Abstract
Attributional and pre-attributional styles of three samples of patients with heterogeneous chronic pain, suffering different degrees of depressive symptomatology, were compared with respect to six hypotheses arising out of a review of previously published literature. These hypotheses intended to clarify the respective roles of the three attributional dimensions of internality, stability and globality (after Abramson et al 1978), the pre-attributional judgements of consensus and consistency (after Kelley 1967) and the judgement of controllability over the event in question. The hypotheses also aimed to clarify the significance of using the standard negative and positive scenarios of the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Peterson et al 1982), as opposed to hypothetical patient-related events and real-life events. A further aim was to clarify the role of context variables, such as age, sex and chronicity of pain, in mediating the associations between attributional/pre-attributional judgements and depression. The interpretation of results was complicated by the fact that some dimensions had very low internal reliability. However, of all the dimensions, that of (low) controllabiliy was most closely associated with depression. There was no clear evidence that dimensional ratings for hypothetical pain events were different from those for real pain events. There was also no clear evidence that dimensional ratings for real pain events showed a greater association with depression, than those for hypothetical negative events. These findings are linked to those of previous research and implications for future research directions are discussed. The failure of previous research to investigate the internal reliability of their data is also discussed.