This study was an assessment of how children's achievement attributions were influenced by their age, attentional focus, gender, and success or failure experience. Older and younger elementary school children performed a memory task under either self-focusing or task-focusing instructions. After performance, half of the children in each condition were given success feedback and the other half f...

The experiences of clinicians working with the ASD population suggest that parents of children with autism frequently misattribute their child’s behaviour, particularly misbehaviour, to autism and that this can be a barrier in behavioural interventions (Howlin and Rutter, 1987). However, no research on the specific attributions that parents of children with ASD make for their child’s behaviour ...

Terror Management Theory posits that when individuals are faced with their own mortality, they use several defense mechanisms to reduce the existential anxiety caused by the thought of their own death. In this paper, we examined one such mechanism: Control attributions. To do so, we ran an experiment (n = 140) in which we manipulated mortality salience and type of failure (relevant vs. irreleva...

OBJECTIVE To examine mothers' attributions for the causes and remedies of their children's abdominal pain, specifically whether attributions differed according to child diagnosis, reflected a dualistic or multidimensional view of pain, and changed following medical evaluation. METHODS Mothers of children whose medical evaluation indicated peptic disease (n = 55) or unexplained pain without id...

Aggressive and prosocial children's emotion attributions and moral reasoning were investigated. Participants were 235 kindergarten children (M=6.2 years) and 136 elementary-school children (M=7.6 years) who were selected as aggressive or prosocial based on (kindergarten) teacher ratings. The children were asked to evaluate hypothetical rule violations, attribute emotions they would feel in the ...

This meta-analytic review of 42 studies covering 8,009 participants 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: 0.15, 0.38; d = .39, 95% CI: 0.29, 0.49). Effect sizes differ considerably across studies and this heterogeneity...

I investigated the moderating role of ingroup identification on the relationship between the affective state experienced and the causal attributions made for social identity threatening outcomes of intergroup comparisons. For people under such conditions, on the basis of prior research, I expected that affect unpleasantness is positively correlated with attributions for outgroup merits to the e...

People's attributional phenomenology is likely to be characterized by effortful situational correction. Drawing on this phenomenology and on people's desire to view themselves more favorably than others, the authors hypothesized that people expect others to engage in less situational correction than themselves and to make more extreme dispositional attributions for constrained actors' behavior....