The reformulated learned helplessness model proposes that people who tend to make internal, stable, and global attributions in response to uncontrollable aversive events are more likely to develop depression. The present study sought to investigate the nature of the relationship between attributional style and depression in a male prison sample. One hundred and one adult male prisoners from fou...

Knowledge scouts are software agents that autonomously synthesize knowledge of interest to a given user (target knowledge) by applying inductive database operators to a local or distributed dataset. This paper describes briefly a method and a scripting language for developing knowledge scouts, and then reports on experiments with a knowledge scout, SCAMP, for discovering patterns characterizing...

Research into the nature of attributional reasoning in paranoia has for the most part been restricted to questionnaire-based approaches. This fails to address the issue of whether a distinctive attributional style underpins the everyday talk of paranoid individuals. This study aimed to investigate whether attributional models of paranoid delusions applied to spontaneous attributions generated i...

The causes cited by 218 participants for the hypothetical positive and negative life events on the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) and the dimensional ratings of the causes were examined to determine the match between the dimensional and categorical definitions of attributional style. Optimists (n = 105) and pessimists (n = 113) used different types of causes to explain the negative ASQ...

It was proposed that people attribute an individual’s behavior more to internal factors when that individual’s actions are influenced by reward than when those actions are influenced by punishment. Previous research has failed to control for the power of reward versus punishment which, in effect, creates a confounding of behavioral base rates (consensus) with the reward-punishment manipulation....

This study examined the relationship of attributional styles for negative and positive events with depression and anxiety. A sample of 239 college students underwent structured diagnostic interviews and completed self–report measures of attributional style and major life events at two time points separated by approximately four weeks. Using cross–sectional methodology, attributional styles for ...

We tried to verify whether the reformulated Learned Helplessness Model and its more fully articulated form, Hopelessness Theory of Depression, were adequate predict symptoms social functioning (SF) in persons with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders by comparing a clinical group (n = 25) non-clinical one 30). Bivariate correlations multiple linear regressions conducted assess relationships between...

Self-serving bias suggests that people tend to attribute success to internal factors and attribute failure to external factors (Bradley, J Pers Soc Psychol 36:56–71,1978; Miller and Ross, Psychol Bull 82:213–225,1975). However, the results of the attribution of failure are not always consistent. Some studies have found that people attribute failure to external factors (Snyder, Stephan, & Rosenf...

This study aimed at investigating hostile attributional biases for ambiguous facialexpressions and answers generated to impasse situations related to aggressive behavior inadolescence. In a cross-sectional design, four pictures suggesting ambiguity in relation to emotions and a narrative based on a hypothetic impasse situation were applied to a non-randomized sample of 29 incarcerat...