Depressive symptoms and attributional style were assessed in a sample of 7- to 11-year-old children at two time points. Findings revealed that boys and girls did not differ in their level of depressive symptoms over 1 year. At baseline, boys were more likely than girls to make stable attributions for negative events. Boys made fewer stable attributions for positive events than did girls. Modera...

The causal impact of attributions on academic performance was examined by changing low-scoring students' attributions regarding their poor performances. Initially, when students who were failing a college course identified the cause of the performance, they emphasized external, uncontrollable causes. Because these self-serving attributions could have perpetuated poor performance on subsequent e...

ANNALS, AAPSS, 634, March 2011 Lay or commonsense accounts of the origins of criminal behavior may play a key role in sustaining a strong public appetite for harsh criminal justice policies and undergird large black-white differences in opinion in this domain. Using data from the nationally representative Race, Crime, and Public Opinion project’s 2001 survey, the authors develop an explanatory ...

Field studies have not yet conclusively established how attributions affect adjustment to unanticipated traumatic events. This may be due, in part, to the adoption of several untested assumptions in most prior research. It has usually been assumed that attributional issues are important to people who experience a traumatic event, that such concern is adaptive, and that specific attributions (e....

In the present study we evaluated attributional style which refers to how individuals explain the causes for positive and negative events in their lives in patients with first episode of schizophrenia with and without paranoid ideation. 43 patients with first episode of psychosis and 37 matched normal controls completed Ambiguous Intentions Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ) (Combs et al. 2007). Be...

Games are increasingly being used as educational tools, in part because they are presumed to enhance student motivation. We look at student motivation in games from the viewpoint of attribution theory, which predicts more learning by students who make attributions along certain dimensions, and thus may provide a way of examining this claim in more detail. We studied 13 students as they played a...