The Marlowe-Crowne, repressor-sensitizer, and internal-external scales and attribution of unconscious hostile intent

Locus of Control and Judgments about Another's Accident

Female Ss scoring internal and external on Rotter's scale rated the personal characteristics and responsibility of a stimulus person who experienced a chemical laboratory accident which varied in severity and type of consequences. Consistent with a strategy of denying threat, Internals reported that they were less like the accident perpetrator than did Externals, but contrary to predictions did not hold the person more accountable. Contrary to other studies and defensive attribution theory no support was found that the stimulus person's responsibility and characteristics were assigned on the basis of the accident's consequences.

Social Desirability Response Bias in Children's Locus of Control Reports

As part of a comprehensive evaluation of an in-school parenting education curriculum, 281 junior high school students in a major urban school district completed both the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale for Children and the Crandall, Crandall, and Katkovsky Children's Social Desirability Questionnaire. Potential differences in influence of social-desirability response bias on the locus scores of students of differing race and sex were explored via zero-order correlations and bivariate regression. Although mean scores of black respondents were significantly higher than those of their white counterparts on measures of social-desirability response bias and external locus of control, Children's Social Desirability scores never accounted for more than 1% of the variance in the locus of control scores of any subgroup.

Association between Levenson's Dimensions of Locus of Control and Measures of Coping and Defense Mechanisms

Theoretically, locus of control may be related to coping and defense style. Because little is known about specific relationships, scores on Levenson's Chance, Powerful Others, and Internal control scales were correlated with 20 coping and defense measures for a sample of 2648 Marine Corps recruits. The findings suggested that the relationship of locus of control with coping and defense could be described in terms of two integrated personality styles. The external style combines external control orientations with low coping skills and externalizing defenses, e.g., displacement. The internal style combines internal control with minimizing, reversing defenses, and more extensive coping. These styles received some support from prior research and may help explain the association between better over-all adjustment and internality. These tentative style formulations can provide a basis for more detailed investigations of control and coping and defense.

Locus of control, repression-sensitization, and interpersonal causality

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between repression-sensitization and multidimensional locus of control, particularly as these variables relate to a third variable, the attribution of causality in interpersonal relationships. 41 male psychiatric inpatients were employed as subjects, of whom 18 were from an acute general inpatient unit and 23 were from an alcohol and drug unit. Eight independent variables were considered. There were eight dependent variables which were derived from an attribution measure devised for this study. Stepwise multiple regression analyses indicated that the variable having the most predictive power with respect to causal attributions was the subsample which the subject represented. A second analysis excluding subsample considerations showed that Levenson's Powerful Others scale was positively correlated with Internal-Positive attributions. Other significant correlations between the various measures were examined.

Correlates of adult locus of control

Correlations between scores on the Adult Locus of Control Scale and a number of personality scales supported the hypothesis that the control scores are related to need achievement, anxiety, psychopathology, socioeconomic status, ethnic group membership, and intellectual ability. There was some evidence that locus of control scores are also related to teacher effectiveness.

Review of the internal-external control construct as a personality variable

This review of recent research concerning Rotter's concept of internal-external control of reinforcement is divided into 12 areas: the Internal-External (I-E) Control Scale, personality, attempts to control the environment, achievement, reactions to threat, ethnic group and social class differences, parent-child relationships, risk-taking, reactions to social stimuli, and the relation of the internal-external control measure to anxiety, adjustment, and learning. Evidence generally supports the validity of Rotter's concept. Implications and limitations of the research are presented, and suggestions for further work in specific problem areas are made.