ABSTRACT
The study of explanatory style in treatment research poses a special dilemma. Is explanatory style a stable trait, and thus a potential predictor of treatment response or relapse? This predictive role would be a familiar one for explanatory style, as evidenced in the other chapters in this book. Or is explanatory style a changeable characteristic, a statelike feature of a person, so that its change during therapy would be of interest? This latter formulation would seem to go against the assumptions made in most research on explanatory style. In this chapter we see that perhaps explanatory style can have it both ways, at least within the context of cognitive therapy for depression.
