Attributional Styles
- Optimistic Attributional Style. Optimism has been conceptualized as both dispositional (Carver & Scheier, 2003) and as an explanatory style: in terms of explanatory style, optimism refers to how an individual ...
- Depressive Attributional Style. ...
- Pessimistic Attributional Style. ...
What is a pessimistic attributional style?
A pessimistic attributional style assumes that if something bad happens it somehow infects everything else and hence everything is bad. What is optimistic behavior? Optimism is a mental attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable.
What is your attributional style?
Your attributional style is the way you explain a negative event to yourself. The way you think about why a bad thing has happened to you. The conclusions you draw from a negative event: the meaning you attribute to it.
What is optimistic explanation style?
Optimistic explanatory style The way you mentally explain the things that happen to you is at the heart of optimism. Optimists explain positive events in terms of personal, permanent causes and negative events in terms of external, temporary causes.
Does attributional style affect academic achievement and self-esteem in high school students?
Their findings suggested that an optimistic attributional style for events was associated with higher academic achievement in high school students and mediated the effect of academic performance upon self-esteem.
What are the different attributional styles?
When people experience positive or negative events, they often wonder why the event occurred. In order to answer this question, people make causal attributions based upon three basic dimensions: internal-external, stable-unstable, and global-specific.
Why is an optimistic attributional style undesirable?
Optimistic. A person holding a optimistic attributional style will attribute negative outcomes to external events and positive outcomes to internal events.
What is a negative attributional style?
You have a negative attributional style if you think a negative event has happened to you because of something inside you. Something internal. For example, “I failed the maths test because I am no good at maths”. (Thinking you're no good at maths is an internal reason to explain the failure.)
What is the difference between an optimistic and pessimistic explanatory style?
Definitions of characteristics of explanatory style A pessimistic style is one that uses global, stable, and internal explanations for negative events. In contrast, an optimistic style is characterized as using local, unstable, and external explanations for negative events (Peterson & Buchanan, 1995).
How can attributional style influence the likelihood of developing depression?
'Attributions of uncontrollability' (i.e. the extent to which the causes of events are perceived as uncontrollable) has been shown to increase the likelihood that a person with a depressogenic attributional style will develop depressive symptoms in response to an adverse event [28].
Is attributional style cognitive?
Attributional style reflects cognitive styles + optimism–pessimism bias. Global/local, stable/unstable, and internal/external styles dominated. Positive and negative bias were independent of each other. Scoring should reflect three styles and two biases.
What is depressive attributional style?
Numerous studies have shown that depression-prone people are characterized by a chronic style of attributing failures to internal, stable, and global causes, sometimes labeled as the “depressive attributional style.” Much less is known, however, about how social-cultural factors such as religious beliefs might modulate ...
What are Attributional patterns?
An internal attribution is when a behavior is attributed to internal or personal factors. It's also known as a dispositional attribution, because it is when we assume that a person's disposition is the reason for their behavior. An external attribution is when a behavior is attributed to external factors.
What is Seligman attributional style questionnaire?
The ASQ is a self-report instrument that yields scores for explanatory style for bad events and for good events using three causal dimensions: internal versus external, stable versus unstable, and global versus specific causes.
What is the difference between optimistic explanatory style and pessimistic explanatory style quizlet?
Optimistic explanatory style involves seeing good events as external while pessimistic explanatory style involves seeing good events as internal.
What is pessimistic explanatory style in psychology?
People who generally tend to blame themselves for negative events, believe that such events will continue indefinitely, and let such events affect many aspects of their lives display what is called a pessimistic explanatory style.
How do people who have an optimistic explanatory style tend to think about setbacks?
People with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to view setbacks as personal, permanent, and pervasive. People with an optimistic explanatory style tend to blame setbacks on outside forces and view them as temporary, isolated events.
Attribution
Attribution refers to the way of describing the cause of an event or behavior.
Attribution Style
Attribution style can be defined as how an individual describes or justifies a negative event.
Signs of Negative Attributional Style
If a person has a negative attribution style when he will come across any event he will explain the event in a way that it will look like, internal, global and stable.
Types of Attribution
Researchers have done a two dimensional classification of Attribution.
Attribution Theory
This theory focuses on how ordinary people tend to infer and explain the causes of an event.
Jones and Davis Correspondent Inference Theory
In 1965, Jones and Davis put forward an idea that an individual tends to pay more attention to his intentional behaviour as compared to his unintentional behaviour.
Attribution Theory (B. Weiner)
In 1974, Weiner developed a theory which has gained enormous attention in social psychology.
What Is the Optimistic Explanatory Style?
An explanatory style describes how we make sense of adverse events that happen to us (Peterson & Seligman, 1987). Specifically, explanatory styles refer to how we explain the causes of particular events; in other words, why did this event happen to us? Our explanatory styles tend to be stable.
2 Real-Life Examples
In this section, we detail a few examples of an optimistic explanatory style in different spheres.
Fostering an Optimistic Explanatory Style: 5 Tips
Fortunately, even if your explanatory style has tended to be pessimistic, you can learn to adopt a more optimistic one.
A Take-Home Message
Even though we may present with a pessimistic style initially, the good news is that we can learn to adopt a more optimistic explanatory style.
