PSY-33 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Explanatory Style, Content Analysis, Safe Sex
Document Summary
Explanatory style: people develop habitual ways of explaining both the good and bad things that happen to them in life. Pessimistic explanatory style: people who view neg events as their own fault (internal), likely to happen again (stable) and undermining other aspects of their lives (global) Optimistic explanatory style: view neg events as not their own fault (external), unlikely to happen again (stable) and limited to just one aspect of their lives (specific) Attributional style questionnaire (asq): contains 12 hypothetical good and bad situations. Cave technique: content analysis of verbatim explanations. People w optimistic explanatory styles outperform expectations and their pessimistic peers. Optimistic uni students do better in their classes. They show greater motivation and persist longer in face of adversity. Pessimistic explanations tend to be less self-filling. Less likely to have specific academic goals and less likely to seek. People and teams with optimistic explanatory style perform better than those with a pessimistic style.
