Bulman and Wortman's (1977) study of severe accident victims showed that victims who blamed themselves as the cause of the accident were more likely to receive higher coping ratings from a nurse or social worker, while victims who blamed others for the accident or who saw the accident as avoidable were more likely to be rated as having coped…

Although some researchers have distinguished the concepts of pain and suffering and despite the recent rise of many centers for pain management in the United States, medical educators and practitioners have given little attention to the topic of suffering. In the studies which have been conducted, patients differed in styles of coping with and…

Previous research has indicated that locus of control acts to moderate the effects of stressful events. In this study the role of depressive attributions, negative outcome expectancies, and internal locus of control and their interactions with minor negative events in predicting symptoms of psychological distress were examined. Subjects (N=131)…

The Type A behavior pattern, an independent risk factor for coronary heart disease, has been characterized as a response style for coping with perceived threats to control. Recent research suggests that self-attributional biases may play a role in the Type A's sensitivity to loss of control. Attributional mediation of Type A's experience of stress…

The aim of this study was to investigate self-theories (theories of intelligence, confidence in one's intelligence, internal attribution of failure, academic self-efficacy), specific control, and experiencing of stress by means of a questionnaire for 915 Swedish high school students. Factor analysis yielded 6 stress domains (Workload, Psychosocial…

Systematic investigations have verified the existence of a number of behavioral manifestations of the "Type A" behavior pattern. For example, brief exposure to salient uncontrollable stress has led to enhanced performance by Type A's on a subsequent task, whereas prolonged exposure has lead to performance deterioration. The ongoing experiences of…

Socio-psychological research concerning the relationship between attributions and coping with negative events unrelated to marriage suggests two constructs, blame and perceived control, which may influence conflict resolution in marriage. Married women (N=32) were interviewed in an investigation of attributions of control and blame for marital…

An attributional approach to social behavior traces problems in personal adjustment back to the assumptions individuals formulate about the causes of behaviors and events. Attributional information presented during counseling may have therapeutically beneficial consequences. The effectiveness of attribution therapy was investigated in a factorial…

When people experience failures they search for an explanation of why the failure occurred. The process of seeking an explanatory cause is the basis of attribution theory. Causal attributions include the dimensions of locus of causality (internal or external), stability of the cause over time, and the degree of personal control over the outcome.…

Knowledge of the influence of situational variables and the importance of interaction between person and situation requires a more complex view of illness than that held by many practitioners of psychosomatic medicine, who attribute causality solely to internal and isolated personality traits. Personality was studied, therefore, as a conditioner…

Elementary teachers read vignettes depicting incidents involving (fictional) students who presented chronic behavior problems, and then told how they would respond if the incidents occurred in their classrooms. Responses were coded for attributions about the students and about the teacher's roles in causing and remediating the problem. Teachers…

A survey of 126 female survivors of childhood sexual abuse (n=126) found participants reporting abuse by immediate family members and before age 10 tended make internal attributions of blame when they were children. Reports of childhood internal attributions of blame were significantly predictive of overall adult symptomatology and suicide…