Observer Attributions of Depressed Students
- 1 March 1983
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Vol. 9 (1) , 74-82
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167283091010
Abstract
In two identical experiments, depressed and nondepressed college students made attributions about the causes of another's essay-writing behavior. Half of each depressed group was given information designed to lead to an internal attribution for the essay writing and half was given information designed to lead to an external attribution. The results of both experiments showed that across the attribution conditions, depressed students made more use of the attributional information than did nondepressed students. These data fit with the theoretical reasoning of Pittman and Pittman (1980) that lack of control motivates attributional processing. In addition, the data imply that depressed students, compared to nondepressed students, show more sensitivity in some types of information processing tasks.Keywords
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