Occupations with higher proportions of women are often thought to be less difficult jobs. The importance of specific socioeconomic factors, e.g., gender, race, age, income, and prestige, is assessed through judgment of the ability, luck, effort, and task difficulty necessary for each occupation. To examine conceptions of various occupations within…

The role of affect in information processing has recently received attention, and several possible influences of affect have been suggested. The informational and directive effects of affect were investigated with subjects (N=61) who either described events in their recent past that made them feel good, described events that made them feel bad, or…

With the increase of violence and aggression affecting more people, this compilation of materials focused on anger and aggression consists of three parts: (1) a general list of articles; (2) an annotated review of selected articles from the general list; and (3) a bibliography of books. The topics range from suggested causes of aggressive behavior…

Attributions of causes of successful task performances as a function of task and sex of the performer were investigated. Introductory psychology students (N=157) were presented with closed-circuit, videotaped episodes in which a male or female stimulus person performed a card-guessing task for 10 trials. Subjects heard the task described to the…

The determinants of interpersonal attraction were examined in 10 dyadic situations involving an actor's behavior toward a perceiver. For each situation, the intentionality of the actor's behavior was varied at three levels (intentional, nonintentional, no information), and the affective implications of the behavior for the actor were also varied…

Individuals interacting with an unfamiliar target person behave according to prior impressions of the target. A perceiver's pre-interaction expectancy can mediate both his and the target person's behavior, resulting in behavioral confirmation or compensation. Male subjects (N=96) participated in dyadic interactions in which one subject (perceiver)…

Kruglanski's endogenous-exogenous partition, when applied to reasons given by smokers for smoking cigarettes, distinguishes two types of actions: (1) endogenous reasons implying that the behavior of consuming the cigarette is the goal of the action and the actor is positive toward the behavior, and (2) exogenous reasons implying that the behavior…

Research in developmental social cognition should detail commonalities between self and other as well as the self-other differentiation process. A method which indexed developmental changes in the understanding of both intersubjective rules of interpersonal behavior and subjective individual perspectives was devised to research questions…

Subjects interacted once or twice with a confederate whose behavior in each interaction was friendly or unfriendly and either spontaneous or forced. Single interaction subjects formed impressions reflecting the confederate's behavior but not its cause. Subjects having friendly then unfriendly interactions formed impressions reflecting the cuase of…

The argument that the personality structures obtained from retrospective ratings reflect semantic similarity structures has been as provocative as a red cape in the bull ring. High congruence between those two kinds of structures seems well established. What is less clear is how and why those structures differ from that for immediate judgments of…

To investigate the attributional processes mediating between outcome and expectancies and persistence, children's expectancies, attributions and response latency were measured. Children, equally divided into three age groups (three-five, six-eight, nine-twelve) were shown figures to match and were provided with experimentally controlled feedback…

This paper presents a series of studies related to the question of how children learn to evaluate themselves in achievement situations. The approach to the research is based on the Weiner et al attributional model of achievement. The paper describes three studies designed to determine the extent to which first, second and third grade children use…

The Trent Attribution Profile provides measures of locus of control and stability which can be further partitioned into individual attribution elements (ability, effort, task difficulty, luck). Reliability and validity data are reported. (Author/JKS)

Undergraduate students' perceptions of causes of their performance in a course were related to their ratings of the course and instructor in order to explore convergent and discriminant validity of such ratings. Regression analyses indicated that attributional judgments about causes of student performance were related to evaluations of…

Research in the area of attribution theory is reviewed--tendency to explain whatever happens to someone as a just consequence of personal characteristics, rather than environmental circumstances. Ramifications of this tendency in teachers' perceptions of students are discussed, and suggestions are offered for guarding against this sort of…