The relationship between attributional style and symptoms of depression in youth

A systematic review and meta-analysis

Bibliographic Data

ID21559161
AuthorsJeffrey C Valentine (0000-0002-2673-1915, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Patrick Pössel (0000-0002-5851-4253, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Abdul Alharbi (University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Samantha Gerbine (University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Liz Utterback (University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Erica Mcclure (University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Toheeb Mustapha (0000-0002-9133-0691, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Nqobile Nzama (0009-0002-9338-2230, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Khushboo S Patel (0000-0002-6589-1997, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Taylor Pratt (University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Jennifer S Tinman (0009-0009-4154-2459, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky), Hamid Zarei (0009-0000-4491-4769, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky)
Year2024
Volume43
Issue4
Pages377-405
Publication date2024-08-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Social and Clinical Psychology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0736-7236 • E-ISSN: 1943-2771
PublisherGuilford Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1521/jscp.2024.43.4.377
LanguageEN
References cited31

Introduction: Humans seem to have an innate need to understand the world. We address this need in part by generating largely automatic explanations for the things we see and the things that happen to us. Explanations for personally relevant events often involve a set of inferences, called attributions, that behave in a trait-like way and are collectively referred to as an attributional style. A person's attributional style is theoretically predicted to be causally related to depression (Abramson et al., 1978). Method: This article reports a systematic review and meta-analysis involving 153 studies with 177 independent samples investigating the cross-sectional relationship between attributional style and depressive symptoms in samples of youth. Results: The relationship between attributional style and depressive symptoms is in the theoretically predicted direction, large enough to be meaningful, heterogeneous across studies, and probably underestimated in most studies due to measurement error. A moderator analysis suggested larger effects when the attributional style measure was based on a composite of positive and negative events relative to when the correlation was based on negative effects. None of the other moderator analyses conducted yielded statistically significant results. Discussion: We conclude with suggestions regarding the reliability of measures of attributional style and ways that future studies can more effectively support future meta-analytic moderator analyses

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