SELF-BLAME FOLLOWING A TRAUMATIC EVENT - THE ROLE OF PERCEIVED AVOIDABILITY

People who have experienced a traumatic life event may blame themselve s, in part, because they perceive that they could have avoided the eve nt. A study of respondents with spinal cord injuries shows that their causal attributions for the event are distinguishable from their perce ptions of avoidability, the latter frequently focusing on mutable aspe cts of their own behavior Respondents with spinal cord injuries and tr ained raters attributed the same degree of causal significance to the respondent but differed in their assignment of blame: Respondents assu med more personal blame than raters gave them. Regression analyses sug gest that a significant portion of respondents' self-blame can be attr ibuted to their self-implicating perceptions of avoidability. The degr ee to which respondents believed that they could have avoided their ac cident predicted self-blame even after controlling for their causal at tributions for the event. Implications for the study of self-blame and perceived avoidability are discussed.