To compare hearing and hearing impaired subjects on the certainty of their attributions in relation to unitization and role behavior, 48 hearing impaired and 48 non hearing impaired college students were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: unitization level (fine or gross) and role (in-role or out-of-role). All subjects were given…

Self-handicapping strategies are behaviors or choices of performance settings which allow people to maintain self-esteem by avoiding negative self-relevant attributions. People will behave in such a way that accurate, nonambiguous attributions about their performance cannot be made. Research on self-handicapping has focused on clinically relevant…

Although an event is normally perceived and understood in terms of its location within a temporally ordered network of interconnected causes and effects, there is little data regarding the principles people use in tracing causality for an outcome through immediate, proximal events to prior, distal events. To investigate: (1) the conditions under…

Previous research has investigated the role of personal faith and locus of control in attribution. To expand these investigations to include the role of Quest faith (a personal struggle to understand), 154 undergraduates (57 males, 97 females) participated in a study. Participants were those who ranked themselves at least 4 out of 7 on a…

A selected review of the effects of various grading systems on student motivation at the university level has been summarized and interpreted. Particular emphasis is devoted to contract grading and the identification of student characteristics, both personal and intellectual, that appear to interact favorably with this relatively new grading…

Tests the hypothesis that individuals are more likely to view their own behavior as caused by the situation and the behavior of others as caused by underlying personality dispositions. Subjects were 100 undergraduate students. (MP)

The relation between past history of outcomes and achievement expectancies was examined for 72 elementary school students. (JMB)

Explored whether and to what degree differences between actor and observer were likely to occur in the mutual attributions of 40 married couples regarding the causes of each other's behavior. Results revealed that married couples exhibited mutual idealizing tendencies in both their perceptions and causal attributions. (Author/ABB)

The hypothesis that, when trying to decide whether the person, stimulus, or circumstance is the cause of an event, individuals increasingly select schema-consistent information with increasing age was tested in 106 Turkish 9-, 12-, and 17-year-old subjects. (Author/RH)

Investigated six- to nine-year-old children's understanding of the principle of mutual trust by testing children's ability to make correct blame attributions on the basis of second-order beliefs. Subjects were presented with four story frames. Stories differed in protagonist's second-order belief about another's knowledge. (Author/NH)

Preschoolers were accurate in identifying the situational determinants of others' real emotions. Their strategies for remediating negative affect in others were consistent with the type and attributional basis of the emotion to be altered. Further, they used contextual information in significantly different and meaningful ways across and within…

Employing the multidimensional scaling of similarities data, studied person perception in five adult-aged groups of both male and female respondents. Identified three basic attributes: perceived age, perceived gender, and perceived autonomy. Discerned several generalizable trends for the attributes of perceived age and perceived autonomy.…

Investigated interrelationships between perceived causes of divorce in a sample of 275 males and 336 females. Seven dimensions of divorce, underlying 18 possible contributing causes, were revealed. Significant differences were found between the sexes both in frequencies with which causes were identified and in composition of the seven factors.…

Examined data on students' perceptions of certain academic factors, faculty and advisors, and university factors to interpret reasons for leaving college. Subjects (N=370) completed questionnaires, which showed that students left school most often due to dissatisfaction with academic programs, unclear career objectives, and unclear educational…

Patterns of academic attributions, developed by 225 hearing impaired college students to explain success or failure, closely resembled those of hearing students. The internal factors of ability and effort received the strongest attributional ratings for success, whereas the external and unstable factor or luck received the weakest rating.…