Attributional style and attributional patterns among married couples.

Explored whether couples develop an attributional style in explaining marital behavior. Results demonstrate that spouses vary greatly in the extent to which they develop an attributional style in this area. Development of an attributional style is correlated with marital distress. Investigators have assumed that simultaneous attributional ratings across several attributional dimensions best characterize the attributions that spouses make for marital events. Yet almost all studies to date have considered each attributional dimension separately. The current investigation explored whether meaningful attributional patterns across dimensions were discernible for marital events. Findings indicate that such patterns do exist and are psychologically interpretable, and support the hypothesis that distressed spouses tend to maximize negative partner behaviors while minimizing positive partner behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depressive attributions: Selection of different causes or assignment of dimensional meanings?

Although attributional models of depression suggest that depression is associated with internal, stable, and global causal explanations of events, they do not specify whether the depressive attributional process involves the selection of certain causes, the assignment of dimensional meanings to those causes, or both. The extent of agreement between a priori and perceived dimensions of causes was examined in the present study, and the equivalence of the existing cause-rating method and 2 variants of the dimension-rating method were tested. 51 male and 45 female undergraduates were administered attribution and depression questionnaires. Findings indicate that the choice of causes did not reliably indicate the perceived dimensions and that there was poor convergence between existing methods that assess causes and those that assess dimensions. When causes and dimensions were each measured in a manner that avoided confounding by the other, each made a unique contribution to the prediction of depression scores. Cause ratings alone were significantly associated with depression scores, but the optimal prediction of depression included both causes and dimensions. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cross sectional study of symptom attribution and recognition of depression and anxiety in primary care

OBJECTIVES: To examine the effect of patients' causal attributions of common somatic symptoms on recognition by general practitioners of cases of depression and anxiety and to test the hypothesis that normalising attributions make recognition less likely. DESIGN: Cross sectional survey. SETTING: One general practice of eight doctors in Bristol. SUBJECTS: 305 general practice attenders. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: The rate of detection by general practitioners of cases of depression and anxiety as defined by the general health questionnaire. RESULTS: Consecutive attenders completed the general health questionnaire and the symptom interpretation questionnaire, which scores style of symptom attribution along the dimensions of psychologising, somatising, and normalising. General practitioners detected depression or anxiety in 56 (36%; 95% confidence interval 28% to 44%) of the 157 patients who scored highly on the general health questionnaire. Subjects with a normalising attributional style were less likely to be detected as cases; doctors did not make any psychological diagnosis in 46 (85%; 73% to 93%) of 54 patients who had high questionnaire and high normalising scores. Those with a psychologising style were more likely to be detected; doctors did not detect 21 (38%; 25% to 52%) of 55 patients who had high questionnaire and high psychologising scores. The somatisation scale was not associated with low detection rates. This pattern of results persisted after adjustment for age, sex, general health questionnaire score, and general practitioner. CONCLUSIONS: Normalising attributions minimise symptoms and are non-pathological in character. The normalising attributional style is predominant in general practice attenders and is an important cause of low rates of detection of depression and anxiety.     

Attributional style in depression: A meta-analytic review.

Conducted a meta-analysis of the attribution–depression relation in studies appearing in the clinical, social, personality, and educational literatures. In 104 studies involving nearly 15,000 Ss, several attributional patterns had reliable associations with depression scores. For negative events, attributions to internal, stable, and global causes had a reliable and significant association with depression. Studies in which the attribution factors of ability and luck were measured also showed a reliable association with depression. Ability and luck attribution factors for positive events were also associated with depression. The relations for positive events, however, were weaker than the corresponding ones for negative events. In general, these patterns of relations were independent of a number of potential mediators suggested by authors in this literature, including the type of S studied (psychiatric vs college student), the type of event about which the attribution is made (real vs simulated), the depression measure used, or the publication status of the research report. Conclusions are compared with those of other reviews. Implications for attributional models of depression are discussed. (81 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective and cognitive characteristics of depression in 10- and 11-year-old children.

Used an index of childhood depression to regress indices of emotion experiences, attribution style, and intellectual performance of 82 male and 64 female 5th graders from a rural public school. All Ss completed a children's depression inventory, a differential emotion scale, and an attributional style questionnaire. Teachers rated Ss on their frequency of expression of 3 categories of emotion. 45 Ss whose scores were high, low, or intermediate on the depression inventory also completed the PPVT and the Block Design subscale of the WISC. Results indicate that the depressed Ss were like depressed adults in that they reported experiencing a pattern of emotions including sadness, anger, self-directed hostility, and shame, and they tended to explain negative events in terms of internal, stable, and global causes. The similarity between depressed children and depressed adults on these measures was greater for girls than for boys. Depression was not related to performance on a verbal task, but depressed girls performed worse than nondepressed girls on the Block Design task. The measures of emotion experiences accounted for 78.1 and 46.1% of the variance in girls' and boys' depression scores, respectively, after the variance accounted for by attribution style was partialed out. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learned helplessness, attributional style, and depression in epilepsy. Bozeman Epilepsy Surgery Consortium

PURPOSE: We wished to examine the relevance of the theory of learned helplessness in general, and attributional style in particular, to the understanding of depression among patients with epilepsy. METHODS: Patients with lateralized temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) (right = 73, left = 70) were administered two self-report depression inventories [Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale (CES-D)]. Depression scores were examined in relation to a key component of the revised theory of learned helplessness (attributional style) using the Optimism/Pessimism Scale. RESULTS: Attributional style was significantly associated with increased self-reported depression and remained significant when the effects of several confounding variables were controlled [age, age at onset, laterality of TLE, sex, and method variance]. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that the concept of learned helplessness in general, and attributional style in particular, are related to the genesis of depression in epilepsy. Because they are known to be related to depression in the general population, and because specific techniques for intervention and prevention are available, greater consideration of learned helplessness and attributional style in the genesis of depression in epilepsy may be worthwhile.     

Attributional style and depression in rheumatoid arthritis: The moderating role of perceived illness control.

Examined the moderating influence of perceived daily illness control on the relationship between disease-unrelated causal attributions and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (DSM-IV) depressive symptomatology in a sample of 58 patients (aged 25–75 yrs) with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Eight of the Ss met DSM-IV criteria for major depression. All Ss completed paper-and-pencil instruments measuring depression, attributional style, arthritis-specific helplessness, disease severity and pain and disability. As predicted, attribution?×? perceived control interactions contributed significant variance to depression, after controlling for disease variables and arthritis helplessness. Specifically, internal and global attributions for negative events were associated with increased levels of depression under conditions of decreased perceived illness control. The findings provide support for examining general attributional style in studies of depression in RA and for cognitive diathesis-stress conceptualizations of adjustment to chronic illness. Clinical implications of the results for cognitive-behavioral treatment approaches in RA are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional style in clinically depressed and conduct disordered adolescents.

We tested the reformulated learned helplessness theory of depression with adolescent inpatients (N?=?63) who were diagnosed by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III; American Psychiatric Association, 1980) criteria as depressed, or conduct disordered, or both. Adolescents with major depression diagnoses differed from nondepressed adolescents with significantly lower attributional style scores for positive events. The study also evaluated the relation of self-reported depression, anxiety, and social maladjustment to attributional style. Subjects who reported more severe depression had a significantly lower composite score for internal, stable, and global attributions for positive events. The composite of internal, stable, and global attributions for negative events was not significantly related to either diagnosed or self-reported depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional information processing: A response time model of causal subtraction.

Response time measures have been used occasionally in social psychology, but rarely as direct probes of information processing. A study (with 24 undergraduates) collecting response time data in a near-exact replication of L. McArthur's (see record 1972-27156-001) classic attribution study sheds light on the information processing involved in Ss' responses. The process is analyzed into 2 stages: (a) encoding or comprehension of the stimulus sentence and the consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information and (b) attributional processing per se. In the 2nd stage, response time analyses suggest that perceivers operate by subtracting causes from an initial set to arrive at a response, rather than by adding causal components (person, stimulus, and circumstances) until an adequate cause is obtained. Subtraction is theoretically related to the salience model of attribution. Response time measures promise to expand greatly the ability of social psychologists to build process models of causal attribution and other kinds of social perception and cognition. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributions and expectations: A confluence of vulnerabilities in mild depression in a college student population.

The reformulated model of learned helplessness assumes that attributional style has its impact on depression in part through the intermediary effect of pessimistic or negative expectations about the occurrence of future outcomes. A possible logical next step in testing the model is to measure jointly attributions and expectations and to examine their combined (interactive) contributions. We used a short-term longitudinal design to examine whether attributional style works in combination with other factors, such as expectations, to predispose individuals to depression. Consistent with the initial theoretical analysis, the interaction of attributional style and expectations predicted depression on the Beck Depression Inventory 6 weeks later. We also found that attributional style predicted depression 6 weeks later in interaction with initial level of depression. These findings support our confluence hypothesis, which assumes that vulnerability factors can combine interactively and qualify the effects of attributional style. These interaction-effect findings have implications for currently popular cognitive theories of depression and for previous research on vulnerability to depression that has examined only the effects of single cognitive variables (such as attributional style) considered alone. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional styles and life events in the classroom: Vulnerability and invulnerability to depressive mood reactions.

A core prediction of the reformulated model of learned helplessness and depression states that when confronted with the same negative life event, people who display a tendency to attribute negative outcomes to internal, stable, or global factors should be more likely to experience a depressive reaction than people who typically attribute negative outcomes to external, unstable, or specific factors. The present study tested that prediction with 227 undergraduates by determining whether the content of Ss' attributional styles at 1 point in time predicted the severity of their depressive response (Multiple Affect Adjective Check List) to receiving a low grade on an exam at a subsequent time. Consistent with the prediction, Ss with an internal or global attributional style for negative outcomes at Time 1 experienced a depressive response when confronted with a low grade; Ss with an external or specific attributional style were invulnerable to this response. In contrast to results for the internality and globality dimensions, Ss' scores along the stability attribution dimension were not correlated with the severity of their depressive response to the low grade. In the absence of a negative life event, Ss' generalized tendencies to make internal or global attributions for negative outcomes at Time 1 were not significantly correlated with their subsequent changes in depressive mood, although there was a nonsignificant positive correlation between severity of depressive response and the tendency to make global attributions for negative outcomes at Time l. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional style, depression, and perceptions of consensus for events.

This study examined the differences between depressed and nondepressed individuals' implicit perceptions of consensus, which may contribute to differences in their attributional styles. Subjects rated the extent to which positive, negative, and neutral events happen to themselves and to the average college student and completed measures of depth of depression and attributional style. Perceptions of consensus were highly correlated with all components of attributional style for negative and positive events. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that ratings of others explained variance in attributional style beyond that explained by ratings of the self for positive but not for negative events. Path analyses, however, indicated that the indirect path from perceptions of consensus to depression mediated through attributional style was nonsignificant for positive events, although it was significant for negative events. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of perceptions of others as precursors of attributional style and depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Validity and utility of the attributional style construct at a moderate level of specificity.

The validity and utility of attributional style has been questioned in recent years. Major criticisms are that attributional style is not cross-situationally consistent, is not measured appropriately, has little construct validity, and contributes little to the prediction of important social behaviors. This article examines these issues with data primarily related to the several different attributional style measures found in Anderson's Attributional Style Assessment Tests. We examined previously published and new data. The results show evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for attributional styles assessed at an intermediate level of specificity. Also, attributional style effects were as large as parallel attribution manipulations in complex social settings. We concluded that both the extreme pessimism of some recent researchers and the broad, sweepingly optimistic claims of some proponents are unwarranted, and that further work on specifying the appropriate level of assessment for attributional style would be useful. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Vulnerability to postpartum depression: A prospective multivariate study.

A sample of 115 primiparous women was assessed during pregnancy and the postpartum to identify the predictors and correlates of postpartum depression. The variables considered were marital adjustment, attributional style, life stress, maternal expectations for and perceptions of infant behavior, and blues symptoms. The data obtained at each assessment were submitted to principal-components analyses to identify variable clusters or constructs, which were used to predict both depressive symptom levels and a diagnosis of depression. Concurrently, symptoms and diagnosis were related to mothers' perceptions of their infants as temperamentally difficult. Prospectively, depressive symptomatology was predicted by low marital adjustment and depressed mood during pregnancy, optimistic expectations for infants, prepartum life stress, and early postpartum symptoms of anxiety and cognitive impairment. Although diagnostic status was related to a subset of these variables, results indicate that depressive symptom levels and diagnosis are not synonymous measures of the construct "postpartum depression." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adjustment following sexual abuse discovery: The role of shame and attributional style.

This study examined adjustment following sexual abuse as a function of shame and attributional style. One hundred forty-seven participants (83 children and 64 adolescents) were seen at the time of abuse discovery and again 1 year later. Once adjustment at abuse discovery was accounted for, shame and attribution style explained additional variation in subsequent adjustment, whereas abuse severity did not. A pessimistic attribution style at abuse discovery moderated the relation between severity of abuse and subsequent depressive symptoms and self-esteem. The relations between abuse severity and these outcomes were significant only at high levels of pessimistic attribution style. Of note, patterns of change in shame and attribution predicted which children remained at risk or improved in adjustment. In addition, age and gender differences were found in adjustment over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression, self-esteem, and the absence of self-protective attributional biases.

Previous research has demonstrated a relation between depression and attributional style. In the present study we evaluated the extent to which self-esteem may be an important determinant of attributional style. Subjects completed measures of self-esteem, depression, and anxiety and responded to the Attributional Style Questionnaire. Maximum R–2 analyses revealed that for significant one-variable and multivariable regression models, self-esteem accounted for the variation in attributional style on the majority of outcome measures. Depression and anxiety added little beyond the contribution of self-esteem. These findings were consistent for both positive and negative events. In addition, self-esteem accounted for variation in attributional evenhandedness. Results are discussed in terms of the role of self-esteem maintenance in attributional style. (61 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cross-situational consistency in causal attributions: Does attributional style exist?

Two studies evaluated the concept of an attributional style, as operationalized by the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ). Study 1, with 1,333 undergraduates, examined the reliability and validity of the ASQ and analyzed the factor structure of the measure. Only weak evidence of a cross-situationally consistent attributional style was found. An attempt to identify Ss who tended to be very consistent in their causal attributions on the ASQ similarly did not provide strong support for the attibutional style concept. In Study 2, the relation between scores on the ASQ and causal attributions for actual negative events, as assessed by the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, were examined among 85 pregnant women. Attributional Style scores were poor predictors of actual causal attributions, and selecting highly consistent Ss did not improve the ASQ's predictive validity. Implications for the attributional style concept and an attributional analysis of depression are discussed. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptions of stressful life events and depression: A test of attributional models.

Tested the attributional models of depression proposed by L. Y. Abramson et al (see record 1979-00305-001), using 278 undergraduates who had recently experienced a stressful event and 51 55–79 yr old adults who sought treatment for problems with depression. Three questions were addressed: (a) the validity of the hypothesized independent and direction relation between each of the dimensions of internality, stability, controllability, intentionality, and globality and depression; (b) the causal relation between attributions and depression in a 2-mo prospective study; and (c) evaluation of the model on the 2 disparate samples. Ss were administered a battery of depression measures; students completed an attribution questionnaire, while adults completed a measure of life stress attributions. Causal modeling statistical procedures were applied to both the question of concurrent relations and causal relations between cognitions and depression. Results suggest minimal support for the attributional model: The dimensions were not each independently and directly associated with depression in the manner predicted, and the model that best fit the data was generally congruent for both the normal and clinical samples. In terms of direction of causality, the data were more consistent in indicating that depression causes cognitions than in indicating the reverse. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The causality of causal attributions in depression: A cross-lagged panel correlational analysis.

The attributional reformulation of the learned helplessness model of depression proposes that causal attributions about negative outcomes play a causal role in reactive depression. This research tested this hypothesis by studying the causal role of attributions in depression in 180 college students. On 2 occasions separated by 1 mo, Ss were administered a battery of tests that included an attributional style questionnaire and the Beck Depression Inventory. The attributional dimensions of internality, stability, and globality were correlated with depression; when the possible causal role of attributions was tested through the use of cross-lagged panel correlational analysis, the hypothesis that stability and globality attributions for bad outcomes might be causes of depression was supported. There was no support, however, for the hypothesis that internal attributions for bad outcomes are a cause of depression. Evidence was also found that unstable attributions for good outcomes may function as a cause of depression. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Negative attributional style in seasonal and nonseasonal depression

OBJECTIVE: There is a substantial relationship between dysfunctional cognitions and the clinical course of major depression. This study examined whether this association extends to patients with seasonal affective disorder. METHOD: A revised version of the Attributional Style Questionnaire was used to assess negative attributional style and predict response to treatment in a group of depressed outpatients, 26 with seasonal depression and 30 with nonseasonal, unipolar major depression. RESULTS: Pretreatment scores on negative attributional style did not differ between the patients with seasonal affective disorder and those with nonseasonal depression. Negative attributional style predicted poor response to pharmacotherapy in the nonseasonal depression group but did not predict response to light therapy in the group with seasonal affective disorder. CONCLUSIONS: Dysfunctional cognitions may play a lesser role in seasonal affective disorder than in nonseasonal depression.