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Biomedical subjects

M E Seligman

Publications and source records attributed to M E Seligman.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1988

Pessimistic explanatory style is a risk factor for physical illness: a thirty-five-year longitudinal study.

Explanatory style, the habitual ways in which individuals explain bad events, was extracted from open-ended questionnaires filled out by 99 graduates of the Harvard University classes of 1942-1944 at age 25. Physical health from ages 30 to 60 as measured by physician examination was related to earlier explanatory style. Pessimistic explanatory style (the belief that bad events are caused by stable, global, and internal factors) predicted poor health at ages 45 through 60, even when physical and mental health at age 25 were controlled. Pessimism in early adulthood appears to be a risk factor for poor health in middle and late adulthood.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

What is a dream?

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Cognition↗
PubMed1987

Explanatory style and illness.

Explanatory style is an individual difference that influences people's response to bad events. The present article discusses the possibility that a pessimistic explanatory style makes illness more likely. Several studies suggest that people who offer internal, stable, and global explanations for bad events are at increased risk for morbidity and mortality. We tentatively conclude that passivity, pessimism, and low morale foreshadow disease and death, although the process by which this occurs is unclear.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1986

Learned helplessness in children: a longitudinal study of depression, achievement, and explanatory style.

In this longitudinal study, the depressive symptoms, life events, and explanatory styles of 168 school children were measured five times during the course of 1 year. Measures of school achievement were obtained once during the year. Depressive symptoms and explanatory styles were found to be quite stable over the year. As predicted by the reformulated learned helplessness theory, explanatory style both correlated with concurrent levels of depression and school achievement and predicted later changes in depression during the year. Depression also predicted later explanatory styles. The implications of these results for intervention with children with depressive symptoms or school achievement problems are discussed.

Achievement↗
PubMed1984

Attributional style and the generality of learned helplessness.

According to the logic of the attribution reformulation of learned helplessness, the interaction of two factors influences whether helplessness experienced in one situation will transfer to a new situation. The model predicts that people who exhibit a style of attributing negative outcomes to global factors will show helplessness deficits in new situations that are either similar or dissimilar to the original situation in which they were helpless. In contrast, people who exhibit a style of attributing negative outcomes to only specific factors will show helplessness deficits in situations that are similar, but not dissimilar, to the original situation in which they were helpless. To test these predictions, we conducted two studies in which undergraduates with either a global or specific attributional style for negative outcomes were given one of three pretreatments in the typical helplessness triadic design: controllable bursts of noise, uncontrollable bursts of noise, or no noise. In Experiment 1, students were tested for helplessness deficits in a test situation similar to the pretreatment setting, whereas in Experiment 2, they were tested in a test situation dissimilar to the pretreatment setting. The findings were consistent with predictions of the reformulated helplessness theory.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Problem-solving deficits and depressive symptoms among children.

Depressive symptoms among 40 fourth- and fifth-grade students as measured by the Children's Depression Inventory, correlated highly with impaired problem solving at block designs (r = .64) and anagrams (r = .67). Similar impairments have been found among depressed adults, suggesting that depression among children may be continuous with depression among adults.

Child↗
PubMed1982

Tumor rejection in rats after inescapable or escapable shock.

Rats experienced inescapable, escapable, or no electric shock 1 day after being implanted with a Walker 256 tumor preparation. Only 27 percent of the rats receiving inescapable shock rejected the tumor, whereas 63 percent of the rats receiving escapable shock and 54 percent of the rats receiving no shock rejected the tumor. These results imply that lack of control over stressors reduces tumor rejection and decreases survival.

Animals↗
PubMed1982

Patient behavior in hospitals: helplessness, reactance, or both?

Forty-eight inpatients hospitalized for 1, 3, or 9 weeks and 24 outpatients were tested on cognitive tasks: poor performance and depressive symptoms increased with length of hospitalization, even as illness resolved. Further, increased hospitalization made patients more susceptible to the debilitating effect of uncontrollable events. Taken together, these results imply that the passive, compliant, and inanimate behavior of the "good patient" may be the result of learned helplessness engendered by hospitalization.

Adult↗
PubMed1982

Attributional styles and life events in the classroom: vulnerability and invulnerability to depressive mood reactions.

A core prediction of the reformulated model of learned helplessness and depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) is that when confronted with the same negative life event, people who display a generalized tendency to attribute negative outcomes to internal, stable, or global factors should be more likely to experience a depressive mood reaction than people who typically attribute negative outcomes to external, unstable, or specific factors. We tested this prediction with a prospective design in a naturalistic setting by determining whether the content of college students' attributional styles at one point in time predicted the severity of their depressive mood response to receiving a low grade on a midterm exam at a subsequent point in time. Consistent with the prediction, students with an internal or global attributional style for negative outcomes at Time 1 experienced a depressive mood response when confronted with a subsequent low midterm grade, whereas students with an external or specific attributional style for negative outcomes were invulnerable to this depressive mood response. In contrast to the results for the internality and globality dimensions, students' scores along the stability attribution dimension were not correlated with the severity of their depressive mood response to the low midterm grade. In the absence of a negative life event (i.e., receipt of a high midterm grade), students' generalized tendencies to make internal or global attributions for negative outcomes at Time 1 were not significantly correlated with their subsequent changes in depressive mood although there was a nonsignificant positive correlation between severity of depressive mood response and the tendency to make global attributions for negative outcomes at Time 1.

Achievement↗
PubMed1981

Self-blame and depressive symptoms.

Are internal attributions for bad events always associated with depression? The depressive symptoms of 87 female undergraduates correlated with blame directed at their own characters. In contrast, blame directed at their own behaviors correlated with lack of depressive symptoms. Behaviorally attributed bad events were seen as more controllable and their causes less stable and less global than were characterologically attributed bad events and their causes. Characterological blame increased with more negative life events during the last year, implying that individuals who blame their character may arrive at this attributional style by a covariation analysis. Finally, characterological blame did not precede the onset of depressive symptoms 6 or 12 weeks later. Thus, characterological blame may be a strong concomitant of depression, but not a cause.

Adult↗