When people experience failures they search for an explanation of why the failure occurred. The process of seeking an explanatory cause is the basis of attribution theory. Causal attributions include the dimensions of locus of causality (internal or external), stability of the cause over time, and the degree of personal control over the outcome.…

To date, the constructive motivation hypothesis has generally been limited to educational achievement as an outcome variable, and few studies have been specifically designed to investigate student satisfaction outcomes. To measure student preferences for course structure and difficulty level and student perceptions of instructors' orientation…

Two different conceptions of ability are proposed. The first conception of ability is more differentiated and generally employed by adults and older children. Here ability level is defined with reference to the performance of others assuming that optimum effort was employed. High ability means higher than others. The second conception of ability…

This study focuses on the impact of various aspects of work, especially unemployment, on the amount and quality of paternal involvement with preschool or kindergarten children and examines how attributions about the cause of unemployment might influence father-child interaction. Findings indicate that children of employed families obtain…

Does new vocabulary help students to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or does it actually give them new ideas which they did not previously hold? James Woodcock asks whether offering students new vocabulary can give them new ideas, and whether this can enhance their historical analyses of causation problems. This is an…

Several psychological theories are viable when examining the victims of intimate violence, specifically battered women. Although cognitive consistency models view individuals as striving toward balanced cognitive states, battered women can exist with the cognitive inconsistency of being harmed by men who love them. The theory of cognitive arousal…

Research has found that, in many performance situations, attributions of success and failure may reflect numerous experiences occurring over time. To expand this research, achievement attributions in an extended ego-involving situation, i.e., performance in an academic course, were examined. In addition to the traditional causes of effort,…

Although consensus on the meaning of depression exists, theories vary widely regarding its source. Depression is essentially an affective disorder; however, because the assessment of sadness is difficult, most psychological theories of depression have focused on some nonaffective component of depression, such as activity level, cognitive…

Knowledge of the influence of situational variables and the importance of interaction between person and situation requires a more complex view of illness than that held by many practitioners of psychosomatic medicine, who attribute causality solely to internal and isolated personality traits. Personality was studied, therefore, as a conditioner…

Labeling bias is the distortion of diagnostic judgment as a function of prior diagnostic information. University students (N=102) were assigned to 16 treatment groups, with variables of: prior diagnosis attributed to a videotaped target person ("psychotic" versus none), setting in which the observed sample of his behavior was said to…

The research described in this paper was generated by the presupposition that cultural ethnocentrism is a source of error in the scientific analysis of achievement. In order to examine the relationship between culture and competence, and the effect of culture on achievement, a study was undertaken of family behaviors that could be predictive of…

Second graders, fifth graders, and college students heard 12 stories that varied systematically by situational domain, outcome, and causal attribution. Students were asked to infer the story character's emotion at the end of the story and give reasons for it. Contributions and limitations of Weiner's attribution-emotion model are assessed in light…

Research literature on childrens' causal understanding in oral and written settings is reviewed. Results show that maturation and task complexity both influence childrens' causal understanding. However, the findings are contradictory, and no generalizations could be made about which factors influence causal understanding and at which ages they are…

When kindergarten, second grade, fourth grade, and college students listened to stories and were asked to predict and explain the story character's behavioral or emotional reaction to a new event, the use of personality attributions to predict and explain future reactions increased with age. (RH)

Longitudinal study examined effect of children's gender on tendencies of mothers to use specific antecedents in ascribing causal explanations for their children's sixth grade mathematics performance. Path analyses showed that, for both mothers of boys and mothers of girls, maternal perceptions of child performance were associated with…