Incorporating Elkind's (1979) construct of the personal fable, this investigation focused on the relationship between self-concept and projected attachments to a distant object (i.e., a favorite celebrity). In a repeated measures design, 79 male and female 5th, 8th, and 11th graders and college sophomores completed a set of personality scales,…

Children's interpretations of social experiences were compared to adults' interpretations of the same experiences in a study involving 151 children between 6 and 12 years of age and the mothers of a subsample of 43 of the children. Seventy-six participating children were asked to describe some of their social experiences and generate attributions…

Public reactions to rape affect victims in a variety of ways and have implications for psychological services and legal adjudication of rape defendants. To investigate reactions to rape, 144 undergraduates were randomly assigned to a 2 (male versus female subjects) x 2 (victim with versus without rape history) x 3 (high versus medium versus low…

Recent research in achievement has focused on sex differences found in locus of standards, conceptual focus, and expectations for success. To examine the nature of sex differences and their relationship to achievement domains, 439 college students (197 females, 242 males) were asked to write an account of an achievement or failure. They then…

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…

Although homelessness is not a new phenomenon, the number of homeless people today has fostered mobilization on their behalf by public and private sectors. Principal factors accepted as contributing to homelessness are inadequate low-cost housing, unemployment, chemical dependency, family violence, and inadequate community services for the…

Attribution research has not yet come to a consensus on the conditions under which it can be expected that women will exhibit less self-serving attributions than men for their performance. An experiment was conducted in which subjects (N=66), who were college students, completed tasks requiring performance. They were instructed either that the…

Shaver's Defensive Attribution concept suggests that subjects who perceive themselves as similar to a rape victim attribute less responsibility to the victim, thus protecting themselves against blame should they ever be victims. Studies have supported this interpretation for females, but have reported difficulty interpreting the responses of…

High-test-anxious individuals have been found to perform less well on cognitive tasks than others of comparable ability. To investigate the relationship between test anxiety and causal attributions following success and failure in an achievement situation, 200 introductory psychology students completed the Test Anxiety Scale (TAS) and were…

The influences of locus of control, awareness of control and metacognition on the use and transfer of a trained strategy were examined. Specifically, it was hypothesized that internal locus of control would be associated with more strategic performance, and that those children who were able to both accurately assess their performance with and…

Most theories of attributions are multidimensional, suggesting that specific causal factors can be classified along such dimensions as internal-external, stable-unstable, or controllable-uncontrollable. To examine the dimensions underlying causal attributions in an educational setting, 345 students who had just received a grade on a major course…

An interview investigation was undertaken in which a group of nurses and a group of technicians reasoned about evidence for the existence of a causal relation in a medical and in a technical case. A statement about the existence of the relation was presented and the subjects were then asked as to what evidence there might and should be behind such…

Attributions affect coping with victimization. Battered women who blame their husbands' moods are less likely to leave than are women who blame their husbands' permanent characteristics for the violence. Abused women often have repeated contacts with crisis intervention workers and the attitudes of those workers may affect the attributions made by…

Early research demonstrating an association between success and the male stereotype and between failure and the female stereotype, and the Bayesian analysis of attribution theory provided the bases for predictions about the effects of gender and performance outcomes on probability estimates of future success. The relation between gender…

Parents of chronically ill children are faced with the difficult task of being vigilant and yet not overprotective of their children. The literature suggests that parents hold a positive bias toward their ill children. Attribution theory gives a framework in which to study parents' ideas about their children's behavior. A study was conducted to…