Although cross-sectional studies depict (negative) emotions as both antecedents and consequences of trait procrastination, longitudinal studies examining reciprocal relationships between procrastination and emotions are scant. Yet, investigating reciprocal relationships between procrastination and emotions within long-term frameworks can shed…

Many studies suggest a relationship between education and political participation, but only some address causality. We add to this by re-examining the German case. For identification, we exploit an exogenous increase in compulsory schooling, and use data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The data enable analyses that do not rely…

The relationship between students' subject-specific academic self-concept and their academic achievement is one of the most widely researched topics in educational psychology. A large proportion of this research has considered cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs), oftentimes synonymously referred to as reciprocal effects models (REMs), as the gold…

Research in moral education demonstrates the pattern referred to as happy victimising (HV) does not emerge only among children. Adults also transgress moral rules and might feel good doing so; however, research reveals the HV pattern emergence is context specific. In contrast to findings among young children in whom the HV pattern was interpreted…

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 study contributes to a developmental approach focusing on emotions as being of key significance in explaining the Happy Victimizer pattern (HV pattern) among adults. Based on findings from our own research on moral emotions within the Happy Victimizer paradigm, we claim that a purely cognitive approach to explain the HV is overly narrow.…

Students' causal attributions play an important role in recent studies due to their effects on academic self-concept and performances. Most common causal attributions are students' ability, effort, task difficulty, and chance. The present study aims at identifying students' preferred causal attributions of failure and success while experimenting.…

Though panel data are increasingly used in the social sciences, the question whether repeatedly participating in a panel survey affects respondents' attitudes and (response) behaviour is still largely unsolved. Drawing on a model of associative networks that is extended by assumptions on survey satisficing, we present a theoretical framework that…

This study investigated patterns of reasoning regarding different types of moral transgressions and different measures of moral development in children 6-8 years of age (N = 130). The findings documented different patterns of reasoning for each measure and for transgressions including different moral principles. Children distinguished between…

The teleological bias, a major learning obstacle, involves explaining biological phenomena in terms of purposes and goals. To probe the teleological bias, researchers have used acceptance judgement tasks and preference judgement tasks. In the present study, such tasks were used with German high school students (N = 353) for 10 phenomena from human…

This explorative, qualitative study examines the use and effectiveness of resources of multilinguality, with particular regard to the development of causal links in geography classes. Contentual and linguistic strategies of multilingual pupils in creating causal links were collected and evaluated systematically. This was done by means of a…

A great deal of research shows that the way in which children attribute causes to their successes and failures in school has implications for the development of their academic self-concept (ASC). The most common attributions are ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. The present study asked 68 elementary school children aged seven to eight…

Learners' academic self-concepts and attributions have been widely evidenced to substantially regulate their educational development. Developmentally, they will not only operate in a mutually reinforcing manner. Rather, self-concepts will directly affect learners' outcome attributions in a particular academic setting. Current research in the…

Executive functions (EFs) may help children to regulate their food-intake in an "obesogenic" environment, where energy-dense food is easily available. There is mounting evidence that overweight is associated with diminished hot and cool EFs, and several longitudinal studies found evidence for a predictive effect of hot EFs on children's…

This article addresses the causes of underachievement in scholastic education. Whereas many studies have been able to show that motivational deficits provide an explanation for underachievement, little research has yet explored the possible influences of deficits in fine motor skills. The aim of our empirical study was, therefore, to investigate…