Abstract
Two experiments with 108 female undergraduates tested a theoretical model of behavioral self-regulation, which makes predictions about the effect of failure on a person's subsequent efforts. This model holds that degree of effort will be a product of 2 things: expectancy of being able to redress the failure and degree of self-attention. In the experiments, a failure pretreatment was used to create large within-self discrepancies among Ss. It was predicted that (a) negative outcome expectancies regarding a subsequent task would lead to decreased persistence on that task, (b) positive outcome expectancies for the subsequent task would lead to increased persistence on that task, and (c) both of these tendencies would be mediated by self-directed attention. Results support the predictions. (39 ref)