Depressive attributional style.

Abstract

Depressed college students, compared to nondepressed college students, attributed bad outcomes to internal, stable, and global causes, as measured by an attributional style scale. This attributional style was predicted by the reformulated helplessness model of depression. In addition, relative to nondepressed students, depressed students attributed good outcomes to external, unstable causes. Recently, Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale (1978) proposed an attributional reformulation of the learned helplessness hypothesis. This reformulation resolves a number of the inadequacies of the original hypothesis when applied to human helplessness and depression. According to the reformulated hypothesis, the kinds of causal attributions people make for lack of control influence whether their helplessness will entail low selfesteem and whether their helplessness will generalize across situations and time. Abramson et al. argued that three attributional dimensions are crucial for explaining human helplessness and depression: internal-external, stable-unstable, and global-specific. In brief, the reformulated model asserts that attributing lack of control to internal factors leads to lowered self-esteem, whereas attributing lack of control to external factors does not. Furthermore, attributing lack of control to stable factors should lead to helplessness deficits extended across time, and attributing lack of control to global factors should lead to wide generalization of help