Causal attributions and blame: associations with mothers' adjustment to the birth of a child with Down syndrome

The main purpose of this study is to explore the associations between causal attributions to others, blaming others and mothers' adjustment to the birth of a child with Down syndrome (DS). Participants (n?=?214) rated causal attributions to others and blaming others, and completed five measures of adjustment: anger, anxiety, depression, parenting stress, and attitudes towards the child. The adjustment of three groups of mothers was compared: (i) those who made no attributions to others (ii) those who made causal attributions but did not blame, and (iii) those who blamed others. Four years after the births of their children with DS, 16% of mothers blamed others and 17% made causal attributions but did not blame others for this outcome. Those who blamed others had higher levels of anger, anxiety, depression, parenting stress and more negative attitudes towards their children with DS than did those who made causal attributions but did not blame, and those who made who made no attributions to others. The adjustment of the latter two groups did not differ. Investigating blame rather than causal attributions may be a more fruitful area for future research aimed at understanding and facilitating adjustment to illness and other negative life events.     

Parent and child causal attributions related to the child's clinical problem

Parents and children were asked to give causal attributions related to the child's learning or behavior problems and an area of success. Actor-observer differences and tendencies of actors to make differential attributions for their positive and negative outcomes were examined. A significant number of parents and childen were in disagreement regarding the cause of the child's problem. Parents made significantly more internal than external attributions for children's presenting problems. In contrast, children were evenly distributed in problem attributions. Both parents and children made significantly more internal success attributions. Research with clinical child populations is highlighted as a valuable way to validate, expand, and refine attribution theory while clarifying its practical applications.Portions of the data included here served as the basis for a presentation by the first author at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, New York, 1979. The authors wish to thank the Fernald research group for their comments, and the staff of the San Fernando Valley Child Guidance Clinic, the Fernald office staff, and Perry Nelson for assistance.     

Gender and managers' causal attributions for subordinate performance: A field story

The study addresses the effect of gender on managers' causal explanations for subordinate work performance. Prior laboratory studies suggest women's work performance will be attributed in a manner disadvantageous to their career progression within organizations. There are, however, numerous reasons to question the generalizability of the laboratory work to organizational settings. The study was performed to address the gap in field research on this issue. Ninety-three mainly Caucasian managers in two organizations made attributions for successful and unsuccessful performance of direct subordinates. Contrary to the hypotheses, subordinate gender was unrelated to managers' causal explanations for either positive or negative outcomes. Implications of the results for future research on attributional gender effects in organizational settings are discussed.     

Effects of Question-Wording Style and Research Context on Attributions for Success and Failure

Although a substantial body of research exists concerning the patterns of causal attributions that are made to explain achievement outcomes, relatively little attention has been paid to the effects that measurement techniques have on the attributions they elicit. Two methodological factors—question-wording style and research context—were hypothesized to affect the results of attribution studies. Participants made informational (e.g., "How hard did you try?") and causal (e.g., "To what extent was effort a cause of your outcome?") attributions to outcomes in either an experimental (anagram-task) or natural (classroom-examination) research context. Significant outcome effects were found for (a) informational but not causal attributions to ability and to the task and for (b) attributions to ability in the natural but not in the experimental context. The implications of these findings for attribution theory and research are discussed.     

Children's Trait and Emotion Attributions in Socially Ambiguous and Unambiguous Situations

Children's attributions about story characters in ambiguous and unambiguous social situations were assessed. One hundred and forty-four 6–7-year-olds and 10–11-year-olds heard about actors who slighted a recipient intentionally or for an undetermined reason and then made causal attributions about the events, an emotion attribution about the recipient, and global personality attributions about the actors and recipient. Relations between perceived self-competence and attribution style were also assessed. Participants were more likely to make negative causal attributions in the unambiguous condition and with increasing age. Older girls and younger boys were more likely than other groups to attribute negative emotions to the recipient. Overall, participants perceived recipients positively and actors negatively. Perceived self-competence was positively correlated with actor attributions, although these differed by age and gender. Implications for children's psychosocial adjustment are discussed.     

Locus of control and causal attribution for positive and negative outcomes on university examinations

One-hundred-five internal and external locus of control subjects attributed responsibility for their positive and negative outcomes on a university examination. Internal and positive outcome subjects attributed responsibility to internal causal factors while external and negative outcome subjects were more external in their causal attributions. Overall ratings of the four causal components ability, effort, task, and luck were not always in accord with the Weiner model two-dimensional classification.     

Expressed emotion and attributions in the carers of patients with Alzheimer's disease: the effect on carer burden

Burden of care, expressed emotion (EE), causal attributions, and salivary cortisol were assessed in 100 carers of patients with Alzheimer's disease. Forty-one carers were rated high EE, which was associated with higher scores of carer distress and strain, and greater reports of noncognitive features in the patient, but not with cortisol levels. High EE carers made more attributions personal to, and controllable by, the patient for negative events. Critical carers made more attributions of the patient's behavior that was idiosyncratic. Warmth toward the patient was associated with the opposite of this pattern. Overinvolved carers made attributions of the patient's behavior to causes external to the patient and internal to themselves. Cortisol levels were associated with self-reports of strain and distress.     

Causal attributions of married couples: when do they search for causes? What do they conclude when they do?

In this study, we examined when and whether married people engage in attributional activity or form causal attributions to explain their partners' behavior. We used an indirect probe to better approximate naturally occurring cognitive activity. We also examined the content of spouses' causal attributions, using both direct and indirect probes. Spouses were asked about frequent as well as infrequent relationship events, and about partner behaviors that had positive or negative impacts on the recipient. Husbands in unsatisfying relationships reported more attributional thoughts than did happily married husbands, whereas wives in the two groups did not differ. Behaviors having negative impacts elicited more attributional activity than did positive behaviors. Behavioral frequency and impact interacted in ways contrary to predictions. Finally, distressed couples were particularly likely to report distress-maintaining attributions and were particularly unlikely to report relationship-enhancing attributions, compared with their nondistressed counterparts.     

Causal attributions, sanctions, and normal mood variations

The causal-locus hypothesis (CLH) asserts that persons making internal attributions for failure and external attributions for success experience more negative postoutcome moods than persons making the opposite attributions. Three experiments assessed the CLH. Although outcomes consistently affected moods and attributions, attributions did not affect moods. Significant correlations consistent with the CLH were also infrequently obtained. Another theory, the sanctioned-object hypothesis (SOH), was proposed for understanding how causal attributions lead to mood changes. This hypothesis asserts that the application of positive or negative sanctions to objects in the perceptual field is a central determinant of mood and that attributions affect mood when their content and salience activate sanctioning processes. A fourth experiment evaluated the competing theories. The results supported the SOH but not the CLH. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding mood variations and the effects that moods have on the construction of attributions and for adopting methodological alternatives that may be valuable for future laboratory research studying mood variations.     

Attributions in a Spiritual Healing Context: An Archival Analysis of a 1920s Healing Movement

Research on religious attributions has been limited by a preoccupation with disentangling “religious” from “naturalistic” attributions and a failure to capture the attributions that people make in response to meaningful events. Thirty years of research has shown that even under optimum conditions religious attributions are rare compared to naturalistic ones. This research draws on unique archival materials comprising letters written to the Panacea Society containing self‐reported effects of a spiritual healing treatment based on water‐taking practices. This analysis examined attributions over time among a sample of letter writers (N = 19) from the 1920s using the Leeds Attributional Coding System to examine patterns of attributions that correspondents made in response to improvement and worsening of health outcomes. In line with previous research, religious attributions were more common for positive outcomes than negative outcomes. Contrary to previous research, religious attributions accounted for the majority of attributions made compared with nonreligious attributions. We discuss the implications for future research in studying attributions in real‐life meaningful settings and in expanding the repertoire of attributions to include religious ritual and community.     

Who's Being Served? "Self-Serving" Attributions in Social Hierarchies

Making external attributions for negative events, though often considered “self-serving,” also implies that the attributor is not in control of critical resources. We hypothesized that making external attributions for negative events will lead to impressions of powerlessness. Because individuals in high-status roles are expected to have power and control, external attributions may violate these role expectations; thus, we further hypothesized that status would moderate the relationship between attributions and interpersonal outcomes. Specifically, more negative impressions and affect will be directed toward high-status individuals who make external attributions than toward their lower status counterparts. Three studies were conducted, one using a role-play methodology, one using an experimentally created hierarchy, and one using vignettes. The results supported our hypotheses: external attributions can be highly disserving for people in high-status positions.     

Effect of memory perspective on retrospective causal attributions

Two studies examined whether people's retrospective causal attributions might be mediated by the visual perspective from which events are recalled. In Study 1, pairs of Ss participated in "get-acquainted" conversations and made a series of attribution ratings for their performance. They returned 3 weeks later to rerate their performance on the same attribution scales and to indicate the perspective from which they remembered their earlier conversation. Ss reported either "observer" memories in which they could "see" themselves from the outside or "field" memories in which their field of view matched that of the original situation. Study 2 was identical to Study 1 with the exception that Ss' memory perspectives were manipulated via verbal instructions. In both experiments, conversations that were recalled from an observer's perspective were attributed more dispositionally. These results suggest that the different perspectives from which events can be recalled function much like the divergent visual perspectives available to actors and observers in immediate, everyday experience. Discussion of these results focuses on how they further understanding of the contradictory findings reported in the literature on temporal shifts in attributions.     

The Relationship of Informational Attributions to Affective Response to Success and Failure

Abstract

This study assessed the relationship of informational attributions—perceived characteristics of the self and the task situation—to postperformance affect. College students performed an anagram task and rated causal and informational attributions for their outcomes, the causal dimensions for the perceived causes of their outcomes, and their affective response to their outcomes. The valence of the outcome—success or failure—was the best predictor of affect, and both causal attributions and causal dimensions accounted for substantial portions of the affect variance. Informational attributions accounted for a significant proportion of the affect variance beyond that attributable to the other factors. Implications of these results for the attributional theory of emotion are discussed.     

Causal Attribution and Perceived Realism of Stories

Just as people generate causal explanations for social events around them, story readers usually generate inferences about causality of events when reading a story. The attribution literature suggests that, when judging events that happen to others, people spontaneously generate dispositional explanations for negative events and situational explanations for positive events and the reverse when judging events that happen to themselves. Three experiments examined how these spontaneously generated inferences of causality interacted with causal explanations provided by the text of a story to influence perceived realism. The results indicate that the relationship between spontaneously generated causal attributions and information supplied by the story had little influence on realism judgments about story characters or about other people. When evaluating the story scenario for the self, however, results of all three experiments show that people find information consistent with their own spontaneous attributions more realistic. The results contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that may drive realism evaluations of stories and possible contrasting mechanisms between attributions in story worlds and the social world.     

Do Children’s Attributions Mediate the Link Between Parental Conditional Regard and Child Depression and Emotion?

Both parental conditional regard for academics and depressogenic attributions are related to detrimental psychological outcomes for children. Here we examine associations among parental conditional negative regard, child depressogenic attributions, child depressive symptoms, and emotion reactivity in children between the ages of 8 and 12, as well as whether children’s self-reported and behavioral attributions for negative events mediate associations between parental conditional negative regard for academics with children’s depressive symptoms and emotion reactivity. In Study 1 (N?=?108, M _age ?=?9.73, 50 male), children’s self-reported attributions for hypothetical events mediated the link between parental conditional negative regard and child depressive symptoms. In Study 2 (N?=?104, M _age ?=?10.28, 54 male), children attempted an impossible puzzle task while their skin conductance level was monitored, after which they completed an interview that was coded for spontaneous attributions for failure. Children’s spontaneous attributions mediated the link between parental conditional negative regard and child emotion reactivity, but not depressive symptoms. Findings suggest that children’s attributions may be a mechanism through which parental conditional negative regard is related to children’s depressive symptoms and emotion reactivity during a performance challenge. These results have implications for developmental models of depression risk and potential areas for clinical interventions with both children and their parents.     

Expressed emotion and attributions in the relatives of bipolar patients: an analysis of problem-solving interactions

Among the relatives of schizophrenic and depressed patients, high expressed emotion (EE) attitudes are associated with "controllability attributions" about the causes of patients' symptoms and problem behaviors. However, previous studies have judged EE attitudes and causal attributions from the same assessment measure, the Camberwell Family Interview (CFI; C. E. Vaughn & J. P. Leff, 1976). The authors examined causal attributions among relatives of 47 bipolar patients, as spontaneously expressed to patients in family problem-solving interactions during a postillness period. Relatives rated high EE during the patients' acute episode (based on the CFI) were more likely than relatives rated low EE to spontaneously attribute patients' symptoms and negative behaviors to personal and controllable factors during the postillness interactional assessment. Thus, the EE-attribution linkage extends to the relatives of bipolar patients evaluated during a family interaction task.     

Carers' attributions about positive events in psychosis relate to expressed emotion

Background

Relapse is increased in people with psychosis who live with carers with high expressed emotion (EE). Attributional style has been used to understand EE at a psychological level. Previous studies have investigated carer appraisals for negative events in the patient's life. We therefore aimed to examine spontaneous carer attributions for both negative and positive events. Further, we distinguished between high EE based on critical comments, and that based on emotional-overinvolvement.

Method

Audiotapes of the Camberwell Family Interview (CFI) (N = 70) were rated using the Leeds Attributional Coding System (LACS). Raters were blind to previous ratings of EE.

Results

In our sample, low EE carers made significantly more attributions about positive events, and less about negative events than high EE carers. This is because criticism, but not overinvolvement, was strongly associated with responsibility attributions for negative events, while overinvolvement, but not criticism, was inversely associated with responsibility attributions for positive events.

Conclusion

Carers' attributions for both positive and negative events may be a useful target for improving family interventions in psychosis.     

A Self-Attribution-Reactance Model of Recovery from Injury in Type A Individuals1

A self-attribution-reactance model of Type A behavior and medical recovery is introduced. The model proposes that Type As' bias to view themselves as causal for all outcomes makes them sensitive to events (illness, injury, or treatment) that reduce their personal control. Consequently, Type As are more likely than Type Bs to respond to such events with reactant behavior (noncompliance with treatment) in order to restore their perceptions of control and freedom. In a test of the model, 32 patients being treated for running-related injuries were assessed for Type A behavior, preference for control over and involvement with treatment, and attributions for and reactions to their injury at the beginning of treatment. The physician's ratings of progress through treatment made at the conclusion of the study served as the measure of recovery. Results supported the model in that extreme Type As were more likely than moderate Type As and Type Bs to be judged as exhibiting poor recovery. Moreover, Type As judged to have made poor progress made more extreme self-attributions and were more angry about their injuries than were Type A and B patients judged to have made good progress. The implications of the findings for promoting compliance are discussed.     

Gender Differences in Self-Serving Attributions About Sexual Experiences1

Two studies investigated sex differences in attributions about sexual experiences. Subjects were asked to provide causal explanations for satisfying and unsatisfying past experiences. Men were expected to display a greater self-serving bias than women. This hypothesis was supported for unsatisfying but not for satisfying experiences. In both experiments, males were found to blame their partners more for unsatisfying experiences than females. Males used self-serving attributions, assigning more responsibility to the partner than to themselves (Experiment I), whereas women displayed self-derogatory attributions, attributing negative outcomes more to themselves than to their partners (Experiment II). Furthermore, self-derogatory attribution patterns were correlated with unsatisfactory sexual histories in women but not in men. Implications for the treatment of sexual dysfunctions via reattribution training are discussed.     

Attributions,Cognitions, and Coping Styles: Teleworkers' Reactions to Work-Related Problems1

Based on the attributional reformulation of learned helplessness theory (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) and Lazarus and Launier's (1978) primary-secondary appraisal theory of stress, the present study sought to examine teleworkers' reactions to their work-related problems. The role of attributions about the sources, and cognitions about the consesquences, of these problems in promoting positive adaptation was addressed. In particular, it was predicted that teleworkers who made optimistic attributions and cognitions would be more likely to employ problem-focused coping strategies and, as a result, report more positive psychological and job-related outcomes. Based on a survey sample of 192 teleworkers, the results indicated that a tendency to engage in self-blame was related to the use of emotion-focused coping strategies. In turn, there was evidence linking emotion-focused coping strategies to negative outcomes and problem-focused coping strategies to positive outcomes. The results are discussed in relation to attributional approaches to stress which highlight the importance of cognitions about the consequences of negative events. Finally, implications for the training of teleworkers are presented.