example of this approach (Michie et al., 2011), as it includes key constructs thought to determine behaviour (ability, motivation, opportunity) that can be subdivided to particular intervention techniques. The theoretical domains framework is another example of a meso-level approach to using theory for implementation science (Cane, O’Connor, & Michie, 2012). Relatedly, Lubans et al. (2017) presents a model of evidence-based principles and aligned teaching strategies targeted toward practitioners for simple delivery of effective physical activity interventions. These types of frameworks represent important future approaches to theory in physical activity because they may service implementation while still remaining accountable to scientific scrutiny and revision.

Finally, the most critical future impact on physical activity theory design, testing, and refinement may come from technological developments applied to research. The theories noted above have largely been created by theorists using deductive processes and designed for face-to-face clinical or education-based (small group) intervention with a limited series of assessments. Analyses that utilize big data and real-time data may assist to develop dynamic theoretical models, create unique insights into theory development via inductive approaches, as well as lead to intervention design that can more effectively capture the momentary idiographic needs of people who are attempting to increase physical activity. Dynamic models explore how psychological processes unfold over time and occur within or across contexts and individuals (Wright & Hopwood, 2016). They are particularly well-suited for the study of physical activity because of the shifts from decision, to adoption, and then to behavioural maintenance (Rhodes, 2017). In addition to the dynamic nature of physical activity itself, predictors of physical activity may vary through time and context, which is not captured through static assessments (Dunton, 2017, 2018). These models also allow for the examination of idiographic behaviour changes (i.e., a person’s change over time) that may be more accurate for testing the tenets of a theory and precision in intervention compared to group (nomothetic) behaviour changes (Dunton, 2017). Specifically, there has been a growing body of work using dynamic models by leveraging mobile technology to develop Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions (Dunton, 2017, 2018; Nahum-Shani et al., 2016; Spruijt-Metz et al., 2015). Exploring the effectiveness of this approach to further develop and refine current theories and interventions has considerable promise.

In summary, the health benefits of physical activity are well recognized but many people in developed countries are not physically active enough to reap optimal health benefits. Theories of physical activity are essential to understand behaviour change and provide an organizing framework for effective intervention. The purpose of this paper was to overview the main theoretical frameworks that have been applied to understand and change physical activity over the last three decades. The dominant framework for understanding physical activity has been in the social cognitive tradition, and it has provided valuable information on key constructs linked to physical activity such as self-efficacy and intention as well as demonstrating changes to behaviour when applied in intervention. The humanistic framework for understanding physical activity has seen a surge in research in the last decade and has demonstrated initial effectiveness in both explaining and intervening on behaviour through autonomous motivation and meeting basic human needs. The most recent and understudied framework for understanding physical activity is through dual process models. These have promise by complementing the prior frameworks with better understanding of non-conscious and hedonic determinants of physical activity and alternate approaches to intervention. Finally, the individual-level focus of all three of these approaches is contrasted by the socioecological framework, which has seen considerable research attention in the last 15 years and focuses on the interplay between multiple levels of influence (from individual to organizational and environmental policy). The socioecological model has been instrumental in understanding the role of the built environment in physical activity behaviour and critical to shaping public health policy in government. Despite the strengths of all four frameworks, we noted several weaknesses of each approach at present and highlighted several newer applications of integrated models and dynamic models that may serve to improve our understanding and promotion of physical activity.