A male epileptic, male nonepileptic, female epileptic, or female nonepileptic job candidate was evaluated for either an auto sales or receptionist job by 112 university students in personnel or behavioral science courses. The female epileptic and the male nonepileptic candidates had significantly higher probabilities of being hired than the other…

Two studies investigated treatments on the attribution and behavioral persistence of special education students (9 to 15 years old) labelled as helpless in arithmetic. In the first study (N=14), an attribution retraining treatment was effective in alleviating helplessness but not significantly more effective than a control treatment. In the second…

Sixty-one learning disabled (LD) adolescents in four junior high schools were randomly assigned to experimental or control groups as part of an effort to teach LD students to set realistic goals so they might experience success and satisfaction in school. Ss in the experimental group made achievement contracts and predicted their performance in…

Data from a mail survey completed by 330 parents of mentally retarded children were analyzed to identify patterns of attributions of causality for the retardation. Results revealed that type of attribution was differentially associated with family background (race), stage at which the child is diagnosed, and utilization of services (extensiveness…

This paper attempts to develop a theory of administrative attribution and to provide some insight into the potential contribution the application of attribution theory can make to the study of educational administration. Attribution is defined as the need to understand cause, and administrative attribution is defined as being concerned with what…

Two experiments were designed to provide an empirical test of an attribution model of psychopathology and to extend it to the clinical problem of social anxiety. Specifically, the research examines the relation between social anxiety and attributions of success and failure in heterosexual interactions. (Author/RK)

This study tests two differing hypotheses: the competing response hypothesis, which states that both reward and non-reward distractions produce decreases in interest which weaken over repeated trials, and the attribution/overjustification hypothesis, which maintains that rewards produce a decrease in interest that does not weaken over trials.…

Subjective perceptions of outcomes (both success and failure) may vary considerably from those of the experimenter's, and causal attributions are based as much on subject's own perceptions of success and failure as on the experimenter's definitions of outcomes. (Author/MJB)

Causal attributions concerning success or failure by undergraduate students at a motor task followed patterns established by past research in that success is predominantly attributed to internal factors and failure to external factors. (MJB)

This study examined the general importance of similarity in children's causal reasoning and the relation between similarity and the other principles of causal inference. Participants were 16 boys and 16 girls at each of four grade levels: K, 2, 4, and 6. (Author/JMB)

Children aged 5 to 12 years and college students were asked to judge hypothetical persons' ability or effort from information about task outcome, task difficulty, and magnitude of the complementary personal characteristic, effort, or ability. (JMB)

The study investigated differences in causal attributions made by 134 student clinicians taking actor and observer roles in good and poor speech therapy sessions. Clinicians taking the actor role cited client causes more frequently than other causes while clinicians taking the observer role cited clinician causes. (Author/DB)

Children 5 to 15 years old answered questions on causal attributions of their own and their mothers' emotions, and methods for inferring and changing maternal emotion. Parents were asked reciprocal questions. (PCB)

Results indicated that (1) fathers who were less involved in child care attributed lesser competence to infants than did more involved fathers; (2) fathers generally attributed lesser competence to infants than mothers did; and (3) as fathers' involvement in infant care increased, their attributions became more similar to mothers'. (RH)

Examined the attributions made about males and females who have children, remain childless by choice, or who are involuntarily childless. Multidimensional scaling of the similarity judgments revealed two dimensions: the first related to likability, being loving, devoted, and emotionally mature; the other differentiated among fertility-status…