Negative Attributional Style for Interpersonal Events and the Occurrence of Severe Interpersonal Disruptions as Predictors of Self-Reported Suicidal Ideation

We applied the hopelessness theory of depression to suicidal symptoms: 203 undergraduates completed questionnaires on attributional style, negative life events, hopelessness, and suicidal symptoms at one point in time and again 10 weeks later. Consistent with prediction, the combination of a negative attributional style for interpersonal events and the occurrence of such events were prospectively related to increases in self-reported suicidally over the course of the 10-week study. These findings displayed specificity with respect to interpersonal versus achievement-related styles and events. Contrary to hypothesis, hopelessness did not mediate the relation between the Attributional style x Stress interaction and the increases in self-reported suicidality.     

What Drives Support for Transgender Rights? Assessing the Effects of Biological Attribution on U.S. Public Opinion of Transgender Rights

Sex Roles - Scholars have a limited understanding of what drives opinion on transgender rights. The present study begins to fill this gap by applying attribution theory to data from a national...     

Chronic and temporary aggression causes hostile false memories for ambiguous information

Chronic and temporarily aggressive people show a phenomenon known as the hostile attribution bias (HAB), in which access to hostile schemas leads them to interpret ambiguously hostile information in a hostile way. Can these people also be induced to remember unambiguously hostile, yet completely false information? To address this question, we investigated the effect of both chronic and temporary aggression on recall for a list containing words that could be interpreted as exemplars of either an aggressive (violence‐related) or non‐aggressive (kitchen‐related) category. Subjects were exposed to five consecutive lists of associated words including the ambiguous list, but half read a list of insult words immediately before presentation of the ambiguous list, while the other half read only emotionally neutral lists. When recalling the ambiguous list, aggressive subjects and subjects who were primed with insult words were more likely to report having seen unpresented aggressive words compared with their low aggressive and not primed counterparts. We discuss our findings in line with Anderson and Bushman's (2002) General Aggression Model (GAM). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Many Perspectives Provide a Compass? Differentiating 360‐Degree and Multi‐Source Feedback

Researchers have been inconsistent regarding (a) the relationship between 360° feedback and multi‐source feedback and (b) the definition of 360° feedback. In the present paper, we review these topics and offer two solutions that could facilitate effective communication about these terms.