It was recently hypothesized that the source of interactional differences between mothers and fathers lies in differences in social perception processes, such as representation of infant and coding of situational variables. From this perspective, the present work analyzes the attribution of causality in interpersonal events related to an episode…

This study examined the relationship between children's understanding of their parents' divorce, attribution style, and classroom behavior. Fifty fourth and fifth grade children of divorce completed questionnaires concerning their understanding of divorce and attribution style, while teachers completed a rating of classroom behavior. Measures of…

Psychologists and laymen alike often use the terms "shame" and "guilt" interchangeably. Guilt is an affective state most often associated with a focus on some past behaviors which the subject finds inconsistent with a set of internalized standards which are often, but not necessarily moral in nature. Shame involves less of a…

This study examined the effects of perceived similarity, behavioral confirmation of sex role stereotypes, and victim gender on attributions of blame and derogation of the victim. College students (N=120) participated in a 2x2x2 factorial design manipulating victim gender, victim behavior (active/passive), and personal similarity (young…

Interpersonal attraction appears to increase under aversive conditions. Two distinct theories suggest that attraction results from either misattribution or fear reduction. To investigate the effects of misattribution and fear reduction on attraction, 36 male college students were ostensibly exposed to an electromagnetic field while an attractive…

Causal attribution theory, including the concept of learned helplessness, has been used to explain student motivation and achievement in school. In this paper, a model is developed which explains how attribution theory could explain student effort and achievement in mathematics. According to the model, student perceptions of success or failure in…

Previous research on the primacy effect in ability attribution has focused on intellectual ability, using intelligence test problems as the stimulus material. To examine ability attribution under conditions of ascending (improving), descending, and random patterns of performance on a typing task, 179 college students (69 males, 110 females)…

While earlier, more blatant forms of sex discrimination may have declined, some researchers have suggested the existence of more subtle forms of bias, based less on gender than on gender-related attributes. The investigation of bias related to either gender or gender-related attributes requires a scale to address both the gender-relatedness of…

Results of four experiments concerning the way young people interpret an intended or expressed sanction (praise or blame) from a teacher are presented. The intention of the four studies was to expose the flaws in Meyer's 1984 attempted explanations of such interpretation, in which sanctions are paradoxically received by the student as an…

While research has shown that people are adversely psychologically affected by knowledge that their communities have been toxically contaminated, it has been suggested that those who see a disaster as naturally occurring tend to be less adversely affected than those who see a disaster as caused by human acts. To examine this issue, questionnaires…

The purpose of this study is to identify developmental trends in children's understanding of pity, anger, and guilt by examining changes in their reasoning about the causes of these emotions. Specifically, relationships between perceived controllability of negative events and these three emotions were examined. A total of 120 children between the…

Previous research in social cognition has established that "top of the head" processing is a robust inferential bias, even in engrossing task situations. Three experiments were conducted to examine the generalizability of perceptual salience effects. In each experiment, salience was manipulated by varying the visual prominence of…

Individuals may be stigmatized (discredited) if their attributes make them less than what is expected for the social categories into which they are placed. A tentative typology of situations can be developed, based on their potential for producing the stigmatization of old age. In daily situations that do not demand excessive physical or mental…

Recent attempts to predict marital success or failure have explored the explanations couples offer for interpersonal events. To investigate whether positive and negative affect would lead to different causal attributions in a conflict-resolution conversation, 20 married couples were asked to observe a conflict-resolution and a control conversation…

Studies on victimization suggest that victims, whether of crime, accident, disease, or natural disaster, ask "why me?" questions and that finding answers to these questions seems related to the victims' adjustment. An attributional theory of victims' search for meaning in their misfortune proposes that victims perceive their misfortunes as…