Depression and attributional style: interpretations of important personal events.

The reformulated helplessness model of depression predicts that depressed persons attribute negative life events to internal, stable, and global causes while attributing positive life events to external, unstable, and specific causes. In addition to these hypotheses, the present author predicted that depressed students would attribute negative life events to more controllable causes, compared with nondepressed students. A third prediction was that depressed students' controllable causal attributions would be more closely related to independent judgments of the controllability of events than would the attributions of nondepressed students. These predictions were examined using a less structured methodology than previous studies. Forty-five depressed and 46 nondepressed female college students reported important personal events, provided untutored explanations of their causes, and rated the importance of particular causes of these events. Results confirmed predictions for the internal dimension (p < .01) and for the controllable dimension for negative events (p < .05) but not for the stable dimension. Results did not support the prediction that depressed students' attributions to controllable causes would appear more similar to judges' ratings of the controllability of events.