Explored open-ended attributions for success and failure of relatively younger and older men in social and academic situations using between-subjects design. Findings from 109 college students showed that respondents were more likely to make attributions that combined age with other attributional categories than attributions solely to target's…

Preschoolers completed stories about fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and surprise by explaining why a protagonist felt a particular emotion or what the protagonist did when he felt the emotion. Children distinguished causes from consequences for most emotions. Accuracy was not increased when an emotion was specified by a facial expression rather…

Incarcerated male murderers manifested consistent changes in attitudes toward treatment efficacy and their culpability as function of participating in 12-week anger management groups. Four qualitatively different stages were evident during treatment as prisoners' resistive responses were actively encouraged: initial apathy, emerging interest in…

Mothers attributed their children's outcomes to either child-rearing practices, genetics, or environment. It was predicted that mothers of only children and gifted children would attribute more importance to child rearing than would mothers of multiple children and special education children. Predictions were supported across academic, social, and…

A study of 64 mothers and their 3- to 8-year-old children examined mothers' attributions, affect, and proposed behavioral responses regarding 2 forms of noncompliant behavior, direct defiance and passive noncompliance. Findings indicated that mothers regarded children's direct defiance as more intentional and dispositional than passive…

Investigated age differences from early childhood to adulthood in the capacity to understand--in a psychologically meaningful way--traits in stories wherein main characters perform actions based on a positive, negative, or incidental motive that result in an emotional consequence for another character. Found that even 5- to 6-year-olds made trait…

Discusses problems with performance evaluations in academic libraries and examines attribution theory, a sociopsychological theory which helps explain how biases may arise in the performance-evaluation process and may be responsible for producing serious and unrecognized inequities. Considers fairness in performance evaluation and differential…

Describes general components of attribution theory as it applies to social motivation and behavior in children. Reviews research on the subject and its application in context of best practices, cognitive behavioral model of social-skills training. Details use of attributional assessment, modeling, and coaching/reframing for each phase of training.…

Focuses on children's perceptions of the causes, signs, and aftermath of conflict, as well as of fairness and gender differences. Reports the outcome of focus group interviews with second graders through high school students. Describes students responses and uses them to support the idea of peer mediation programs. (DSK)

Studied how achievement motives and incentive values were related to attribution for 166 advanced education majors in Norway. As expected, success-oriented persons attributed positive events more internally, stably, and globally, and negative events more externally, unstably, and specifically, than did failure-avoidant persons. (SLD)

Elementary school teachers (N=200) were assessed about their explanatory attribution and preferred practices regarding four school behavior problems. Teacher burnout was assessed by Maslach Burnout Inventory. Results show that teacher misbehavior-related attributions and preferred practices differentiate significantly the burnout levels…

Examined the influence of victim dress, perceiver gender, situational relevance, and personal relevance on attributions of responsibility for date rape by 632 college students. Attributions of responsibility were significantly influenced by perceiver gender and victim dress. Discusses implications for attribution theory and practical implications,…

Past research indicates that specific shape recognition and spatial-relations encoding rely on subsystems that exhibit right-hemisphere advantages, whereas abstract shape recognition and spatial-relations encoding rely on subsystems that exhibit left-hemisphere advantages. Given these apparent regularities, we tested whether asymmetries in shape…

This study examined relationships among personality traits, causal attributions, and global life satisfaction in a sample of 212 high school students. A chief aim of this research was to explore whether causal attributions mediate the relationship between personality characteristics and global life satisfaction as hypothesized by DeNeve and Cooper…

This study investigated how 4- to 7-year-old children's second-order belief attribution might be facilitated by either reducing information processing or varying the sequence of task questions. In Experiment 1, compared with Perner and Wimmer's (1985) original second-order false-belief task, a new task with reduced information-processing demands…