The reformulated learned helplessness model proposes that people who tend to make internal, stable, and global attributions in response to uncontrollable aversive events are more likely to develop depression. The present study sought to investigate the nature of the relationship between attributional style and depression in a male prison sample. One hundred and one adult male prisoners from fou...

Knowledge scouts are software agents that autonomously synthesize knowledge of interest to a given user (target knowledge) by applying inductive database operators to a local or distributed dataset. This paper describes briefly a method and a scripting language for developing knowledge scouts, and then reports on experiments with a knowledge scout, SCAMP, for discovering patterns characterizing...

Research into the nature of attributional reasoning in paranoia has for the most part been restricted to questionnaire-based approaches. This fails to address the issue of whether a distinctive attributional style underpins the everyday talk of paranoid individuals. This study aimed to investigate whether attributional models of paranoid delusions applied to spontaneous attributions generated i...

An influential model of persecutory delusions put forward by Bentall and colleagues hypothesizes that persecutory-deluded patients avoid the activation of negative self-beliefs by making externalising, personalising attributions for negative events. The first study reported here used a new instrument for the measurement of persecutory ideation, the Paranoid, Persecutory and Delusion-Proneness Q...

It was proposed that people attribute an individual’s behavior more to internal factors when that individual’s actions are influenced by reward than when those actions are influenced by punishment. Previous research has failed to control for the power of reward versus punishment which, in effect, creates a confounding of behavioral base rates (consensus) with the reward-punishment manipulation....

Interoceptive accuracy (IAc), the ability to perceive signals from within body, has been linked many beneficial health outcomes but also psychopathologies such as anxiety disorders. Therefore, its relation a person's subjective well-being (SWB) is unclear. Here, we predicted that individuals who are prone interpreting interoceptive positively benefit IAc and exhibit higher SWB. In contrast, wit...

This study aimed at investigating hostile attributional biases for ambiguous facialexpressions and answers generated to impasse situations related to aggressive behavior inadolescence. In a cross-sectional design, four pictures suggesting ambiguity in relation to emotions and a narrative based on a hypothetic impasse situation were applied to a non-randomized sample of 29 incarcerat...

Uncertainty reduction underlies relational development, i.e., relationships develop as we learn more about each other. The present study examines ethnic differences in the uses of interactive uncertainty reduction communication--selfdisclosure, interrogative strategies, non-verbal immediacy, and other's self-disclosure-and their inter-relationships with attributional confidence (uncertainty red...

The relationship was examined between exposure to and preference for violent electronic games and aggressive norms as well as hostile attributional style. Following a pilot study to sample widely used electronic games varying in violent content, 231 eighth-grade adolescents in Germany reported their use of and attraction to violent electronic games. They also completed measures of hostile attri...