Research has established a reliable relationship between self-awareness and causal attribution, i.e., heightened attention toward the self increases attributions of responsibility to the self. It was hypothesized that increased availability or accessibility of self-related cognition would increase causal attributions to the self, although this…

The potential for feelings of hopelessness and depression in the aged is well documented. Although studies have examined the role of perceived control in ameliorating depression in the institutionalized elderly, no research has actually measured the perceived causal attributions among depressed, hopeless and/or institutionalized elderly…

Suggests that the composing process is a kind of mental trip, a development of ideas not merely determined by one's limitations but conditioned, rather, by some ongoing circumstances not easily commandeered by the ego. (HOD)

The interactive effects of implicit normative and explicit situational consensus information were examined regarding the processes of causal attribution and evaluation. Stimulus items were single sentence descriptions of antisocial and prosocial behaviors representing the extremes of high and low normative consensus in each behavior category, as…

Examined the effects of perceived control and close alternative outcomes on counterfactual generation (thoughts of what could have been). Subjects played a "wheel of fortune" game in which they controlled one of two wheels. Results supported the idea that people generate counterfactuals about events over which they have perceived…

Examined impact of outcome controllability on counterfactual thoughts (thoughts of what could have been). Two studies showed that outcome controllability affected counterfactual direction: thoughts on how things could have been better were more frequent following controllable outcomes, and thoughts on how things could have been worse followed…

Efforts to understand mediating and maintaining factors associated with dysfunction of alcoholics have produced competing explanations and conflicting, overlapping constructs. To clarify the relationship between mental health and attributional patterns among women, the attributional patterns of alcoholic, depressed, and control females in response…

The notion that life stresses and personality have an interactive role in illness is part of the wisdom of the ages. Most past research has studied either life stresses or personality. A model for understanding health/illness status is presented that includes stressful life events and the resistance resources of personality, social supports,…

Typical learned helplessness research has involved the presentation of non-contingent, aversive events followed by measures of performance on subsequent tasks; recent investigations have focused on the effect of non-contingent rewards. To examine the effects of non-contingent rewards on children, two studies were conducted, in which children were…

Studied conditions and consequences, the characteristics of agentic (volitional, teleological) human behavior in investigations of weight control, vocational exploration, and eating disorders. Demonstrated the ability of individuals professing eating and exercise problems, to exhibit control; and in separate study examining personality factors and…

Interpersonal power has been defined as the ability of an agent to alter the behavior of a target through means-control, attractiveness, and credibility. To identify and delineate situations of influence in personal relationships, undergraduate students either wrote influence descriptions (N=96), made similarity judgments on the original 96…

Research suggests that primary control increases as humans develop from infancy through middle age and then decreases in old age. To minimize losses, individuals rely on cognitively based secondary control processes in middle and old age. Literature on adult control processes is reviewed. (SLD)