ABSTRACT
Historically, the notion of cognitive vulnerability to psychopathology has most often been associated with the study of depression, and particularly with the study of hopelessness depression, a subtype of the disorder proposed by Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy (1989). The hopelessness theory of depression distinguishes between distal and proximal factors that contribute to the disorder. Distal factors occur at the beginning of the chain of events that eventually leads to the expression of the symptoms of hopelessness depression. According to Abramson and her colleagues, a major distal influence is attributional style. Specifically, people who end up depressed tend to make stable and global attributions for negative events in their lives. Yet, simply having this attributional style does not cause depression. Rather, people must also experience negative events in their lives. Abramson et al. (1989) proposed that a diathesis-stress approach can be used to understand these contributory factors, such that a depressogenic attributional style (the diathesis) and negative life events (the stress) interact to increase the likelihood that a person will experience the symptoms of depression in the future.
