Assessed the causes ascribed by 60 Israeli 4th- and 9th-graders for the Arab-Israeli conflict and the relationship of these attributions to their expectations and emotions. Found that adolescents tended to view causes as more constant or less fluctuating over time than did younger children. Results support an attributional model for understanding…

In interviews, nine managers and nine trainers in health care organizations were asked about organizational changes and causal attributions. Differences appeared in manager and trainer attributions. Judgments were often made with very limited data and there was a lack of communication between trainers and managers. (SK)

Three habituation experiments examined the necessary conditions under which infants invoked the principle of rational action, interpreting behavior as goal-directed action. Found that the rational action principle operated at 9 months but not at 6 months. Perceptual cues indicating agency were not necessary prerequisites for a goal-directed…

This article differentiates a social etiology model focused on identifying the social antecedents of one particular mental disorder from a social consequences model concerned with the overall mental health consequences of various social arrangements. In the social etiology model, people with disorders other than the one particular disorder singled…

This study examined the suicide and risk-taking deaths of adolescents aged 12-17 years between January 1996 and December 2000. The methodology consisted of a case file review of government records. One hundred and eighty-seven adolescents (133 males, 54 females) died by suicide and risk-taking and could be classified into three distinct groups:…

In this article we focus on a major advance of the past few decades: the introduction of mental representation as a tool for understanding social development. We argue that despite the considerable contributions made by this approach, it is underrepresented in social developmental research, except in the area of attachment. We go on to show that…

The authors investigated whether underconfidence in judgments of learning (JOLs) is pervasive across multiple study-test trials as suggested by A. Koriat, L. Sheffer, and H. Ma'ayan (2002) or whether underconfidence with practice (UWP) might be a kind of anchoring-and-adjustment effect, such that the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the UWP effect…

One important property of human object categories is that they define the sets of exemplars to which newly observed properties are generalized. We manipulated the causal knowledge associated with novel categories and assessed the resulting strength of property inductions. We found that the theoretical coherence afforded to a category by…

Causal inference is an important, controversial topic in the social sciences, where it is difficult to conduct experiments or measure and control for all confounding variables. To address this concern, the present study presents a probability index to assess the robustness of a causal inference to the impact of a confounding variable. The…

The author of this article presents his own explanation on the two types of conditioning--respondent and operant. He states that when withdrawal of a negative reinforcer is the contingency that increases the strength of the operant behavior, the stimulus will have a negative emotional response to the experimental chamber. However, when a positive…

The main objective of this study is to investigate the motivation patterns of the two groups of Hong Kong students with different cultural backgrounds and examine the relationship between their motivation to learn English and English attainment. This study adopted the motivation framework of Dorneyi (2001) to investigate to what extent each social…

This paper provides senior leadership teams with a body of literature that will guide the development of "fund-raising strategy" and provides an "interdisciplinary" context for understanding "donor motives". Consideration of these "theoretical foundations" can help shape the fund-raising philosophy of the institution. These perspectives also have…

This article investigates the factors Israeli parents gave as paramount reasons for enrolling their children in a private international school in Israel. A survey and personal interviews were administered to parents designated as host country nationals by school admissions records. Findings revealed that while an English-language education was…

In recent years universities have attempted to articulate the generic outcomes of the educational experiences they provide, beyond the content knowledge that is taught. These outcomes have come to be known as generic skills or generic graduate attributes in Australia, although they are also referred to by a range of other terms. Akin to some…

Procrastination is a prevalent and pernicious form of self-regulatory failure that is not entirely understood. Hence, the relevant conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work is reviewed, drawing upon correlational, experimental, and qualitative findings. A meta-analysis of procrastination's possible causes and effects, based on 691 correlations,…