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This study examined how explanatory flexibility and explanatory style, two indices derived from the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), were related to each other and to symptoms of depression. At Time 1, seventy-three college students completed the ASQ and a self-report measure of depression, and at Time 2, approximately eight weeks later, completed the depression measure once again as well as a self-report measure of negative life events. Explanatory flexibility demonstrated relative independence from explanatory style. Additionally, explanatory flexibility, but not explanatory style, interacted with negative life events to predict change in depression symptoms such that rigidity was associated with higher levels of depression in the face of negative life events. These findings add to research suggesting that explanatory flexibility is distinct from, but related to, explanatory style and that both constructs add to our understanding of depression.
Cognitive diathesis-stress theories of depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Beck, 1967,1976) have advanced our understanding of the etiology, maintenance, and treatment of depression. These theories posit that vulnerability to depression arises through early life experiences that lead one to adopt a depressogenic view of the world. Specifically, the reformulated learned helplessness theory (Abramson et al., 1978) and hopelessness theory (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989) both conceptualize risk for depression in terms of a depressogenic or pessimistic explanatory style (the tendency to view negative events as arising from stable, global, and internal causes). Similarly, vulnerability for depression in Beck's (1967,1976) theory is associated with dysfunctional attitudes and negative schemas regarding the self, world, and future.
Explanatory style is typically assessed using the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Peterson et al, 1982). The ASQ is a self-report instrument comprised of 12 hypothetical situations-six negative situations and six positive situations. Respondents are asked to vividly imagine that each of the negative and positive events is occurring to them-one at a time. After getting each situation in mind, respondents are asked to write down the one major cause if that event were to occur and to rate that cause on likert-type scales of internality, stability, and globality. However, work from Abramson et al. (1989) has de-emphasized the internality dimension and thus explanatory style is usually measured as a composite score of the stability and globality dimensions, which is called generality. A...