Causal attribution has been found to have a great effect on future performance. Causal attributions were studied across two academic subjects and two outcomes using an open-ended measure. All 180 ninth-graders in a girls' high school in the Bay Area of San Francisco (California) stated their best and worst subjects and provided their perceived…

This document consists of Part 2 of a book of readings on at-risk youth designed to provide information and strategies for counselors, teachers, parents, administrators, social workers, and others who work with youth at risk. Part 2 contains five readings on causal factors related to at-risk behaviors. "The Harmful Effects of Dysfunctional Family…

This study investigated the cognitive styles, attributions, and self-evaluations of 40 gifted girls and 40 gifted boys, grades 6 through 8. Informational attributional ratings for task difficulty, luck, ability, and effort were studied in the context of: (1) an individual non-competitive goal structure; (2) a competitive goal structure; (3)…

To discover what part parent impartiality might play in creating a climate in which each individual child can prosper, 198 college students from a large Midwestern urban university were questioned about their perceptions of their parents' behavior during the time that they were growing up. The first section of the survey consisted of 50 questions…

An attributional model that conceptualizes the pressures that reduce professors' personal and career vitality is presented. The model is based primarily on the locus of control literature and especially the reformulated model of learned helplessness by Lynn Abramson, Martin Seligman, and John Teasdale. The analysis deals only with the cognitive…

When people experience failures they search for an explanation of why the failure occurred. The process of seeking an explanatory cause is the basis of attribution theory. Causal attributions include the dimensions of locus of causality (internal or external), stability of the cause over time, and the degree of personal control over the outcome.…

To date, the constructive motivation hypothesis has generally been limited to educational achievement as an outcome variable, and few studies have been specifically designed to investigate student satisfaction outcomes. To measure student preferences for course structure and difficulty level and student perceptions of instructors' orientation…

Two different conceptions of ability are proposed. The first conception of ability is more differentiated and generally employed by adults and older children. Here ability level is defined with reference to the performance of others assuming that optimum effort was employed. High ability means higher than others. The second conception of ability…

This study focuses on the impact of various aspects of work, especially unemployment, on the amount and quality of paternal involvement with preschool or kindergarten children and examines how attributions about the cause of unemployment might influence father-child interaction. Findings indicate that children of employed families obtain…

Does new vocabulary help students to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or does it actually give them new ideas which they did not previously hold? James Woodcock asks whether offering students new vocabulary can give them new ideas, and whether this can enhance their historical analyses of causation problems. This is an…

Several psychological theories are viable when examining the victims of intimate violence, specifically battered women. Although cognitive consistency models view individuals as striving toward balanced cognitive states, battered women can exist with the cognitive inconsistency of being harmed by men who love them. The theory of cognitive arousal…

Research has found that, in many performance situations, attributions of success and failure may reflect numerous experiences occurring over time. To expand this research, achievement attributions in an extended ego-involving situation, i.e., performance in an academic course, were examined. In addition to the traditional causes of effort,…

Although consensus on the meaning of depression exists, theories vary widely regarding its source. Depression is essentially an affective disorder; however, because the assessment of sadness is difficult, most psychological theories of depression have focused on some nonaffective component of depression, such as activity level, cognitive…

Knowledge of the influence of situational variables and the importance of interaction between person and situation requires a more complex view of illness than that held by many practitioners of psychosomatic medicine, who attribute causality solely to internal and isolated personality traits. Personality was studied, therefore, as a conditioner…

Labeling bias is the distortion of diagnostic judgment as a function of prior diagnostic information. University students (N=102) were assigned to 16 treatment groups, with variables of: prior diagnosis attributed to a videotaped target person ("psychotic" versus none), setting in which the observed sample of his behavior was said to…