Research suggests that for adults, "folkpsychology" and "folkbiology" represent distinct conceptual domains for reasoning about living things. However, it is not clear whether these domains are distinct for children; past work suggests that the 2 systems are confused until age 10, and that radical theory change accounts for eventual differentiation. To examine this claim, 16 subjects each at ag...

The purpose of this paper is to identify attributive constructs of leadership and look at them from a critical perspective. First we will have a look on the self psychology according to Kohut (1996). Then leader role models created by subordinates are examined in detail. The theoretical basis for this empirical study is provided by attribution theory. Empirical role models for leaders are inves...

In this chapter you will be focusing on personality and its influence on a healthy, balanced lifestyle. By the end of this chapter you should have knowledge and understanding of: • personality and its importance in producing effective performance and in following a balanced, active and healthy lifestyle • attitudes and their influence on performance and lifestyle • achievement motivation and it...

The authors investigated social inference practices of Koreans and Americans in two novel domains: behavioral predictions and folk theories of behavior. When dispositional and situational inferences were disentangled, Koreans showed dispositional thinking to the same extent as Americans. This was the case for behavioral predictions based on individual difference information (Study 1) and for en...

Contagious yawning is a common, but poorly understood phenomenon. We hypothesized that contagious yawning is part of a more general phenomenon known as mental state attribution (i.e. the ability to inferentially model the mental states of others). To test this hypothesis we compared susceptibility to contagiously yawn with performance on a self-face recognition task, several theory of mind stor...

This study focused on hurtful messages daughters-in-law (DILs, N = 132) reported receiving from mothers-in-law (MILs). Results reveal various hurtful message types: underand overinvolvement, personal attacks, and hurt communicated to or through a third party. Grounded in attribution theory, we examined DILs’ attributions for MILs’ hurtful messages and their perceived agreement with their husban...

Seven studies tested the hypothesis that people use subjective time progression in hedonic evaluation. When people believe that time has passed unexpectedly quickly, they rate tasks as more engaging, noises as less irritating, and songs as more enjoyable. We propose that felt time distortion operates as a metacognitive cue that people implicitly attribute to their enjoyment of an experience (i....

While claims of the importance of attribution theory and teachers' expectations of students for student performance are repeatedly made, there is little comprehensive research identifying the perceptions preservice teachers have of students with learning disabilities (LD). Accordingly, 444 Australian preservice primary school teachers were surveyed using vignettes and Likert-scale questions, to...