Studied attributions for school-based loneliness for 36 Finnish students with a high degree of loneliness and 42 with a low degree of loneliness. More lonely students mostly used a nonself-serving internal-stable attributional style, while less lonely students attributed temporary loneliness to external, unstable, and controllable causes.…

Explores causal attributions of success and failure as functions of religious orientations among a sample of Polish university students. Participants assessed secular and religious attributions on three dimensions: controllability, stability, and locus. Finds that religious and non-religious participants attributed both success and failure to…

Attributional beliefs of African-American 11- and 17-year-old students with mental retardation were assessed. Results indicated that strategy ratings were intercorrelated, as were capacity ratings, yet the two constructs were differentiated by both age groups. Belief in the importance of internal strategies was positively related to recall and…

Describes a study of college developmental students' perceptions of their high school coursework, teachers, and own personal characteristics. Suggests that students regarded their schools and teachers positively, but that they tended to blame external factors such as task difficulty and teaching quality for their limited successes. (20 citations)…

Attribution retraining was conducted with 82 German 8th grade girls as part of feedback provided by trained teachers in the students' first physics course. In comparison with controls, attribution retraining significantly improved students' performance in physics. Training also had favorable effects on the motivation sets and self-related…

Investigated effect of sentence ambiguity on recall and recognition of story information by aggressive and nonaggressive boys. Found that aggressive boys recalled approximately equal proportions of ambiguous and unambiguous information. Nonaggressive boys recalled more unambiguous than ambiguous information. Nonaggressive boys recognized…

Using prospective cohort data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study examines the extent to which health insurance coverage and the source of that coverage affect adult health. While previous research has shown that privately insured nonelderly individuals enjoy better health outcomes than their uninsured counterparts, the…

The present study investigated the causes to which parents attribute their children's academic successes and failures during children's transition from preschool to primary school. It followed 182 mothers and 167 fathers of 207 children. The parents completed a questionnaire concerning their causal attributions, level of education, and parenting…

Students talk with teachers about disappointing grades for different reasons, and the way students frame such interactions has consequences for how those interactions are likely to unfold. To explore students' primary goals in such interactions, 234 undergraduates reported on a recent conversation with an instructor about a lower-than-desired…

A visit to most any technology education laboratory or classroom will reveal that computers, software, and multimedia software are rapidly becoming a mainstay in learning about technology and technological literacy. Almost all technology labs have at least several computers dedicated to specialized software or hardware such as Computer-aided…

Research indicates that young children, unlike adults, have a generalized tendency to view not only artifacts but also living and nonliving natural phenomena as existing for a purpose. To further understand this tendency's origin, the authors explored parents' propensity to invoke teleological explanation during explanatory conversations with…

In this experiment, the authors investigated the influence of exoneration from blame on children's overt behavioral distress and physiological reactivity following the presentation of overheard adult conflict. The participants were 48 children (48-71 months of age) and their mothers. Through random assignment, the authors presented 16 children…

Young children's failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the…

The standard approach guiding research on the relationship between categories and causality views categories as reflecting causal relations in the world. We provide evidence that the opposite direction also holds: categories that have been acquired in previous learning contexts may influence subsequent causal learning. In three experiments we show…

Presents a social-cognitive model outlining the role of parental attributions for child behavior in parent?child interactions. Examples of studies providing evidence for the basic model are presented, with particular reference to applications of the model in families of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and/or…