Groups of subjects were placed in a room in which their personal space was violated or not violated. Some subjects were told that subliminal noise would be played into the room and that noise would either arouse or relax them. (Actually there was no noise.) Other subjects were told nothing about subliminal noise. The subjects worked on a number of…

Learned helplessness has recently incorporated attribution theory to predict the specific occurrence/nonoccurrence of the motivational, cognitive and affective deficits characteristic of helplessness. College students (N=50) participated in a study to investigate the effects of a personal-universal helplessness manipulation on subsequent task…

One explanation for the positive relationship between alcohol consumption and violent crime considers alcohol consumption to be a socially accepted excuse for otherwise inappropriate behaviors. A policy capturing methodology was used to examine judgments of responsibility for rape. Male (N=30) and female (N=66) undergraduates received 40 profiles…

Studies using unipolar models of sex role identity in conjunction with an attributional approach to female achievement prediction have found that androgynous women tend to consider ability to be a more feasible explanation for success than do either feminine or undifferentiated women. Androgynous, masculine, feminine and undifferentiated males and…

The research literature on learned helplessness in exceptional children is reviewed and the authors' efforts to identify and retrain learning disabled (LD) children who have characteristics typical of learned helplessness are reported. Twenty-eight elementary aged LD children viewed as "learned helpless" were randomly assigned to one of four…

Very little attribution research has examined subjects' self-attributions for important behaviors. When asked to identify reasons for committing criminal offenses, 60 institutionalized male delinquents cited primarily situational factors. This tendency to explain delinquent behavior appeared to be independent of chronological age, and indicative…

An initial model of the evaluation process in the leadership context is presented in order to consider information processing explanations of behavior in general and attributional analyses in particular. The model is designed to aid those individuals acting in supervisory capacities who must evaluate the performance of subordinates in an…

Performance expectancy and satisfaction were investigated in terms of the rate of change in performance outcomes. In a two-by-two factorial design, the direction (improving or deteriorating) and rate (accelerating or decelerating) of change in performance were manipulated using false feedback in a computerized math game. In accord with performance…

Examined were causal attributions for women and men and sports participation. In accord with previous academic research, athletes of both sexes were expected to attribute successes more to their abilities and efforts and failures to lack of effort, as compared to a group of non-athletes. Also examined was the differential use of team and…

If research on personality is to be productive and progressive, it is necessary to make objectives explicit and to link abstractions with common experiences. Six levels of classification outline these objectives. Level 1 involves the characterization and classification of persons. Level 2 studies attributes. Level 3 is concerned with inferred…

Research has shown television characters to be overwhelmingly portrayed as sex-stereotyped. Recently, however, more unstereotyped characters have been introduced into television programming. It was hypothesized that college-age subjects, when presented with prime-time characters pre-rated as examples of stereotyped and unstereotyped portrayals,…

In order to facilitate research on the construct of causal attribution, this paper details developmental procedures used to minimize previous deficiencies and proposes a new scale. The first version of the scale was in ipsative form and provided two basic sets of indices: (1) ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty indices in success and…

In order to give the psychological conception of alienation greater cogency relative to the influence of sociological alienation, research is needed that ties alienation attitudes to individual personal behavior. It was hypothesized that the stronger the alienation attitudes of people, the weaker will be their exploratory behavior. Thus,…

To assess hyperactive children's perceptions of drug treatment, a Causal Attribution Questionnaire was developed and introduced as a series of brief stories about "make believe" children to 36 hyperactive males (6 to 13 years) and a comparison group of 35 males. Results showed that the older the child in terms of chronological age, the greater the…

The connection between self-esteem, sex, and attributional style was examined in two studies. Results indicated that for positive events, high self-esteem subjects make more internal attributions than low self-esteem subjects, and for negative events, high self-esteem subjects make fewer internal attributions than low self-esteem subjects. The…