Testing some attribution-emotion relations in the People's Republic of China.

We conducted a questionnaire study to test the generality of attribution-emotion relations to individuals in the People's Republic of China. Replications of prior findings of studies conducted with American subjects were reported: (a) High effort and success enhanced interpersonal evaluations when ability, effort, and outcome information were provided; (b) affective communications of pity, anger, and guilt were respectively used to infer low ability, lack of effort, and teacher as causes of failure; (c) effort and ability levels were inferred from the presence or absence of anger reactions; and (d) controllable causes of a broken social contract were expected to result in anger from others. Chinese and American respondents also indicated what situations would arouse the affects of anger, guilt, pity, pride, and shame. We found no evidence for the characterization of Chinese as (a) emphasizing effort over ability as a cause of achievement outcomes or (b) de-emphasizing the importance of personal achievement and stressing group goals and accomplishments.

[1]  Ruth Gamberg.  Red and Expert: Education in the People's Republic of China , 1988 .

[2]  G. Fletcher,et al.  Attribution theory and processes: A cross-cultural perspective. , 1988 .

[3]  Robert D. Hess,et al.  Cultural variations in family beliefs about children's performance in mathematics: comparisons among people's Republic of China, Chinese-American, and Caucasian-American families , 1987 .

[4]  Sandra Graham,et al.  Developmental Study of Praise and Blame as Attributional Cues. , 1987 .

[5]  B. Weiner,et al.  An attributional analysis of excuse giving: studies of a naive theory of emotion. , 1987, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[6]  B. Weiner.  An attributional theory of motivation and emotion , 1986 .

[7]  Ann Swidler,et al.  Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life , 1986 .

[8]  B. Weiner.  An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. , 1985, Psychological review.

[9]  B. Weiner,et al.  A Cognition-Emotion-Action Sequence: Anticipated Emotional Consequences of Causal Attributions and Reported Communication Strategy. , 1985 .

[10]  Sandra Graham,et al.  Communicating sympathy and anger to Black and White children: The cognitive (attributional) consequences of affective cues. , 1984 .

[11]  M. Bond,et al.  The Social Impact of Self-Effacing Attributions: The chinese Case , 1982 .

[12]  B. Weiner,et al.  Using affective cues to infer causal thoughts. , 1982 .

[13]  Catherine A. Lutz.  the domain of emotion words on Ifaluk , 1982 .

[14]  Hugh David Roberts Baker,et al.  Chinese family and kinship , 1980, The Journal of Asian Studies.

[15]  W. Meyer,et al.  The informational value of evaluative behavior: Influences of praise and blame on perceptions of ability. , 1979 .

[16]  Wu Ching-hsiung.  The Thought of Confucius and Chinese Culture , 1976 .

[17]  M. Maehr,et al.  Culture and achievement motivation. , 1974, The American psychologist.

[18]  B. Weiner,et al.  Necessary versus Sufficient Causal Schemata for Success and Failure. , 1973 .

[19]  H. Kelley.  The processes of causal attribution. , 1973 .

[20]  B. Weiner,et al.  An attributional analysis of achievement motivation. , 1970 .

[21]  T. Chen,et al.  The New Socialist Man , 1969, Comparative Education Review.

[22]  S. Lipset.  The first new nation : the United States in historical and comparative perspective , 1964 .