This study explores the roles of benevolent sexism (BS), hostile sexism (HS), and gender-role traditionality (GRT) in minimizing rape, blaming the victim, and excusing the rapist. As predicted, hostile sexists minimize the seriousness of the rape in both stranger and date-rape scenarios. In the victim-blame scale, both BS and GRT significantly…

Attributions, attempts to link an event with its causes, enable people to understand and react to their surroundings. Because attributions are directly related to understanding events, and because this understanding influences how individuals then deal with events, attributions play a vital role in the coping process. To explore the nature of…

Impressions of people are resistant to change. Information contradictory to an initial impression has relatively little impact on the impression and is particularly likely to be recalled. Possible resolutions on this paradox include: (1) the recalled information and the impression of the person are independent of each other; (2) people may link…

Attributions for students described in case studies as exhibiting immature, unmanageable, or perceptually-delayed behaviors in the classroom were provided by 174 regular education elementary school teachers. The teachers' attributions for the students' difficulties were primarily "other-directed"; student or home factors were most often…

Parents and children are faced with a variety of challenges over the course of their lives together, yet most research centers only on the early stages of the family life cycle. One major change occurs as parents grow older and need increasing amounts of help from their children. Kelley has developed a general theory of personal relationships…

The frequency and nature of maternal attributions of communication in dyads with 16 11-month old handicapped infants were examined. For some aspects of the study the experimental group was compared with a control group of 16 dyads in which the same-age infants were not handicapped. The study addressed four major purposes: (1) to compare groups on…

Research on the role of life events in human development has revealed the importance of cognitive processes in pre- and post-event coping. Prior research, however, has primarily studied the role of a priori, theoretical or experientially developed cognitive taxonomies in transition coping. A study was conducted to explore the underlying cognitive…

Beck's cognitive theory and the reformulated learned helplessness model suggest that there is a negative idiosyncratic cognitive style that characterizes the way depressed individuals appraise events which is causally associated with depression. Although a few researchers have recognized the importance of examining appraisals of everyday events,…

This study examined the determinants of attributions for success or failure in stopping smoking in a self-help treatment program with and without a drug component. Subjects (N=137) were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: (1) nicotine gum and a self-help manual with an intrinsic motivational orientation; (2) self-help manual…

Cognitive factors have been shown to play an important role in marital distress. To examine the importance of the self-other distinction for understanding the impact of attributions on marital satisfaction, two studies were conducted. In the first study, causal attributions for naturally occurring behavior by the self and spouse were investigated…

Perry and Dickens (1984) found that noncontingent-trained students perceived they had less control and manifested a helpless attribution profile compared to contingent-trained students in a simulated college classroom. To examine the effects of varying amounts of noncontingent success on students' perceived control and attributions, 90 students at…

To compare hearing and hearing impaired subjects on the certainty of their attributions in relation to unitization and role behavior, 48 hearing impaired and 48 non hearing impaired college students were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: unitization level (fine or gross) and role (in-role or out-of-role). All subjects were given…

Self-handicapping strategies are behaviors or choices of performance settings which allow people to maintain self-esteem by avoiding negative self-relevant attributions. People will behave in such a way that accurate, nonambiguous attributions about their performance cannot be made. Research on self-handicapping has focused on clinically relevant…

Although an event is normally perceived and understood in terms of its location within a temporally ordered network of interconnected causes and effects, there is little data regarding the principles people use in tracing causality for an outcome through immediate, proximal events to prior, distal events. To investigate: (1) the conditions under…

Previous research has investigated the role of personal faith and locus of control in attribution. To expand these investigations to include the role of Quest faith (a personal struggle to understand), 154 undergraduates (57 males, 97 females) participated in a study. Participants were those who ranked themselves at least 4 out of 7 on a…