Abstract
Numerous studies have shown that depression-prone people are characterized by a chronic style of attributing failures to internal, stable, and global causes, sometimes labeled as the “depressive attributional style.” Much less is known, however, about how social-cultural factors such as religious beliefs might modulate these processes. In the current study, we hypothesized that Buddhism’s view of ultimate internal controllability plays a buffering role against the depressive attributional style and reduces its negative impacts. We administrated measures of attributional styles and psychological adjustments to a sample of Chinese Buddhists as well as a control group recruited in China. Data analyses showed that Buddhists were more likely to attribute bad outcomes to internal, stable, and global causes, but their well-being was less affected by it. Thus, these results indicate that the “depressive” attributional style is not that depressive for Buddhists, after all.
Highlights
We focus on Buddhism, which is one of the most influential Eastern religious systems, and examine how Buddhist beliefs affect attributional styles and their impacts on well-being
By administrating the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) in a sample of Buddhists and a control group, we found that Buddhists were more likely to attribute bad outcomes to internal, stable, and global causes
This finding is in line with the concept of “karma” – the meritocracy-based retribution system that is central to Buddhist beliefs
Summary
Seligman proposed the learnt helplessness model of depression, which proposed that control over the environment is a fundamental need for any organism, and if one is repeatedly exposed to unavoidable painful stimuli, one will come to expect that such events are uncontrollable and develop hopelessness and depression as a result (Hiroto and Seligman, 1975) This model was later reformulated to the Attributional Style theory (Abramson et al, 1978), which identified three dimensions of attribution of positive and negative outcomes: (a) internality: whether the outcome is due to internal (oneself) or external causes (others or circumstances); (b) stability: whether the outcome is due to stable or temporary causes; (c) globality: whether the outcome is due to global (generalizable to different situations) or specific (limited to the current situation) causes. Meta-analyses did show that the depressive attributional style is a reliable predictor of depression and other indices of well-being (Sweeney et al, 1986; Gladstone and Kaslow, 1995; Joiner and Wagner, 1995)
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