ABSTRACT
Recently, we (Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989) proposed a revision of the 1978 reformulated theory of helplessness and depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) and called it the hopelessness theory of depression. Our motive for proposing the revision was that, although the 1978 reformulation generated a vast amount of empirical work on depression over the past 10 years (see Sweeney, Anderson, & Bailey, 1986, for a meta-analysis of 104 studies) and recently has been evaluated as a model of depression (Barnett & Gotlib, 1988; Brewin, 1985; Coyne & Gotlib, 1983; Peterson & Seligman, 1984), the 1978 article did not explicitly present a clearly articulated theory of depression. Instead, it presented an attributional account of human helplessness and only briefly discussed its implications for depression. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that much controversy existed about the status of the reformulated theory of depression (e.g., Abramson, Alloy, & Metalsky, 1988a; Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1988b; Alloy, Abramson, Metalsky, & Hartlage, 1988; Barnett & Gotlib, 1988; Brewin, 1985; Coyne & Gotlib, 1983; Peterson & Seligman, 1984).
