Our study examined the relation between neuropsychological impairment of executive functions and explanatory styles, according to the Abramson model of learned helplessness in humans, in a sample of substance abusers. Thirty-eight polysubstance abusers were assessed during an abstinence period using a selective neuropsychological battery for the evaluation of the executive functions, as well as...

PURPOSE Hopelessness theory predicts that negative attributional style will interact with negative life events over time to predict depression. The intention of this study was to test this in a population who are at greater risk of negative life events, people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). METHOD Data, including measures of attributional style, negative life events, and depressive symptoms, w...

Does familiarity arise from direct access to memory representations (a mnemonic account) or from inferences and diagnostic cues (an attributional account)? These theoretically distinct explanations can be difficult to distinguish in practice, as is shown by the positivity effect, the increase in feelings of familiarity that accompanies positive emotion. Experiment 1 manipulated mnemonic and att...

The purpose of this study was to assess the utility of social cognition and insight in the prediction of violence in a psychiatric inpatient sample. Violence history, demographic information, symptomatology, neuropsychological functioning, social cognition (i.e., attributional style), and insight were assessed in 29 inpatients with severe mental illness. Greater posttest violence was associated...

A method for discovering multi-head attributional rules in large databases is presented and illustrated by results from an implemented program. Attributional rules (a.k.a. attributional dependencies) can be viewed as generalizations of standard association rules, because they use more general and expressive conditions than those in the latter ones, and by that can express more concisely inter-a...

Compound attributes are named groups of attributes that have been introduced in Attributional Calculus (AC) to facilitate learning descriptions of objects whose components are characterized by different subsets of attributes. The need for such descriptions appears in many practical applications. A method for handling compound attributes in AQ learning and testing is described and illustrated by...

Assessed the influence of children's attribution style, coping style, social competence, parent coping, and demographic variables on the psychosocial adjustment of 86 pediatric oncology patients. Utilizing hierarchical multiple regression procedures, nearly one half of the variance in child depression was predicted by children's avoidance coping, depressive attributional style, and social compe...

The hopelessness theory of depression [Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I. & Alloy, L. B. (1989). Hopelessness depression: a theory-based subtype of depression. Psychological Review, 96, 358-372.] postulates that a negative attributional style represents a risk factor for a particular constellation of depressive symptoms, termed 'hopelessness depression'. Four studies tested the relation of negati...

Six pigeons were trained using a matching-to-sample procedure where sample and rewarded comparisons matched on both attributional (color) and relational (horizontal or vertical orientation) dimensions. Probes then evaluated the pigeons' preference to comparisons that varied in these dimensions. A strong preference was found for the attribute of color. The discrimination was not found to transfe...

Theories about why immoral behaviors carry a large amount of attributional weight tend to emphasize traditional cognitive variables. In contrast, the authors propose that the degree of negative affect that these behaviors induce in observers is largely responsible for their attributional weight. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate an association between the amount of negative affect induced by immoral ...