Low self-esteem and depressed individuals tend to have an attributional style of externalizing success and internalizing failure. To evaluate a program developed to help reverse this pattern of responses to be more similar to high self-esteem and nondepressed individuals, subjects were first tested for self-esteem, depression, and attributional…

Past research indicates that people employ different strategies to manage others' impressions; however, conditions which make these strategies effective remain unclear. Using a sample of college students (N=345), the effectiveness of self-presentational strategies on influencing others' attributions of causes for expected and unexpected helping…

While little research has been done in the area of shyness and most of that has been descriptive, both theory and research suggest that investigation of expectancy of success and attributional style differences between shy and not-shy individuals is warranted. Very shy (N=49) or not-shy (N=48) female subjects, selected from an initial group of 698…

Attribution theory and gerontology would be enriched by the application of a life-span approach to attribution, involving increased attention to the age of the stimulus person and developmental factors associated with self-attribution. In studies on achievement attributions about older people, chronological age appears to be a more salient cue for…

Incest is an issue that generates strong emotional reactions in psychotherapists as well as laypeople. Clinicians may not be immune to the tendancy to overreact by predicting poor outcomes for incest victims or by denying its importance altogether. To assess the effect of incest on the evaluations of female clients by therapists, 124 clinicians…

Research has suggested that race and sex are strongly associated with the "imposter phenomenon" (I-P), a secret, intense, subjective self-perception of phoniness experienced by many high achievers. Sex, race, and perceived atypicality were examined in relation to the imposter phenomenon for 30 persons with adequate achievement in career…

Self-evaluation is thought to play a major role in personality and motivation. Preliminary experience with success or failure, levels of aspiration, attributions for performance, and locus of control may all be interrelated factors in human motivation. After receiving success, failure, or no feedback on a concept formation task, subjects (N=90)…

Attribution of a disposition or trait to a person asserts information about the pattern of that person's behavior. Past research has suggested that a moral disposition implies only moral behavior, while an immoral disposition implies both moral and immoral behavior. The effect of these implicational schemata on attributions of morality was…

Attribution theory suggests that attributional styles may contribute to the motivational and performance deficits frequently observed in depressed and lonely populations. An Attributional Style Assessment Test (ASAT) was created and administered to college students, along with the Beck Depression Inventory and the UCLA Loneliness Scale.…

Many factors affect the way in which others view the parents of a child who has committed suicide. A study of adult responses to newspaper accounts of a child's death revealed the parents were viewed more negatively when the child's death was due to suicide than when the child's death was a result of illness. In addition, the presence of…

Examined are changes in personality impressions formed by status-oriented individuals who differ in Need for Social Approval (NA) or Locus of Control of Reinforcement (I-E). Subjects recorded their initial and final personality impressions of speakers ascribed either high or low social status. High NA observers (or Externals) showed most positive…

One-hundred-seventy-six male and 116 female college freshmen took part in a questionnaire study of sex differences in attribution of achievemnt. Achievement was operationalized as grade point index, a performance measure of significance to the subjects, where success-failure feedback is contingent on one's own performance. The best predictor of…

Using Seligman's "learned helplessness" paradigm, androgynous and feminine women (as defined by the Bem Sex Role Inventory) either succeeded (contingent feedback) or failed (non-contingent feedback) at a concept formation task and were provided with internal (ability, effort), external (task difficulty, luck), or no causal attributions for their…

This report presents a study designed to determine if 5-year-olds possess an understanding of causation that conforms to the Weiner et al (1971) achievement model. This paper also studies the similarities between the attributional explanations of 5-year-olds and their teachers. Twenty-eight kindergarten students, largely part-Hawaiian, were asked…

This study investigated whether kindergarten children have consistent preferences in explaining success and failure outcomes and whether these attributional preferences are related to other variables known to be associated with achievement motivation. The 48 Hawaiian kindergarteners who served as subjects were asked to explain a fictional outcome…