Children's attributions about story characters in ambiguous and unambiguous social situations were assessed. One hundred and forty-four 6-7-year-olds and 10-11-year-olds heard about actors who slighted a recipient intentionally or for an undetermined reason and then made causal attributions about the events, an emotion attribution about the recipient, and global personality attributions about t...

The present article conducts a meta-analytic review of the research adopting the perceived locus of causality in the contexts of sport, exercise, and physical education. A literature search of published articles identified three main research foci: (a) the development of instruments that assess perceived locus of causality; (b) examination of the construct validity of perceived locus of causali...

Although we know from research that achievement motivation is related to individuals’ ideas about how good they are at an activity, we know less about the components that predict these task-specific ability self-perceptions. Given their demonstrated motivational power, it would be useful to know what sub-component physical and psychological skills feed into individuals’ sport-specific ability s...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether perceived sports competence mediates the relationship between childhood motor skill proficiency and subsequent adolescent physical activity and fitness. METHODS In 2000, children's motor skill proficiency was assessed as part of a school-based physical activity intervention. In 2006/07, participants were followed up as part of th...

A longitudinal randomized trial tested the self-determination theory (SDT) intervention and process model of health behavior change for tobacco cessation (N = 1006). Adult smokers were recruited for a study of smokers' health and were assigned to intensive treatment or community care. Participants were relatively poor and undereducated. Intervention patients perceived greater autonomy support a...

According to Harter (1985a), global self-worth (GSW) can be predicted from the relationship between perceptions of competence and importance ratings. In this study, we employed Harter's (1985b) Importance Rating Scale (IRS) and Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC) to examine importance ratings, discrepancy scores, and domain-specific perceptions of competence as predictors of GSW. Childr...

AIM Assessing social competence is important for clinical and preventive interventions of depression. The aim of the present paper was to examine the factor structure of the Japanese Interpersonal Competence Scale (JICS). METHODS Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the survey responses of 730 participants. Simultaneous multigroup analyses were conducted to confirm fa...

Fifty-three adolescents aged 14 to 18 years with diagnoses of cerebral palsy (n = 27), cleft lip or palate or both (n = 17), or spina bifida (n = 9) took part in this study examining their self-esteem, self-concept, self-acceptance, social self-efficacy, and values, as measured by standardized instruments. Comparisons were made separately for males and females with norms developed for adolescen...