Assessing the importance and malleability of mothers' situational attributions for their children's behaviors.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The present study explored the malleability and relative importance of mothers' situational attributions for their children's negative behaviors by examining their relationship with mothers' global attributions, mood, and behavior and their children's mood and behavior. Parents who view their children's noncompliant behaviors as internal, stable, and as the child's fault have been found to have children who display higher levels of disruptive behaviors. However, the majority of these links have been correlational in nature. This study used an experimental design to further examine the cause and effect relationships between parental attributions, mood, and behavior. Additionally, this study explored the malleability of parental specific attributions and the relative influence of situational attributions compared to global attributions.
The sample included 40 mothers of children with varying levels of disruptive behaviors. Twenty of the mothers were primed with child-referent attributions and the other 20 mothers were primed with environment-referent attributions to examine how attributions relate to aspects of parenting, parental mood and behavior and child mood and behavior. Additionally, situational attributions and global attributions were examined as separate predictors of mothers' mood.
As predicted, relationships were seen between dysfunctional child-referent attributions and higher parental stress and psychopathology and lower levels of parental competence. For a subset of parents of children with clinical levels of disruptive behaviors, dysfunctional child-referent attributions were related to child behavior and overreactive parenting. As expected, mothers in the child-referent condition reported situational attributions placing greater responsibility for noncompliance internally within their children, were less positive and more overreactive, and had children who displayed more negative mood and misbehavior. Contrary to prediction, mothers in the environment-referent condition did not offer situational attributions placing greater causality to the environment. Following the experimental manipulation, mothers had significant changes in their global attributions consistent with their conditions. Both situational and global attributions were found to contribute significant variance to the prediction of parents' positive mood after controlling for the variance associated with condition status. These results have implications for addressing attribution change in parenting programs and point to the importance of examining situational attributions separately from global attributions.