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Explanatory Style and Academic Performance among College Students Beginning a Major Course of Study

Explanatory style, a cognitive variable, reflects how people typically explain the causes of bad events involving themselves. Explanatory style emerged from the attributional reformulation of the learned helplessness and depression model as a way of explaining individual differences in response to uncontrollability. A central prediction of the reformulation is that people with habitual explanatory tendencies differ, and individuals with a pessimistic explanatory style will be more likely to exhibit depressive symptoms following bad events than individuals with an optimistic explanatory style. 116 upper-level undergraduates beginning a degree program at this university completed the Attributional Style Questionnaire. Scores were correlated with students' cumulative grade point averages and their total points earned in Consumer Behavior, the first course required in the Marketing major. Students with pessimistic explanatory style scores outperformed colleagues with optimistic explanatory style scores. Implications of these findings and possible explanations for why explanatory style did not correlate in the theoretically predicted way with academic achievement are considered.