Recent attempts to predict marital success or failure have explored the explanations couples offer for interpersonal events. To investigate whether positive and negative affect would lead to different causal attributions in a conflict-resolution conversation, 20 married couples were asked to observe a conflict-resolution and a control conversation…

Investigates a proposed four-stage developmental sequence that describes how children explain changes in sad and angry feelings and how their ability to understand is related to their theories of how feelings change. (HOD)

Recent research on teachers' expectations has begun to explore the factors underlying the link between expectations and performance. To investigate the relationship between the affective responses of teachers and students' attributions regarding effort versus ability, 130 college students (66 male, 64 female) were instructed in solving anagrams…

Proposes and tests an attributional model of parent social cognition and examines parents'inferences about why everyday child behaviors occur and what consequences these inferences may have for socialization. (HOD)

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that variations in physical attractiveness elicit different evaluative and behavioral responses. To assess differences in affective responses to variations in physical attractiveness and the affect of sex on those responses, 76 college students (31 male and 45 female) viewed colored slides of an…

Both cognitive and learned helplessness models of depression stress the importance of low self-esteem in the etiology of depression and depressive symptomatology. To investigate the correlations and causal relationship of low self-esteem to depressive cognition, equal groups of low, medium, and high self-esteem college students (N=135; 89 female,…

Investigates children's person-by-situation knowledge of probable causes of emotion in self and in others, and compares this to adults' construals. Shows that children can generate contextual explanations for affective states in self and others that are both shared by other children and adults and selectively related to different kinds of…

Two major topic areas related to the affective half of prescriptions in mathematics are explored. The first area focuses on stationary or general information about motivation which provides an important backdrop as a prelude to formulating useful individual affective prescriptions. Several observations about stationary motivational variables…

The attributions of success and failure in a course in nursing research design and statistics were measured using a modified version of the Mathematics Attribution Scale. Eight subscales were formed by combining hypothetical success or failure events paired with each attribution category. The scales were success-task, success-environment,…

Longitudinal study examined effect of children's gender on tendencies of mothers to use specific antecedents in ascribing causal explanations for their children's sixth grade mathematics performance. Path analyses showed that, for both mothers of boys and mothers of girls, maternal perceptions of child performance were associated with…