Hostile and sad moods in dysphoria: evidence for cognitive specificity in attributions

Abstract The prototypical affective symptom in depression is sadness. However, depressed individuals also report elevated levels of hostile moods. In the present study, we investigated whether hostile and sad moods in dysphoric individuals were associated with distinctive attribution profiles for actual negative life events. In correlational analyses of dyphoric individuals, we found that sadness was associated with self-blaming, stable, and global attributions. In contrast, we found that hostile moods in dysphoric individuals were associated with other-blaming and specific attributions. When groups of dysphoric individuals who reported stable mood profiles of either predominant sadness or hostility were analyzed, we found that dysphoric-hostile individuals made attributions that were relatively other-blaming even when judges rated their life events as due to self. In contrast, dysphoric-sad individuals made more global attributions. These findings might have implications for understanding cognition in de...