Investigating the Relationship Between Attribution Styles and Metacognitive Skills With Fear of Success Among Students

Background: Fear of success is a stressful factor that is derived from achievement. A few children and adults have a fear of success and as a result restrict their contributions despite their skills. Objectives: The present paper aimed at investigating the relationship between attribution styles and metacognitive skills and fear of success. Methods: This was a descriptive cross sectional study conducted on a statistical population of all students of 3 universities of National, Azad, and Payam-e Noor of Bojnourd, Iran, in the first 6 months of 2015. In the present study, 385 students were selected through clustering random sampling, and 3 questionnaires of Zukerman and Ellison’s Fear of Success, Peterson and Seligman’s Attribution Styles, and Wells’ MetaCognition were distributed among the students. The obtained data were analyzed using SPSS software version 20. Results: Results of the regression revealed that in the best model of prediction, cognitive confidence, positive attributions, uncontrollability, and risk are able to predict the fear of success variable (P0.05.01). With respect to Pearson’s correlation coefficient, a significant negative relationship was obtained between positive attribution style and fear of success (P0.0005), and only negative stable attributions had a significant relationship with fear of success (P0.01). In addition, a significant relationship was detected between cognitive confidence, uncontrollability, and risk (P0.0005), positive beliefs about concern, and fear of success. Conclusions: The results of the present research, conforming to that of the other studies, revealed that attribution styles and metacognitive skills are able to predict the fear of success variable.