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....

Brickman et al.'s (Brickman, P., Rabinowitz, V. C., Coates, D., Cohn, E., Kidder, L. (1982). Models of helping and coping. American Psychologist 37:364-384.) models of helping and coping provided a framework by which to compare clinicians' attributions of blame and control among several hypothetical patients. Sixty-one mental health clinicians (MHCs) and addiction clinicians (ACs)--mostly maste...

OBJECTIVE The current study assessed preschool-age children's control attributions for weight and the relationship of these attributions to attitudes and behavioral intentions toward children of different body sizes. METHODS Forty-two children (mean age = 5.2 years) were interviewed about the adjectives they attributed to figures of different sizes, their preference for size in playmates, and...

Negative parental attributions are related to parent and family stressors and are thought to be important predictors of subsequent disciplinary actions and, potentially, abusive parenting. We examined if negative parental attributions mediate the relation between daily stressors (i.e., low SES, parenting stress, partner-related stress) parents' own history of child maltreatment, and harsh and a...

Attributions have been studied extensively in groups, yet little is known about the effects attributions have on group communication and performance. This study examines how attributions for a group failure affect socioemotional communication, procedural changes, effort, and performance on the next task. Three-member computer-mediated groups worked on two decision-making tasks. All groups recei...

Evidence for the self-serving bias (attributing success internally and failure externally) is inconsistent. Although internal success attributions are consistently found, researchers find both internal and external attributions for failure. The authors explain these disparate effects by considering the intersection of 2 systems, a system comparing self against standards and a causal attribution...

The study investigated interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions in relation to social behaviour in a sample of 59 5-year-old, 123 7-year-old, and 130 9-year-old children. Interpretive understanding was assessed by two tasks measuring children's understanding of ambiguous situations. Moral judgments and emotion attributions were measured using two moral rule transgre...

This study investigates the influence of players’ performance and level of skill on responsibility attributions in groups. Participants act as external judges and evaluate the performance of teams of differently skilled players who compete in a darts game. The results show that both performance and skill influence responsibility attributions. Poor performance elicits high blame and low credit r...

This study examined whether lawyers' attributions of responsibility for mental illnesses affect their decisions about involuntary treatment. A survey that was mailed in 2003 to Illinois lawyers involved in involuntary commitment elicited recommendations for involuntary treatment for characters presented in vignettes. The survey also sought respondents' attributions of personal responsibility fo...

In this study, we investigated people's perceptions about the causes (i.e. attributions) of underachievement among students experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage and their support for public assistance to those students. Results an online survey conducted with Australian adults (N = 1999) revealed that people preferred societal attributions individual The respondents' attributions, particular...