AIMS To study associations between characteristics of employees active at work and making a fatigue related visit to the general practitioner (GP) or occupational physician (OP) in terms of fatigue, physical health problems, mental health problems, psychosocial work characteristics, and attributions of their fatigue complaints. METHODS Self report questionnaires from the Maastricht Cohort Stu...

OBJECTIVE Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic musculoskeletal pain disorder characterized by widespread pain. This study focuses on patients' attributions of illness and of symptom onset. METHODS Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 56 women to elicit patients' views on what triggered their FM. The transcripts of the interviews were analyzed using a classical indexing technique to identi...

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research explores how observers make causal beliefs about an event in terms of the person or situation. Thirty-four participants read various short descriptions of social events that implied either the person or the situation as the cause. Half of them were explicitly instructed to judge whether the event was caused by something about the person...

To reason competently about novel entities, people must discover whether the entity is alive and/or sentient. Exactly how people make this discovery is unknown, although past researchers have proposed that young children – unlike adults – rely chiefly on whether the object can move itself. This study examined the effect of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement on children’s and adult...

Election outcomes correlate with judgments based on a candidate's visual appearance, suggesting that the attributions viewers make based on appearance, so-called thin-slice judgments, influence voting. Yet, it is not known whether the effect of appearance on voting is more strongly influenced by positive or negative attributions, nor which neural mechanisms subserve this effect. We conducted tw...

Discrepancies between people's ought selves and their actual selves and their ideal selves and actual selves predict the emotions that individuals experience. The authors predicted that internal versus external causal attributions for self-discrepancies should moderate the relationship between self-discrepancies and emotions, resulting in more refined predictions for both agitation- and dejecti...

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants (ages 4-20) examines the relation of moral emotion attributions to prosocial and antisocial behavior. A significant association is found between moral emotion attributions and prosocial and antisocial behaviors (d = .26, 95% CI [.15, .38]; d = .39, 95% CI [.29, .49]). Effect sizes differ considerably across studies and this het...

The goal of the present study was to examine a conceptual attributional model for the development of psychopathology after child physical abuse. Physically abused or maltreated children referred for treatment completed a series of measures to assess parent-to-child violence, abuse-specific attributions and general attributional style, other potential predictors, and children's psychopathology. ...

Research has shown that those with insomnia focus primarily on their sleep as a cause of daytime fatigue rather than the multitude of other possible causes of fatigue. This can create sleep-related anxiety and further perpetuate the sleep disturbance. In order to lessen the increased focus on sleep, the present study investigated whether people could learn to consider other attributions for fat...

Previous research into the relationship between attributions and academic performance has produced contradictory findings that have not been resolved. The present research examines the role of specific dimensions of attributional style in predicting subsequent academic performance in a sample of pupils (N = 979) from both high- and low-achieving schools. Hierarchical regression and moderation a...