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F Försterling

Publications and source records attributed to F Försterling.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

Attributions of depressed persons: how consistent are they with the covariation principle?

The sensitivity of depressives' and nondepressives' attributions to covariation information is investigated. Individuals differing in depression made attributions in response to descriptions of negative situations, either without or with additional covariation information designed to lead to external and specific (Studies 1, 2, and 3) or to internal, stable, and global attributions, or to both (Studies 2 and 3). Covariation information modified attributions in the expected directions equally strongly for both mood groups. In Study 4, covariation information was assessed rather than provided. Depressives were more prone than nondepressives to assume low consensus, low distinctiveness, and high consistency for negative events. Depressives' causal conclusions from the self-perceived covariation information were more negative but correlated more strongly with self-perceived covariation than did nondepressives' attributions.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

[Implicit causality in language: criteria for selection of stimulus material in studies of verb causality].

Studies dealing with the implicit causality in verbs have shown that even minimal descriptions of interpersonal events (e.g. "Michael apologizes to Peter" or "Vera admires Karen") systematically elicit attributions toward the sentence subject or sentence object. However, in the majority of existing studies, the stimulus materials (i.e., interpersonal verbs) have not been selected randomly: Verbs were selected either because they had often been used in previous studies, or they were counterbalanced with regard to a number of additional criteria (valence, derivational form, etc.), and therefore, a truly random sampling of stimulus verbs were impossible. In the present study, the criteria for selecting interpersonal verbs are varied in order to compare two groups of verbs, namely, verbs which have been used very often in previous studies versus a random sample of interpersonal verbs. It is shown that the classical findings concerning the perceived causes of interpersonal verbs are less pronounced for the random sample than for the non-random sample of interpersonal verbs. However, even for the random sample of verbs, an impressive amount of variance in causal attributions is explained by different verb types.

Adult↗