Based on a modification of Berglas and Jones' (1978) design, conditions of contingent and noncontingent success and failure were manipulated to determine when and why individuals choose to adopt self-handicapping strategies. Male undergraduates (N=76) were informed that they were participating in a study investigating the effects of music on…

Subjects in five stress groups were threatened with electric shock while subjects in a sixth group were not. In one of the stress groups subjects were encouraged to misattribute (i.e., project) their feelings from the threat of shock to the experimenter instead of to the shock, while subjects in the remaining stress groups were not encouraged to…

This study examined the influence of an individual's attributions upon the type of tasks that individuals would select. Questions guiding this study concerned the predictability (congruence) of tasks from attributions, the consistency of this task-attribution congruency, and the generalizability of the results. Subjects were 801 students drawn…

Characteristics of the situation in which a fear-arousing communication is received affect the effectiveness of the communication. The influence of situational factors affecting a recipient's interpretation of the arousal induced by communication were investigated with smokers (N=37) who were exposed to a fear-arousing anti-smoking movie. Prior to…

For many years researchers have investigated the relationship between alcohol consumption and human aggression. A "policy-capturing" methodology was used to determine how judgments of responsibility for aggressive behavior are influenced by information about a person's alcohol consumption, sex, and degree of injury to a victim. Male subjects (N=8)…

A formal model is presented that decomposes the attribution of personal dispositions into identification and dispositional inference processes. Two illustrative experiments trace the processing of behavioral and situational information at the identification and dispositional inference stages and examine attributions as a joint product of the…

The question of whether special education students exhibit more learned helpless behavior and a more external locus of control than regular students is examined. The effects of these psychological conditions on school success are considered, and programs for alleviating learned helplessness and establishing a more internal locus of control are…

Examined whether spouses' attributions for partner behavior are related to their behavior by assessing their attributions and observing the problem-solving discussions of cohabitating couples (n=52) in which neither spouse was depressed or distressed, the wife was depressed and both spouses were distressed, and the wife was not depressed and both…

Employing measures of attributional styles and metacognitive reading behaviors, a study investigated whether a relationship exists between passive reading behaviors and extreme attributional styles (learned helplessness) in college students on academic probation. Attributional style and metacognitive strategies exhibited while reading college text…

Argues for a greater and more explicit use of evolutionary theory in psychology courses. Provides examples of ways that this strategy can help students think critically about classic psychological theories, understand the importance of narrower domain-specific theories, and comprehend the rationales behind cross-species comparison in psychology.…