Retarded children show marked susceptibility to learned helplessness. Three experiments illustrate how adults may foster this helplessness. In Experiment 1, college students reported causal attributions for failure and expectancies of future success for either "a 6-year-old child" or "a 9-year-old mentally retarded child with a mental age of 6 years." In Experiment 2, students reported attribut...

BACKGROUND Social Cognition and Interaction Training (SCIT) is a manual-based group intervention designed to improve social cognition in schizophrenia. Initial studies conducted by the developers of SCIT suggest that the intervention has promise in ameliorating social cognitive dysfunction in both inpatients and outpatients. AIMS The current study is a preliminary evaluation of SCIT in commun...

Studies focusing on neuropsychological impairments in Wilson's disease (WD) have highlighted that patients showing neurological signs present significant deficits in a wide range of cognitive domains. Attentional and executive impairments have also been described in people with hepatic WD. However, social cognition abilities, i.e. cognitive processes required to perceive the emotions, intention...

The self-positivity bias is found to be an aspect of normal cognitive function. Changes in this bias are usually associated with changes in emotional states, such as dysphoria or depression. The aim of the present study was to clarify the role of emotional valence within self-referential processing. By asking non-dysphoric and dysphoric individuals to rate separately the emotional and self-refe...

This study examined longitudinal associations between adolescents' and their friend's depressive symptoms and depressogenic attributional style. Participants included 398 adolescents in grades six through eight at the outset of the study. Adolescents completed peer nominations to identify reciprocated and unreciprocated best friendships as well as measures of depressive symptoms and depressogen...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the study was to investigate the extent and nature of spontaneous attributional activity elicited by a newspaper report of child sexual abuse. METHOD One hundred and seventy-six respondents, who were recruited through appeals placed in the letters column of a local newspaper, were presented with a newspaper report that described either a stereotype-congruent (rape by ...

A number of studies have supported the hypothesis that negative attributional styles may confer vulnerability to the development of depression. The goal of this study was to explore factors that may contribute to the development of negative attributional styles in children. As hypothesized, elevated levels of depressive symptoms and hopelessness at the initial assessment predicted negative chan...