Abstract
The present study reviewed published research on causal attributions of people who have been diagnosed as having attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD). Causal attributions are one facet of self-cognition related to one’s sense of self-control and feeling of efficacy; they provide important findings for psychological support for secondary disorders such as depressive state or oppositional defiant disorder. The publications reviewed were classified as either questionnaire surveys in which participants evaluated the causal attributes in items presented to them, or experiments in which participants performed tasks and then assessed the causal attributions in their own performance. Investigations were conducted of multiple dimensions, including controllable or uncontrollable, internal or external, stable or unstable, and global or specific. Numerous published studies using this method to compare children with and without AD/HD have showed that young and adolescent children with AD/HD attribute stable, global, and external factors to negative performances, whereas adults with AD/HD attribute internal factors to negative performances. Implications for the relation between causal attribution and learned helplessness of people with AD/HD were discussed.
