Cognitive correlates of life stress and depression in college students.

Attributional models of depression have not been tested adequately in naturalistic situations involving personally relevant events. In the present study, causal attributions along the dimensions of perceived control, locus of causation, stability, intentionality, and globality, and related cognitions of degree of upset, expectation of the event, predicted recurrence, and resultant uncertainty were obtained for naturally occurring stressful events from 34 moderately depressed college students, from 30 students who had encountered high levels of personal stress but had not become depressed, and from 35 nondepressed controls. Contrary to predictions from attributional models, the groups did not differ in their causal ascriptions. However, the groups did differ significantly in their nonattributional cognitions as evaluated by an overall multivariate test. Further, depressed students were significantly more likely to report greater upset and more uncertainty in their lives as a result of stress than either of the nondepressed groups. These results suggest that cognitions about consequences may play a mediating role in the development of depression, and further investigation of such cognitive constructs may improve existing cognitive models of depression.