When people ask "why" questions, and the heuristics of attributional search.

Five experiments involving 447 undergraduates used a self-probe methodology in both simulated and real conditions to demonstrate that individuals do engage in spontaneous attributional search. Results show that this search is most likely when the outcome of an event is negative and unexpected. Content analysis of attributional questions also suggests that causal search is biased toward internality after failure but toward externality following success. Data reveal that the most commonly used heuristic in attributional search is to center on the locus and control dimensions of causality. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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)     

Experimental modification of attribution processes.

Attributional style is hypothesized to be a causative factor in depression vulnerability; however, no studies to date have examined whether manipulation of attributional style influences depressed mood. The purpose of this study was to determine whether computer-based cognitive bias modification (CBM) procedures could modify attributional style and influence stress vulnerability. Participants were provided with multiple training trials that were intended to promote the use of either a positive or a negative attributional style. Compared with individuals in the negative attributional style condition, individuals in the positive attributional style condition showed decreased tendency to make self-deficient causal attributions for poor performance on a difficult anagram test. Furthermore, individuals in the positive attributional style condition reported less depressed mood in response to this academic stressor. These results suggest that attributional style is not invariable and can potentially be modified with CBM approaches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of attributional retraining on strategy-based reading comprehension in learning-disabled students.

Learning-disabled students received instructions about both summarization strategies and their personal beliefs about causality that were designed to improve reading comprehension. 75 upper elementary school students were assigned to 4 treatment groups. The main experimental condition received attributional retraining on paired-associate and sort-recall tasks (which were unrelated to the target comprehension tests), instructions on the use of a summarization strategy, attributional statements about the efficacy of the instructed strategy, and posttests by which we assessed reading skills and general attributional beliefs. Students in another experimental condition received an identical treatment package without prior attributional retraining on unrelated paired-associate and sort-recall tasks but with attributional statements embedded in the summarization strategy. Ss in one control condition received strategy training (without attributional retraining), whereas those in the other received neither strategy nor attribution instructions. Results suggested that attributional training enhanced the maintenance of the summarization strategy and selectivity facilitated generalization. Domain-specific attributional beliefs seemed to provide important orientating and perseverating characteristics that enhanced goal-directed, strategic processing in learning-impaired students. In spite of performance improvements, however, long-standing, antecedent attributional beliefs were unaltered by program-specific attributional training. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional conceptions in clinical psychology.

Integrates theoretical models and research concerning the antecedents of causal attributions with clinically relevant conceptions about attributional consequences and cognitive and rational-emotive therapy. It is argued that an inclusion of research about attributional antecedents into (clinical) models of attributional change (a) increases the range of applicability of attributional approaches in clinical psychology; (b) allows the making of predictions about when attributional changes can be attempted; (c) can be used to derive techniques for alterations of causal cognitions; and (d) can provide constructs for systematizing therapeutic techniques of cognitive behavior modification as advocated by A. T. Beck (1967, 1976) and A. Ellis (1962; see also PA, Vol 73:4293) and Ellis and R. Grieger (1977). Beck's and Ellis's cognitive therapies are described, and the similarities between these theories and attributional conceptions are noted. It is suggested that the similarities between attribution theory and cognitive psychotherapies illustrate the fruitfulness and wide range of applicability of cognitive models of motivation, emotion, and therapeutic change. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imagined empathy and attributions concerning activity preferences of physically disabled college students.

Investigated 89 college students' attributions about the activity preferences of able-bodied vs physically disabled peers and evaluated the effects of imagined empathy on attributional patterns and attitudes toward disabled people. Ss were asked to predict the responses of either a male or a female able-bodied or wheelchair-user college student to items on a 20-item questionnaire offering choices between gregarious–nongregarious activities and between active–passive activities. Results indicate that there was considerable variability in able-bodied students' attributions about disabled peers' activity preferences. Previous contact with disabled people was unrelated either to attitudes toward disabled people or to activity preference attributions. Asking students to imagine empathy for a disabled peer was not an effective technique to change either attributional patterns or attitudes toward disabled people. (16 ref) (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)     

Effects of attributional retraining on the career beliefs and career exploration behavior of college students.

Two studies were conducted to evaluate the efficacy of attributional retraining as a career counseling technique for college students. Participants who received the attributional retraining treatment viewed an 8-min videotape designed to foster internal, controllable, and unstable attributions for career decision making. Participants in the control groups viewed a similar videotape that lacked any reference to career-related attributions. Results revealed that participants who received attributional retraining exhibited significant changes in career beliefs and attributional style and engaged in significantly more career exploration behavior than the participants in the control groups. An evaluation of attributional retraining as a career-counseling technique for college students is provided, and ideas for further research are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depressive attributional style in psychiatric inpatients: Effects of reinforcement level and assessment procedure.

Examined the effect of contextual variation on depressive attributional style in 42 psychiatric inpatients divided into depressed (mean age 36.43 yrs) and control (mean age 30.52 yrs) groups on the basis of their responses to the Beck Depression Inventory. Ss received 20%, 50%, or 80% reinforcement on a task. Three measurement variables were evaluated: (a) when the attributions were produced (during vs after the task), (b) how the attributions were made (generating vs selecting influences), and (c) who provided the dimensional scores (Ss vs raters). The expected group differences on the attributional composite occurred only under the 20 and 50% reinforcement conditions. Group differences were demonstrated only when Ss made attributions after the task (when Ss selected attributions from a list). However, when the Ss generated their own influences after the task, group differences emerged only when they and not the raters provided the dimensional scores. Findings suggest that depressive attributional style is dependent on contextual factors and parameters of measurement. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Persistence following failure: The interactive role of self-awareness and the attributional basis for negative expectancies.

C. S. Carver et al (see record 1981-01305-001), in support of their cybernetic model, have shown that under conditions of high self-awareness, lower expectations resulted in less persistence. However, A. Frankel and M. L. Snyder (see record 1980-08892-001), in support of their egotism model, have shown that manipulations that presumably created lower expectations resulted in improved performance. The present authors investigated the suggestion that negative expectations may decrease performance when expected failure is attributed to the self and may increase performance when expected failure is attributed to the environment. The attributional basis of 57 undergraduates' negative expectancies and their level of self-awareness were manipulated. Results show that under high self-awareness, persistence and interest in the task were greater when expectations were externally based than when expectations were internally based; under low self-awareness, the 2 conditions did not differ. The role of attributional factors in Carver's model and of self-awareness in Snyder's formulation are discussed. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional style and self-esteem; The prediction of emotional distress following a midterm exam.

A midterm design was used to determine whether students' attributional style for negative achievement events interacts with self-esteem and a lower-than-expected exam grade to predict changes in measures of specific and nonspecific depression and anxiety. Participants were 141 students who completed baseline measures of attributional style and self-esteem, as well as affective measures on several occasions before and after receipt of midterm grades. A pessimistic attributional style for negative events interacted with self-esteem and outcome to predict residual changes in a combined measure of nonspecific distress and anxious arousal (marginal trend) but not a combined measure of specific depressive symptoms. Unexpectedly, the greatest residual increases in distress occurred among low-self-esteem pessimists who experienced a nonfailure outcome. These effects did not appear to be mediated by changes in hopelessness. (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)     

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 interpretations in counseling: Content versus discrepancy.

The content of attributional interpretations and their discrepancy from client attributions were manipulated to examine the respective importance of these 2 variables to the effectiveness of interpretation. 38 undergraduates with mild to moderate depression (as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory) and who exhibited either behavior or characterological styles on the Attributional Styles Questionnaire were given brief counseling that contained either behavioral or characterological interpretations. The matching of attributional styles with interpretation content constituted the discrepancy variable. Three male counselors administered all treatments. Results indicate that interpretation content was irrelevant to change in Ss' negative emotions, attributional styles, and problem-related attributions. Change on the stability dimension of Ss' attributional styles was partly a function of interpretation discrepancy. Ss' negative emotions improved in all conditions. Their attributional styles became less internal and less global in all conditions, but their problem-related attributions became more internal. (15 ref) (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)     

Mediational inferences in the process of counselor judgment.

D. C. Strohmer et al (see record 1983-11141-001) suggested that in the process of moving from observations to clinical judgments, the cognitive activity of the counselor can be described as a mediated stagewise decision model. The present study replicated and extended the Strohmer et al research. 20 25–49 yr old counselors were asked to make status and attributional inferences and diagnostic classification of clients. All combinations of 4 levels each of personality test, achievement, and client disability information were presented. Three theoretically derived structural equation models were tested for their ability to account for the correlations among all exogenous and endogenous variables in the parent model. Findings suggest that the clinical judgment process was stagewise mediated and that attributional inferences had little direct impact on final diagnostic classification. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive life events, attributional style, and hopefulness: Testing a model of recovery from depression.

A model of a recovery process from depression that is compatible with the hopelessness theory of depressive onset is proposed. This model predicts that depressives who have an enhancing attributional style for positive events (i.e., make global, stable attributions for such events) will be more likely to regain hopefulness and, thereby, recover from depression, when positive events occur. This prediction was tested by following a group of depressed college students longitudinally for 6 weeks. Although neither positive events alone nor attributional style alone predicted reduction in hopelessness, depressives who both showed the enhancing attributional style for positive events and experienced more positive events showed dramatic reductions in hopelessness which were accompanied by remission of depressive symptoms. Thus, attributional style for positive events may be a factor that enables some depressives to recover when positive events occur in their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of the "mentally retarded" label on adult judgments about child failure.

Retarded children show marked susceptibility to learned helplessness. Three experiments illustrate how adults may foster this helplessness. In Exp I, 152 college students reported causal attributions for failure and expectancies of future success for either "a 6-yr-old child" or "a 9-yr-old mentally retarded child with a mental age of 6 yrs." In Exp II, 58 Ss reported attributions and expectancies for both children. In both experiments, insufficient ability was rated a more important cause of failure for the retarded than for the unlabeled child, insufficient effort was rated more important for the unlabeled child, and the retarded child was rated less likely to succeed in the future. In Exp III, 54 Ss' responses indicated that either a low expectancy of success, an insufficient-ability attribution, or the retarded label alone would reduce the likelihood of their urging a child to persist after a failure. Results suggest a proposed attributional bias (overextension), a familiar attributional bias in a new context (discounting), and resultant helplessness-condoning behavior by adults. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Proneness to shame, proneness to guilt, and psychopathology:" Correction.

Reports an error in the original article by J. P. Tangney et al ( Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1992, Vol 101[3], 469–478). The squared multiple correlation data in Tables 3 and 4 were misplaced. The corrected tables are given. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 1992-43157-001). Examined the links between shame, guilt, and psychopathology. In 2 studies, 245 and 234 undergraduates completed the Self-Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory, the SCL-90, the Beck Depression Inventory, the State-Trait Anxiety Scale, and the Attributional Style Questionnaire. Results failed to support H. B. Lewis's (1971) notion that shame and guilt are differentially related to unique symptom clusters. Shame-proneness was strongly related to psychological maladjustment in general. Guilt-proneness was only moderately related to psychopathology; correlations were ascribable entirely to the shared variance between shame and guilt. Although clearly related to a depressogenic attributional style, shame accounted for substantial variance in depression, above and beyond attributional style. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional style and the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern.

Examined the attributional styles of Types A (coronary-prone) and B (non-coronary-prone) individuals in 2 studies in which 62 undergraduates and 199 18–65 yr old county residents, classified on the Jenkins Activity Survey, completed an attributional style questionnaire. Past research suggests that Type A's exhibit greater performance deficits than Type B's following exposure to extended, salient uncontrollable stimuli. The reformulated learned-helplessness model suggests that individuals most prone to such performance deficits should exhibit an attributional style characterized by internal, stable, and global attributions for negative outcomes, but external, unstable, and specific attributions for positive outcomes. However, a self-esteem protection explanation of learned-helplessness findings predicts an opposite, self-serving attributional style. Results from both studies indicate that Type A's were more self-serving than Type B's in their attributions for positive and negative outcomes. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)