Causal perceptions of stressful events in depressed and nondepressed outpatients.

Abstract

Recent attributional formulations of depression have not typically been tested in clinical populations, and the studies that have been reported commonly employ contrived failure tasks. In the present study cognitions about the causes and consequences of recent personally stressful life events were examined in depressed and nondepressed outpatients. Depressed persons were found to characterize the cause of their most upsetting events as internal, intended, global, expected, and stable; however, no overall differences between depressed and nondepressed were found when all stressful events were included in the comparison. Methodologically, results suggest that questionnaire assessment of causal cognitions has reasonable concurrent validity with causal ascriptions of personal life stresses mentioned spontaneously during intake interviews. The results are interpreted in terms of a need for refinement and differentiation of methods of study and models of depression and cognition.

Neural correlates of causal attribution in negative events of depressed patients: Evidence from an fMRI study

“…Based on previous studies (Abramson et al, 1977(Abramson et al, , 1978Harvey et al, 1978;Gong-Guy et al, 1980), depression attribution in negative events plays a key role in DPs. To examine the different attribution bias in negative life events, we separately examine the effects of each condition for two groups.…”

“…Generally, healthy people usually display a so-called ''self-serving'' bias: the propensity to attribute success to the self and failure to external factors (Miller and Ross, 1975). Nevertheless, a number of theorists have further suggested that depressive symptoms might be profitably understood by taking into account the causal attributions for the bad events in their lives (Abramson and Sackheim, 1977;Abramson et al, 1978;Golin et al, 1981;Gong-Guy and Hammen, 1980;Harvey, 1981;Harvey et al, 1978).…”

Cognitive-behavioral treatment of depression, part VII: Coping with precipitating events

“…Depressed clients are more likely to attribute negative life events to internal, global, and stable causes (Gong-Guy & Hammen, 1980). Furthermore, depressed clients tend to view stressful events as distressing and requiring substantial life change (Robins, Block, & Peselow, 1990).…”

Causal Attributions, Real Life-Events and Personality Characteristics: A Preliminary Study

“…Recently several self-report instruments have been developed to assess attribution style (Gong-Guy & Hammen, 1981;Peterson, Semrnel, Baeyer, Abramson, Metalsky, & Seligman, 1982;Russel, 1982;Girodo, Dotzenroth, & Stein, 1981) either to measure causal attributions on hypothetical-or on real life-events and by that means test the hypothesis of learned helplessness. Apart from the 'traditional' attributional dimensions several authors elaborated the model using other cognitive variables as chance, intention, and expectation (Gong-Guy & Hammen, 1980). Several observations can be made about the existing literature.…”