Examined were causal attributions for women and men and sports participation. In accord with previous academic research, athletes of both sexes were expected to attribute successes more to their abilities and efforts and failures to lack of effort, as compared to a group of non-athletes. Also examined was the differential use of team and…

If research on personality is to be productive and progressive, it is necessary to make objectives explicit and to link abstractions with common experiences. Six levels of classification outline these objectives. Level 1 involves the characterization and classification of persons. Level 2 studies attributes. Level 3 is concerned with inferred…

Research has shown television characters to be overwhelmingly portrayed as sex-stereotyped. Recently, however, more unstereotyped characters have been introduced into television programming. It was hypothesized that college-age subjects, when presented with prime-time characters pre-rated as examples of stereotyped and unstereotyped portrayals,…

In order to facilitate research on the construct of causal attribution, this paper details developmental procedures used to minimize previous deficiencies and proposes a new scale. The first version of the scale was in ipsative form and provided two basic sets of indices: (1) ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty indices in success and…

In order to give the psychological conception of alienation greater cogency relative to the influence of sociological alienation, research is needed that ties alienation attitudes to individual personal behavior. It was hypothesized that the stronger the alienation attitudes of people, the weaker will be their exploratory behavior. Thus,…

To assess hyperactive children's perceptions of drug treatment, a Causal Attribution Questionnaire was developed and introduced as a series of brief stories about "make believe" children to 36 hyperactive males (6 to 13 years) and a comparison group of 35 males. Results showed that the older the child in terms of chronological age, the greater the…

The connection between self-esteem, sex, and attributional style was examined in two studies. Results indicated that for positive events, high self-esteem subjects make more internal attributions than low self-esteem subjects, and for negative events, high self-esteem subjects make fewer internal attributions than low self-esteem subjects. The…

This study examines the development of children's concepts of illness in light of Piagetian findings regarding the ontogenesis of causal relations. The Concept of Illness protocol was administered to 72 3-, 7-, and 11-year-old children; 24 from each age group. Children were interviewed individually in a school setting. Raters assigned subjects'…

New measures of sex role style assess the respondent's self-attribution of sex-typed interpersonal characteristics. In light of claims that androgynous roles are related to behavioral flexibility, the current study investigated the relationship between sex role orientations and performance in interpersonal situations. Males and females in each of…

Objective self-awareness theory and stimulus incongruity theory suggest that focusing one's attention on one's behavior in an unfamiliar situation will increase the drive to evaluate oneself, which may be manifested in social comparison. Videotapes of male undergraduates conversing with hand-held puppets were used to study direction of attention…

Two types of self-blame were investigated: characterological self-blame, corresponding to the popular negative view of self-blame; and behavioral self-blame, representing a positive attempt to reestablish a belief in control. Results of a questionnaire completed by rape crisis centers located across the country attest to the pervasiveness of…

A total of 20 boys and girls from grades 1, 4, 7, and 11 were interviewed on the topic of deviant behavior among their peers. They were also asked to make deviance judgments on two story characters whose behaviors exemplified qualities that typically evoke an attribution of psychological disorder on the part of adult judges. One story described…

The concept "trochiac meter" was taught to 180 college Ss by means of eight treatment conditions. The independent variables involved presenting a definition (D) or instances (E) or both combined with attribute definition (A) and/or atrribute prompting (P). Dependent variables were corrected classification and specified classification…

A total of 112 female teachers and student teachers acted as participants or observers in an experimental situation in which the participant taught a simulated elementary school child a mathematics lesson for three 5-minute trials while the observer watched. The child's performance supposedly either improved over trials (Low-High), deteriorated…

This study (N=160 males) examined the cognitive and behavioral effects of overt success feedback on subjects high and low in resultant achievement motivation (RAM). The cognitive effects of overt success feedback were investigated by requesting attributions to effort, ability, luck, and task difficulty concerning performance on a digit-symbol…