Explanatory style of schizophrenic and depressed outpatients

Abstract

We administered an Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) to several outpatient groups—paranoid schizophrenics ( n = 32), nonparanoid schizophrenics ( n = 30), and depressives ( n = 30)—as well as to a normal comparison group of community college students ( n = 30). Depressives evidenced a more pessimistic explanatory style than paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics and normals. Six months later, among those outpatients experiencing hassles, individuals who attributed good events to stable, global, and internal causes were functioning somewhat better than those who attributed good events to unstable, specific, and external causes. We operationalized explanatory “flexibility” as the range of scores on the ASQ and found that outpatients with larger range scores for bad events (presumably showing more flexibility) functioned better than those having smaller range scores.