Background: This study sought to gather information about the impact of extended training in positive behaviour support on staff knowledge, causal attributions and emotional responses. Methods: Students completed questionnaires at the beginning, middle and end of a University Diploma course to measure changes in their knowledge of challenging…

This article enhances our knowledge of general strain theory (GST) by applying it to the context of traffic delinquency. It does so by first describing and confirming the development of a social-psychological measure allowing for a test of GST. Structural regression analysis is subsequently employed to test the theory within this context across a…

Child externalising symptoms are associated with a bias towards attributing hostile intent to others. We examined the role of parental attributions in the development of this hostile attribution bias in children. The parents of 134 children aged 5-7 years responded to hypothetical social scenarios examining a) their general tendency to attribute…

Different theories try to explain why some students are more successful than the others. Phenomenologists (Mc Combs, 1989) study self concepts of the students and find such students prone to achieve more. Attributional Theorists (Dweck, 1986; Weiner, 2005) focus on personal outcome such as effort or ability. Metacognitive theorists (Pressley,…

Both spatial theories of voting and our intuitions lead us to expect that political parties' ideological positions should affect individuals' turnout decisions. Contrary to these expectations, existing research finds that neither feelings of alienation--that no party adequately represents an individual's ideological position--nor…

This article considers how people judge the identity of objects (e.g., how people decide that a description of an object at one time, t-sub-0, belongs to the same object as a description of it at another time, t-sub-1). The authors propose a causal continuer model for these judgments, based on an earlier theory by Nozick (1981). According to this…

Comments on the article by J. S. Hyde (see record 2005-11115-001), in which Hyde provided an overview of the many meta-analyses that have compared men and women on psychological attributes. The current author argues that, despite the strengths of Hyde's study, a major problem with the analysis is its lack of a theoretical basis for considering sex…

This paper discusses the importance and dangers of causal theories of sexual orientation, noting that, in recent years, the illness model of homosexuality has been thoroughly discredited and replaced with a variety of gay and lesbian affirmative constructs which explore the effects of a disparaging and hostile society on the development and…

Individuals often estimate the probability of future events by the ease with which they can recall or cognitively construct relevant instances. Previous research has not precisely identified the cognitive processes mediating this "availability heuristic." Two potential mediators (imagery of the event, perceived reasons or causes for the…

Some research on attribution processes has suggested that attributional search is exploratory behavior that serves adaptation and mastery motives. This study was conducted to investigate attributional search in reactions to success and failure after quitting smoking, to look for antecedents of attributional search other than expectancy and…

A review of the literature on attribution theory suggests that attributional templates may be similar to balanced structures, in that they are cognitive constructs that have an organizing influence on thought processes and exert a similar organizational influence on the memory for social information. Therefore, the three basic attributional…

In three experiments, this study investigated what evidence people use in making inferences about causality in complex and uncertain situations. Given evidence consisting of multiple observations of some outcome, with each observation including information about the presence or absence of that outcome and of some of its possible causes, subjects…

That anger engendered by means of insult or frustration is physiologically arousing has been demonstrated. This research was designed to investigate the availability of anger to misattribution, an attribution error, and, by this means, the effectiveness of misattribution in reducing aggressive behavior. (Author/RK)

Tested the hypothesis that older children tend to use motivational attributions in their resolutions of situations in which behavior is incongruent with an actor's more stable attitudes, those relating to his disposition, role, or self interest. (Author/SB)

Examined effects of task and supervisory experience on causal attributions and recommendations for corrective action following poor performance. Results indicated task and supervisory experience did affect attributions, to specific causal factors; however, the effects were not consistently in the predicted direction. (Author/BL)