S. Jackson and S. Jacobs's criticism of "single message" designs in communication research served as a framework for a study that examined the differences between various sequential request paradigms. The study sought to answer the following questions: (1) What were the most naturalistic request sequences assured to replicate…

These two documents address the issue of dealing with blame for farm families in crisis. The first document, for the adult student, discusses how and why people blame each other, with emphasis on the current farm financial crisis. It is noted that blaming occurs primarily at the anger and depression stages of the loss cycle and that, when losing…

This study targeted students with a history of academic failure to investigate the relationships among reported self-regulated learning strategies, attributional patterns, academic performance expectancies, and academic performance. Ninety-seven community college students, over 70% of whom were minority group members, completed self-report…

An examination of the dynamics of academic failure is presented in this monograph in the form of an annotated bibliography of current literature. The writings cited offer a cross-section of research on what factors affect students' choices of adaptive or maladaptive behavior patterns in the classroom and in relation to their peers. Section one of…

The content of attributional interpretations and their discrepancy from the attributinal styles of subjects were manipulated in order to investigate the importance of these variables to the effectiveness of interpretation. Thirty-nine subjects experiencing problematic negative emotions and exhibiting either characterological or external…

The purpose of this study was to determine if an intervention package designed to develop the administrative and managerial skills of women vocational educators would change their ascriptions to resemble those of male high achievers. The independent variable was a 2-week residential institute held in June 1982. The dependent variable was…

Type A behavior involves struggle for achievement, chronic time-urgency, and hostile aggression as opposed to Type B behavior, which is the absence of these behaviors. Type A behavior has been associated with the prevalence, recurrence, and future incidence of coronary heart disease. The attributions and achievement-relevant cognitions of 50 Type…

The reluctance of depressed people to try hard may result not from their low expectancy for success, as Learned Helplessness Theory suggests, but rather from egotistic motivation to preserve whatever self-esteem they still have. Two studies were conducted using a paradigm which permitted a direct comparison of Learned Helplessness Theory and…

College students were asked to recall experiences of success and of failure from their own lives, and to indicate what they believed to be the reasons for success or failure. Results indicated that (1) women were more likely than men to attribute success to effort; (2) men attributed success to luck more often than women; (3) women had more pride…

Based on a modification of Berglas and Jones' (1978) design, conditions of contingent and noncontingent success and failure were manipulated to determine when and why individuals choose to adopt self-handicapping strategies. Male undergraduates (N=76) were informed that they were participating in a study investigating the effects of music on…

Two enduring questions in psychology concern the effects on behavior of traits and of attitudes. One method of altering the relative influence of traits or attitudes is by manipulating the activity of those areas of the brain which attend more to the self or to the external environment. Two experiments were conducted to test whether manipulation…

This paper discusses ways in which problem-solving in social situations differs from and is more difficult than problem-solving in other areas. Some of these ways are that social situations are constantly changing, communication is frequently unclear, and strong emotions are often aroused. Problems related to evaluation are discussed as an example…

There are two perspectives from which the academic performance of children from high or low socioeconomic backgrounds can be viewed. The non-environmental perspective specifies a direct relationship between performance and innate ability; environmental deficits may be correlated with poor performances but perhaps are not causally related. The…

Researchers in attribution theory have used two styles in wording attributional questions. The informational style asks subjects the extent to which they possess ability, effort and luck relative to a task, and task difficulty. The causal style asks subjects the extent to which various factors influenced or caused the outcome. A study was…

Causal attributions were obtained from male and female subjects of two racial groups, black and white, following achievement performance in a "natural" setting. Although women expected lower grades than men, no significant differences in attributional ratings as function of gender were observed, nor were any race by gender interactions seen in the…