METATRAITS AND COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT - APPLICATION TO ATTRIBUTIONAL STYLE AND DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS

This research examined whether attributional style is more closely rel ated to depressive symptoms for some people than for others. In Study 1, depressed patients voicing more explanations for negative events sh owed (nonsignificantly) higher correlations between attributional styl e and depressive symptoms. lit Study 2 subjects reporting a tendency t o ruminate about the causes of events showed stronger relations betwee n attributional style and depressive symptoms. Conversely, subjects lo w in attributional complexity exhibited stronger relations of depressi ve symptoms with positive-event attributional style, We speculated tha t by asking for ratings of only the single most important cause of eve nts attributional style measures might provide a less adequate sample of the causal thinking of attributionally complex subjects. Study 3 pa rtially supported this reasoning; attributional complexity was not sig nificantly correlated with seeing events as having multiple muses, but if was associated with rating second-most-important causes as distinc t from first causes on attributional dimensions. Thus, current attribu tional style measures and theories might be best-suited to subjects wh o (a) tend to ponder causes of events but (b) arrive at uniform conclu sions about the nature of these causes.