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Depressive Symptoms and Attributional Style in Children

University of California, San Francisco

John A. Traylor

University of California, San Francisco

Daniel S. Weiss

University of California, San Francisco

The applicability of the reformulated helplessness model of depression to children was assessed with outpatient samples from child psychiatric (N = 29) and pediatric (N = 26) clinics. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to determine the relationship between attributional style and depressive symptoms. In contrast to theoretical prediction, the results indicated that a measure of the attribution of positive events to external, unstable, and specific factors was a more important predictor of depressive symptoms in children than was a measure of the attribution of negative events to internal, stable, and global factors. In the context of similarly inconsistent findings with adults, the results are discussed in terms of the applicability of the helplessness model of depression to children and the need for further revision and refinement of the reformulated helplessness hypothesis to take account of the growing number of studies reporting results inconsistent with its postulates.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 12, No. 4, 442-453 (1986)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167286124007


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