Self-evaluation is thought to play a major role in personality and motivation. Preliminary experience with success or failure, levels of aspiration, attributions for performance, and locus of control may all be interrelated factors in human motivation. After receiving success, failure, or no feedback on a concept formation task, subjects (N=90)…

Attribution of a disposition or trait to a person asserts information about the pattern of that person's behavior. Past research has suggested that a moral disposition implies only moral behavior, while an immoral disposition implies both moral and immoral behavior. The effect of these implicational schemata on attributions of morality was…

Attribution theory suggests that attributional styles may contribute to the motivational and performance deficits frequently observed in depressed and lonely populations. An Attributional Style Assessment Test (ASAT) was created and administered to college students, along with the Beck Depression Inventory and the UCLA Loneliness Scale.…

Many factors affect the way in which others view the parents of a child who has committed suicide. A study of adult responses to newspaper accounts of a child's death revealed the parents were viewed more negatively when the child's death was due to suicide than when the child's death was a result of illness. In addition, the presence of…

Examined are changes in personality impressions formed by status-oriented individuals who differ in Need for Social Approval (NA) or Locus of Control of Reinforcement (I-E). Subjects recorded their initial and final personality impressions of speakers ascribed either high or low social status. High NA observers (or Externals) showed most positive…

One-hundred-seventy-six male and 116 female college freshmen took part in a questionnaire study of sex differences in attribution of achievemnt. Achievement was operationalized as grade point index, a performance measure of significance to the subjects, where success-failure feedback is contingent on one's own performance. The best predictor of…

Using Seligman's "learned helplessness" paradigm, androgynous and feminine women (as defined by the Bem Sex Role Inventory) either succeeded (contingent feedback) or failed (non-contingent feedback) at a concept formation task and were provided with internal (ability, effort), external (task difficulty, luck), or no causal attributions for their…

This report presents a study designed to determine if 5-year-olds possess an understanding of causation that conforms to the Weiner et al (1971) achievement model. This paper also studies the similarities between the attributional explanations of 5-year-olds and their teachers. Twenty-eight kindergarten students, largely part-Hawaiian, were asked…

This study investigated whether kindergarten children have consistent preferences in explaining success and failure outcomes and whether these attributional preferences are related to other variables known to be associated with achievement motivation. The 48 Hawaiian kindergarteners who served as subjects were asked to explain a fictional outcome…

The goals of this study were to replicate the findings produced in a previous conversation simulation study, to examine the conditions whereby persons attribute blame, and to extend the methodology employed in simulation game study. Conversations were simulated by a two-person game in which subjects (46 undergraduate students) were provided a deck…

This document discusses the relationships between organizational features of Individually Guided Education (IGE) as measured in the large sample survey of the IGE evaluation, and teacher job satisfaction. The theoretical model linking organizational features and teacher job satisfaction is tested using causal model analysis. Two findings were…

An experiment was performed to obtain judgments of 324 college students about a list of 18 causal explanations for good or poor performance on an examination. These stimulus causes were judged with respect to a description of two hypothetical situations in which a student either did well or did poorly on the examination. Half the sample judged the…

This study examined four causal attributions (ability, effort, task difficulty and luck) for success and failure in achievement and affiliation contexts across five countries (U.S., South Africa, Japan, India, and Yugoslavia) in three subject majors: teacher training, social science, and science. Each 5x2x3x2 analysis of variance assessed the…

To examine whether a person's actions are more important in determining impressions of personality than are self-descriptions, subjects in two separate studies viewed two videotapes, one depicting a stimulus person's self-description and the other depicting that person's behavior in a conversation. Subjects rated the stimulus person on several…

Some children exhibit a pattern of debilitating behavior characterized as helplessness. Within an achievement context, such children can be observed to initiate few constructive activities, to work with little intensity on those activities already attempted, and to persist at a task only moderately--especially following failure. A stratified…