Relationships Between Self-Serving Attributional Bias and Subjective Well-Being Among Danish and Spanish Women

Abstract

Self-serving attributional bias (SSAB) is defined as the tendency of individuals to make more internal, stable, and global attributions for positive than for negative events. One of the objectives of the current study was to examine the presence and magnitude of SSAB in two undergraduate women samples from Denmark and Spain. SSAB has been inversely associated with psychological distress. However, well-being is not merely the absence of psychological distress. Therefore, positive affect balance and life satisfaction, as components of subjective well-being (SWB), were considered with the aim to explore how SSAB and SWB are related. The results showed that both Danish and Spanish women displayed SSAB. While this bias was greater for the Spanish group than for the Danish one, Danish women reported a more positive affect balance and greater life satisfaction than Spanish women. SSAB and the two components of SWB were interrelated in both samples, and mediational analysis showed that positive affect balance mediated the relationships between SSAB and life satisfaction. The joint study of SSAB and other relevant factors which also influence well-being, in order to know the relative contribution of each of them, would be necessary. Likewise, it also suggested that differences on well-being between analyzed samples can be explained, at least in part, by socioeconomic differences in both countries.