Attributional style among depressed patients.

Male depressed unipolar patients (n?=?30) were more likely to attribute bad outcomes to internal, stable, and global causes than were nondepressed schizophrenics (n?=?15) and nondepressed medical patients (n?=?61). Also, the depressed patients were more evenhanded in their attributions for good and bad events than the other patients. These results support the existence, in clinical depression, of the depressive attributional style postulated by the reformulated learned helplessness model and indicate that it is not a general characteristic of psychopathology. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)