The Survey of Achievement Responsibility (SOAR): Reliability and Validity Data on an Academic Attribution Scale

The Survey of Achievement Responsibility (SOAR) was designed to assess students' causal attributions of success and failure in school-related situations. Unlike other measures of locus of control and attributions, the SOAR simultaneously distinguishes among three broad subject areas—math/science, language arts/ social studies, and physical education-and between two possible outcomes—success and failure. Data on the psychometric characteristics of the SOAR came from two samples from each of two large school districts, one suburban and one metropolitan. A five-stage study of the psychometric qualities of this new instrument revealed: (a) Content validity is high—judges independently classified items into the attribution categories intended by the authors; (b) internal consistency reliabilities are in a range adequate for group research purposes and are comparable to the reliabilities of other measures of attributions; (c) test-retest reliabilities showed attribution profiles to be stable over a 2-month interval; (d) correlations between the SOAR scales and students' self-reports of ability in various subject areas showed differential relationship in the theoretically predicted directions; and (e) correlations between the SOAR scales and achievement tests were statistically significant, though low in magnitude, consistent with reports on other instruments. Finally, use of the SOAR in a spectrum of studies has demonstrated its research utility and indicated directions for further instrument development and research.     

Reach Out and Reduce Prejudice: The Impact of Interpersonal Touch on Intergroup Liking

A brief, casual interpersonal touch results in positive behavior toward the toucher, presumably because touch is a cue to friendship. Research on intergroup contact shows that feelings of friendship toward an individual outgroup member reduce prejudice toward that entire group. Integrating these areas, we examined whether interpersonal touch by an outgroup member could reduce prejudice. In three replications in two studies, interpersonal touch decreased implicit, though not explicit, prejudice toward the toucher's group. Effects of interpersonal touch can extend beyond the toucher to others sharing the toucher's ethnicity, and findings suggest that such effects are automatic and outside conscious awareness.     

Counterfactual potency

Counterfactual thoughts typically take the form of implied or explicit if-then statements. We propose that the multiplicative combination of "if likelihood" (the degree to which the antecedent condition of the counterfactual is perceived to be likely) and "then likelihood" (the perceived conditional likelihood of the outcome of the counterfactual, given the antecedent condition) determine the strength and impact of counterfactuals. This construct, termed counterfactual potency, is a reliable predictor of the degree of influence of counterfactual thinking upon judgments of regret, causation, and responsibility. Through 4 studies, we demonstrate the predictive power of this construct in a variety of contexts and show that it plays a causal role in determining the strength of the effects of counterfactual thought. Implications of counterfactual potency as a central factor of counterfactual influence are discussed.     

Power and fundamentalism

The following article is the second of two on fundamentalism. The first article, published in Journal of Contemporary Religion 10 (1), 1995: 83–91, advanced a definition of fundamentalism by using five ‘hallmarks’. This second article offers a way of ‘reading or interpreting fundamentalisms in modernity and post‐modernity.     

Abstractions and Metaphysical Politics

Books reviewed in this article:
David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy and Apocalypse     

Parents’ Verbal Communication and Childhood Anxiety: A Systematic Review

Parents’ verbal communication to their child, particularly the expression of fear-relevant information (e.g., attributions of threat to the environment), is considered to play a key role in children’s fears and anxiety. This review considers the extent to which parental verbal communication is associated with child anxiety by examining research that has employed objective observational methods. Using a systematic search strategy, we identified 15 studies that addressed this question. These studies provided some evidence that particular fear-relevant features of parental verbal communication are associated with child anxiety under certain conditions. However, the scope for drawing reliable, general conclusions was limited by extensive methodological variation between studies, particularly in terms of the features of parental verbal communication examined and the context in which communication took place, how child anxiety was measured, and inconsistent consideration of factors that may moderate the verbal communication–child anxiety relationship. We discuss ways in which future research can contribute to this developing evidence base and reduce further methodological inconsistency so as to inform interventions for children with anxiety problems.