Identifies nine factors offered in explanation for stage fright by undergraduate students without any formal background in communication: mistakes, unfamiliar role, humiliation, negative results, rigid rules, personality traits, preparation, audience interest, and physical appearance. Shows that respondents' own previous public-speaking experience…

Presents a critical review of religious attribution literature. Discusses the development of an instrument to measure religious attributions of responsibility for problem cause and solution. Also discusses analysis of the instrument. Presents research questions that would advance current understanding of religious attributions and notes…

Used an attribution theory perspective to investigate types of feedback statements used by third-grade teachers during mathematics instruction. Created and tested a coding scheme by which attribution feedback was identified. Determined that teachers rarely provide students with attributionally informative feedback. (JPB)

Reports children's understanding of objects with different anthropomorphic features, including a person, robot, computer, and doll. Shows that different objects did not elicit substantially different judgement patterns concerning their ability to think on their own, with the exception of a clear pattern of increased understanding of clever…

Assessed the causes ascribed by 60 Israeli 4th- and 9th-graders for the Arab-Israeli conflict and the relationship of these attributions to their expectations and emotions. Found that adolescents tended to view causes as more constant or less fluctuating over time than did younger children. Results support an attributional model for understanding…

In interviews, nine managers and nine trainers in health care organizations were asked about organizational changes and causal attributions. Differences appeared in manager and trainer attributions. Judgments were often made with very limited data and there was a lack of communication between trainers and managers. (SK)

Three habituation experiments examined the necessary conditions under which infants invoked the principle of rational action, interpreting behavior as goal-directed action. Found that the rational action principle operated at 9 months but not at 6 months. Perceptual cues indicating agency were not necessary prerequisites for a goal-directed…

This article differentiates a social etiology model focused on identifying the social antecedents of one particular mental disorder from a social consequences model concerned with the overall mental health consequences of various social arrangements. In the social etiology model, people with disorders other than the one particular disorder singled…

This study examined the suicide and risk-taking deaths of adolescents aged 12-17 years between January 1996 and December 2000. The methodology consisted of a case file review of government records. One hundred and eighty-seven adolescents (133 males, 54 females) died by suicide and risk-taking and could be classified into three distinct groups:…

In this article we focus on a major advance of the past few decades: the introduction of mental representation as a tool for understanding social development. We argue that despite the considerable contributions made by this approach, it is underrepresented in social developmental research, except in the area of attachment. We go on to show that…

The authors investigated whether underconfidence in judgments of learning (JOLs) is pervasive across multiple study-test trials as suggested by A. Koriat, L. Sheffer, and H. Ma'ayan (2002) or whether underconfidence with practice (UWP) might be a kind of anchoring-and-adjustment effect, such that the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the UWP effect…

One important property of human object categories is that they define the sets of exemplars to which newly observed properties are generalized. We manipulated the causal knowledge associated with novel categories and assessed the resulting strength of property inductions. We found that the theoretical coherence afforded to a category by…

Causal inference is an important, controversial topic in the social sciences, where it is difficult to conduct experiments or measure and control for all confounding variables. To address this concern, the present study presents a probability index to assess the robustness of a causal inference to the impact of a confounding variable. The…

Although the federal government dedicated nearly $40 billion to funding student loans in 2006, only 60 percent of potential students from low-income families attend college, compared with 90 percent from high-income families. This paper argues that enrollment rates are lower than they could be because potential students undervalue loan subsidies,…

While California has made substantial progress in easing its teacher shortage and reducing the concentration of the least prepared teachers in the lowest achieving schools, the effort to strengthen schools for all students is hampered by the large number of teachers who leave the profession prematurely. Policymakers at the state and local levels…