Documents characteristics of emotions in relation to action and self-perception. Argues that taking affect into account yields a different interpretation of successful achievement-change programs. Also clarifies the differences between ability and effort as perceived causes of success and failure. (Author/GC)

Seventy-five students projected their feelings in eight typical achievement situations. Each student described affective responses to one situation, varying in achievement outcome, task importance, and effort. The 2 x 2 x 2 analysis of variance for affective component scores indicated that perceptions of success/failure accounted for most of the…

Alcoholism is becoming an increasingly significant problem for women. At one time, women rarely drank and the female alcoholic was an anomaly. Estimates of the total number of women alcoholics in the United States today are over 900,000. Women now constitute from 20 to 35% of all alcoholics in this country. This paper attempts to gain…

Educators are becoming increasingly concerned with social psychological variables affecting classroom behavior. This study attempts to determine if the achievement attribution model is supported in an actual classroom setting with college students actually taking an important exam. Participants were 35 volunteers from an introductory social…

After presenting the attributional model, this paper reviews research on individual differences in beliefs about causes of success and failure. Studies illustrating differential performance on achievement-related tasks by individuals who differ in their attributions are reviewed. Causal perceptions of success and failure should be considered, in…

Fifth-grade boys solved sets of achievement-related puzzles, working in pairs in which one succeeded and one failed. Results showed the reward structure of the performance setting was an important determinant of self and interpersonal evaluations. Competitive conditions caused self-punitive behavior for failure outcomes and some ego-enhancing…

The purpose of this study was to examine children's cognitive-attributional and affective response patterns within competitive and individualistic goal structures. Findings showed that effort attributions covaried with outcome in the individualistic structure, whereas luck and outcome covaried in the competitive structure. (Author/GK)

Previous research has shown that different emotions are associated with different attributions. To examine the situational context, i.e., the relationships between attributions and emotions as well as the inter-relationships within emotions and within attributions under separate success and failure conditions, 208 college students performed…

Low self-esteem and depressed individuals tend to have an attributional style of externalizing success and internalizing failure. To evaluate a program developed to help reverse this pattern of responses to be more similar to high self-esteem and nondepressed individuals, subjects were first tested for self-esteem, depression, and attributional…

While little research has been done in the area of shyness and most of that has been descriptive, both theory and research suggest that investigation of expectancy of success and attributional style differences between shy and not-shy individuals is warranted. Very shy (N=49) or not-shy (N=48) female subjects, selected from an initial group of 698…

Employing a cognitive/motivational analysis, a study was undertaken to determine some specific self-perceptions that might contribute to motivational and performance deficits observed in children with reading difficulties. A total of 72 children of relatively good, average, and poor reading ability were assessed on tasks in which success and…

This programmatic series of three studies compares, in British and Hungarian secondary schools, two contrasting conceptualizations of motivation and successively relates them to approaches to learning and studying and then to indices of self-concept and attributions of success and failure. The first conceptualization was developed in Hungary and…

Undergraduates rated their affective reactions to hypothetical test performances under four success conditions. Then, in the role of teachers, they administered rewards to hypothetical students under identical conditions. Both positive self-evaluation and teacher praise were greatest when success followed effort. Perceptions of ability also…

This research explored cognitive-motivational patterns of learning-disabled and nondisabled adolescents by employing the theoretical model of C. S. Dweck, which posits that a "learning goal" orients students toward the development of competence, whereas a "performance goal" orients students toward the documentation of competence, and that these…