Psychology Commons^™

The Effect Of Causal Attribution And Self-Evaluation On Mood, William N. Werner

Dissertations and Theses

The present study was designed to test the causal locus hypothesis, and to develop and explore the self-evaluational hypothesis. The causal locus hypothesis is based on attribution, which is a person's perception of cause. The hypothesis holds that persons making internal attributions (self-caused) for failure end external attributions (not self-caused) for success experience more negative postoutcome mood than persons making external attributions for failure and internal attributions for success. The hypothesis was derived from major theories or attribution, but was not experimentally tested until recently (Wollert et al., 1981).