Relative Contributions of Attributional Style and Arthritis Helplessness to Depression in Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Longitudinal Investigation

Abstract

We examined the relative efficacy of disease-specific and disease-unrelated appraisals of helplessness in predicting depression in rheumatoid arthritis over the course of 1 year. Forty-two individuals from an outpatient rheumatology clinic completed measures of depression, disease-unrelated causal attributions, arthritis-specific helplessness, pain, and disability. Results revealed that disease-unrelated causal attributions, assessed at Time 1 contributed significant variance to depression assessed at Time 2, after controlling for initial levels of depression and concurrent disease status variables. Arthritis-specific helplessness did not relate to subsequent levels of depression. In general, our findings indicated that causal attributions for disease-unrelated events were more reliable predictors of depression in rheumatoid arthritis than was arthritis-specific helplessness. Discussion of the implications of our findings for future research follows from the results.