The relationship between attributional style and symptoms of depression in youth: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

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.