Negative attributional style, life events, and depressive symptomatology

Abstract

Negative attributional style is a cognitive personality variable that reflects a stable tendency to explain negative events with causes that are internal to self, stable across time and global in effect. The re-formulated learned helplessness model and its next development, the hopelessness theory, predict that negative attributional style interacts with perceived stress to predict depressive symptomatology. The first goal of the present study was to prove this hypothesis with an adult Spanish sample. The results confirmed the hypothesis. We discuss the convenience to study factors such as self-esteem, the perception of the controllability of stressful situations or the degree of their subjective importance. These factors may modulate the relationship between this explanatory style and the development of depressive symptoms, but have received very little attention up to now.