Conducted two studies to investigate marital satisfaction and egocentric bias in spouses' perceived contributions to activities in marriage. Results from 40 spouses indicated that spouses claimed to make greater contributions to negative relationships events than their partners attributed to them. Results from 50 spouses replicated findings.…

Analyzes mishaps affecting Delta Air Lines from perspective of motivational psychology. Hypothesizes that pilot error in one near disaster caused other employees to try harder not to make mistakes. Sees additional motivation as pushing many employees beyond point of optimal performance, generating decline in overall performance. Describes problem…

Four-year-olds' and adults' inferences based on shared conceptual properties, category labels, and perceptual information were assessed in four experiments. Stimuli included novel and familiar animals. Found that children made attribute-based inductions as well as category-based inductions, and that perceptual similarity consistently influenced…

Research documents that attributions of failure resulting from lack of ability result in less punishment from others than do ascriptions to lack of effort. This paper provides a conceptual analysis of these empirical findings, guided by a taxonomy of causal thinking. Process and functional understandings of achievement strivings are distinguished.…

In a visual habituation experiment, infants watched a circle (the "agent") move toward another circle by jumping over a barrier or jumping without a barrier present, and then watched a circle move straight to another circle. Found that infants were able to identify the agent's spatial goal and to interpret the agent's actions causally in…

Children who were rated for aggression and assessed for depression made attributions of story characters' intent and described their responses to story situations. Aggressive and depressed children made attributions of hostile intent. Children who were both aggressive and depressed showed response patterns similar to both aggressive and depressed…

Proposes that construct differentiation moderates the effects of perspective on causal judgments. Finds that construct differentiation was positively associated with intrapersonal variability in ratings of causal judgments across three perspectives and positively associated with actor/observer differences when taking the perspective of message…

Using data from two ongoing longitudinal studies and prior research, examines the effect of parental attitudes on the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in choice of school subjects and careers. Because society does not yet reward female- and male-typed occupations equally, such stereotyping is often disadvantageous to girls. (DM)

In the two studies reported, three year olds tended to choose mentalistic descriptions more often than behavioral ones to describe people. (PCB)

The divergent views of poor and working-class African-American and White men regarding the causes of their current condition are presented. Different "biographies of race" encourage African-American men to blame the economy and racism but White men to blame Black males for the economic plight of White men. The ways in which the two…

Examined sources of parents' and 2- to 6-year olds' discordant recall of events evoking various children's emotions. Found that children agreed with parents' emotion attributions most often for events parents recalled as evoking happiness and sadness, less for fear, and least for anger. Discord related to differences in attribution of children's…

Compares two models of attribution to assess counselors' reactions to clients' initial attributional presentations. Results reveal that counselors reacted most positively when they disagreed with the client's internal attribution and most negatively when they disagreed with the client's external attribution. (Contains 22 references.) (GCP)

Investigates differences between expressed attributions that adolescents and young adults offer for academic success and failure when interacting with peers. Explores the perceptions adolescents and young adults associate with such interactions. Finds that young adults had a significantly larger repertoire of attributional expressions at their…

Examined 3- to 5-year olds' justifications for conformity to physical laws and social rules. Found that children's justifications for social rule conformity involved consequences and permission/obligation, and for physical laws involved physical limitations or impossibility. Older preschoolers, but not 3-year olds, appreciated that social…

Explored the association between preschoolers' hostile attribution and aggressive behaviors. Found that hostile/aggressive children were significantly more likely to possess a hostile attributional bias than less aggressive children. Also found that preschoolers were capable of distinguishing between intentional and unintentional actions when…