The role of depression and sex differences in attributions related to problematic social situations

The present study was designed to evaluate the hypothesis that a group of depressed subjects would tend to make more internal and stable attributions of causality in potentially problematic social situations than would a group of nondepressed subjects. A group of 215 undergraduate psychology students were divided into depressed (n = 30) and nondepressed (n = 185) groups on the basis of the results on the Beck Depression Inventory. Each subject was presented a series of 12 brief vignettes depicting potentially problematic social situations. After reading each vignette, subjects rated them as to internal/external causality and along a stable/unstable dimension. Although the results provide support for the hypothesis, the need to replicate the findings with non-student populations was emphasized prior to generalizing the results to more general depressive populations.