Teacher praise typically does not function as a reinforcer. Rather, it is reactive to and under the control of student behavior. Its effects must be understood using concepts from attribution and social learning/reinforcement theories. (Author/GK)

Three- to eight-year-old children were asked to make causal attributions for performance on a motor task, reward allocations for the performance outcome, and state expectations for future success. (Author/DB)

The possibility that teachers' counterdefensive attributions are self-presentations designed to establish favorable social identities is examined. An experiment by Ross et al. (1974) in which teachers were led to believe that they had been successful or unsucessful in teaching a lesson to a pupil is simulated. (Author/GK)

Lack of effort-perceived controllability of need for help-anger-neglect and lack of ability-perceived uncontrollability-pity-help form two constellations. There was also evidence of an attribution-affect-action motivational sequence, in which thoughts determine what we feel and feelings determine what we do. (Author/CP)

As temporal distance from an event increased, individuals both interpreted their own behavior and outcomes as being more due to situational influences and perceived their behavior to have been more similar to the behavior of others. Further, differences in attributions of actors and observers narrowed as temporal distance from the target event…

Six experiments examined the relations of causal attributions and affect to judgments of help-giving. (Author/SS)

This study uses a multifactorial model of locus of control to examine the attribution of causality in Black and White students in Zambia and Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. (Author/MC)

In a competitive situation success and failure were attributed to degrees of ability, effort, and luck, and results show they affect intrinsic motivation of males and females differently. (JD)

Competition interaction indicated that males exhibited more intrinsic motivation during competition than when not in competition, whereas females displayed no differences between these conditions. (JD)

Assesses the ability of four-year-old children to judge certain social situations from the facial expressions of peers. The children were presented with soundless videotapes of the face and upper torso of classmates and unknown peers interacting with peers and adults who were strange or familiar. (JMB)

Second- and third-grade children receiving no consequences or only social consequences for donating to needy peers attributed their behavior to a concern for the other child. Children receiving material consequences together with social consequences tended to attribute their help giving to external sources. (JMB)

The research literature on defensive attribution of responsibility is reviewed within the framework of a nonmotivational information-processing model which proposes that attributed responsibility is a function of the difference between the perceived contingent probability (congruence) of an outcome, given a perpetrators' behavior, and the…

Two experiments attempted to directly assess the impact of self-other perspective on success and failure attributions for a variety of achievement-related situations. (Author/RK)

Two studies are reported which utilize a variety of achievement situations. It was hypothesized that subjects would spontaneously make attributions to ability, effort, luck and/or task difficulty in all these situations and that they would seek information of the types used in previous studies. (Author/RK)

The role of cognitive development in the formation of social judgments was investigated in 2 experiments examining children's use of task outcome information in attributional judgments of ability and task difficulty. (SB)