Parents' cultural beliefs are associated with their children's socialization and development. Researchers have examined these associations through the lens of parents' ethnotheories, which refer to parents' implicit beliefs about children's developmentally appropriate behavior. In contrast to prior work focused on parents' ethnotheories of…

Despite policy initiatives to ban use of corporal punishment, some teachers still use punitive classroom management strategies in countries like Indonesia. With the urgent need for teachers to use evidence-based strategies to address challenging behaviours, it is important to understand the factors that may predict teachers' likelihood to employ…

Autistic meltdowns have been explored from the perspectives of parents, but there is a paucity of research on the experience of meltdowns from the autistic perspective. Little is known about how adults experience these events. In this descriptive phenomenological study, we conducted online interviews with 32 autistic adults on the experience of…

Little is known about the attributional patterns of caregivers of autistic children, particularly in relation to caregivers of children with other developmental or behavioral disorders. This study examined differences in caregiver attributions of child behavior between three groups: toddlers with (1) Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or ASD concerns;…

In this study, we examined 535 primary classroom teachers' causal attributions about challenging behaviour in West Bengal, India. The participants completed a questionnaire that collected information about their perceptions, causal attribution, and proposed strategies to address a range of challenging behaviours that were presented through five…

In this mixed-methods experiment, we examined the impacts of an externally provided rationale and teachers' own beliefs on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to student misbehavior. Teachers (N = 120) viewed a video describing three instances of a student's misbehavior, then were randomly assigned to receive one of three explanatory…

Multicultural teenagers in South Korea often suffer from psychological difficulties, such as social withdrawal and depression, due to communication difficulties, discrimination, and economic constraints. These emotional problems negatively affect career decision-making. However, little is known about the basic mechanism through which multicultural…

This study seeks to examine the connection between teacher implicit racial attitudes and how teachers label classroom behavioral disruptions. Grounding the research in attribution theory, which humans use in order to make sense of others' behavior through beliefs about locus of causality, stability, and controllability, the current study examined…

Preschool children are developing social and emotional skills, like recognizing and expressing emotions, building relationships with peers and adults, following directions, and solving problems. To develop these skills, young children rely on support from adults, including teachers, who model and teach children social and emotional skills in the…

Across all cultures, parents have intuitive ideas ("ethnotheories") of what undesirable child characteristics are as well as how to explain them. Yet there have been relatively few cross-cultural comparisons of parents' ethnotheories about the nature and causes of child misbehavior. 108 mothers of 5-year-old children from the United…

Although previous research indicates that both parental attributions for child misbehavior and parenting discipline are associated with child problem behavior, there is a lack of research examining the relationship between these variables in parents of young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This study investigated the relations…

Disruptive student behavior is a frequent part of school life, most often shown by male students and related to many negative academic outcomes. In this study, we examined the psychological benefits of engaging in disruptive behavior for low-achieving students from an attributional perspective. In an experimental vignette study of 178 ninth…

This exploratory study considered the impact of a whole school programme to enhance relationships, promote positive behaviour, and reduce teacher stress in a secondary school. The programme was facilitated by the school's educational psychologist (EP) drawing on psychological theory and practice across a range of paradigms (ecosystemic, cognitive,…

Teachers' attributions of student behavior are associated with the decisions they make about how to respond to behavior problems and support their students. This exploratory study investigates teachers' attributions of student externalizing behavior, how attributions vary as a function of teacher and school characteristics, and the association of…

Background: The background which led to the researchers embarking in this research study was that they had noticed that teachers in schools in Eswatini, though they are always trying to ensure good behaviour of learners through positive discipline, maladaptive behaviour is still on the rise in most schools. This status has resulted in compromised…