Attributive styles: tell me how you explain things and I'll tell you how you feel

Do you know what we do from the first minute of being born? Learn. We really learn even before we are born. Did you know that language development already works while in the womb?

We are an inexhaustible information processing machine. We continually process what surrounds us. We need to understand it in order to adapt and interact with our environment.

And we learn mainly by association and by consequences, our own or others. In other words, in this learning to explain to ourselves how this living thing works, we are continually looking for the cause-effect binomial. Following Heider, people act like "naive scientists." We "study" non-stop everything that surrounds us to try to understand and explain it.

What is the important? What happens or should happen? Why happens? Without realizing it, these are big questions that we are wondering about from minute one. And in that task, and each one depending on their "teachers" and the environment in which they live, draws their own conclusions and creates their attributive style.

• Related article: "17 curiosities about human perception"

What are attributive styles?

Taking into account that the attribution refers to the explanation about the causes of something happening, whether they are internal or external causes, with attributive style we refer to the tendency that each one of us has when explaining what happens, based on one cause or another.

What kinds of causes is usually attributed what happens? What we are going to raise largely derives from Bernard Weiner's theory of causal attribution. In this sense, we organize the causes based on 3 factors or dimensions.

1. Locus of control: where the cause is located

A) Yes, The cause can be Internal, that is, it is due to something specific to the person, or it can be External.

To say that "I have passed because I have made an effort and I have studied a lot", supposes to attribute the cause to something internal, to a quality, the effort. On the other hand, if "I passed because the exam was very easy", it means attributing the case to an external variable, in In this case, that the exam was easy, that it could also have been luck, good or bad, to the conjunction of the stars ...

2. Temporality

This factor refers to whether the causes are Stable or Unstable.

If the cause is stable, it is assumed that that cause will always be present and therefore the same will always happen. On the contrary, if the cause is considered unstable, what is being assumed is that what has happened does not have to happen again.

For example, "I'm sure I'll get all the exams the same," he tells us that what happened will happen again, sets a stable scenario regarding what happened. Faced with the same fact, an unstable scenario can be established, "this time I have succeeded, but I will not be able for the next exam"

3. Situational element

This factor refers to the situations in which the cause is valid.

In this way, a cause, what happened can be Global, so that it will be present in all situations, or else be Specific, and therefore only refers to a situation particular.

"Study what I study, I will not get it", he makes it clear that what happened, what happens will be global and no matter what is studied, where it is studied, the result would be the same. "I think mathematics is especially difficult for me, with biology it would cost me less." Either because biology is more interesting, entertaining... the fact is that the difficulties to study focus on mathematics

Surely as you have been reading, a question has arisen: are not the three factors related? The answer, how could it be otherwise, is that of course they are related. The attributive styles of a person are congruent in themselves. Another thing is that they are congruent when challenged.

How do attributive styles influence us?

From the studies and the theory of Heider (Theory of Attribution), to the investigations of Martin Seligman which led to the Theory of Helplessness to explain depression and its subsequent reformulations in 1975 (Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale), the theoretical constructor of the Attributions has been gaining the relevance that is deserves.

Specifically, the perception of uncontrollability, or what is the same, the perception that what is done or not done, has no relation to what happens, has an important weight in the cognitive structure present in mood disorders and depression.

It is actually rather the explanation that is given to this perception of uncontrollability, which explains the hopelessness that is related to mood disorders.

Among many other theories and authors, these investigations laid the foundations and highlighted the importance of attributions and attributive styles. Although they do not explain everything, they do have a lot to say in disorders such as depression, anxiety ...

And you: what style do you have?

Answering this question involves questioning what theory we have built to understand and explain why things happen and how we "should" act.

The attributive style that each one has learned will undoubtedly determine what decisions they make and how they face their day to day. To help us specify how we tend to attribute the causes of what happens around us, it is important to incorporate a new variable and observe how we explain successes or failures.

If we take this table as a reference, what boxes would you check before the positive (a success) and the negative (a failure) that happens in your life?

Although it has mainly been investigated and associated with depression and mood disorders and with anxiety disorders, Knowing our attributive style is also a useful tool to understand how we manage our day to day, and ultimately about managing our own life.

Attributions and mood: how is it related?

Before continuing, it is important to note that not everything can be summarized or explained on the basis of the attributive styles, people are much more complex and rich to be summed up in a style attributive.

However, many cases and our experience in the clinic highlight that normally depression appears associated with a certain attributive style such as the following.

The successes, the positive events, tend to be explained on the basis of external, specific and unstable causes. Namely:

• External Causes: It occurs due to something external to the person. Chance, that he was a "good person", the test was easy, they did him a favor, and so on.
• Specific Causes: That is, it has happened specifically in that situation, with that exam, with that person
• Unstable Causes: It is considered that the positive will not happen again.

On the contrary, negative events are attributed to:

• Internal causes: The negative is explained by something internal, by some negative internal quality.
• Global causes: What happened will happen to other people, in other situations ...
• Stable causes: Now that it is due to something internal, it will always be this way.

Therefore, it is important that we pay attention to our attributive style. If you observe that you have to take responsibility for the negative but not for the positive, and consider that this will happen always and everywhere, hopelessness is likely to appear, and it is certainly not a good companion for lifetime.

We do not usually realize how much information we neglect, and how we skew the way we perceive what happens to us. We tend to replicate over and over the way we have learned to interpret things. For this reason, it is important to know what our explanatory hypotheses, our attributive styles are, and learn to review and challenge them.