Research on parent and sibling attributions about the controllability of family member’s symptoms provides perhaps the most ecologically sound test of signaling events and attributions. In these cases, individuals who intimately know the person with mental illness report on controllability attributions and emotional response. Attributions are spontaneously produced during the course of an interview suggesting that attributional processes are naturally pervasive and not generated by a psychologist’s probe. Additional research in this area should determine what aspects of the signaling event are most relatedto controllability attributions