Journal of Rehabil itation Research & Development Attributional style and symptoms as predictors of social function in schizophrenia

Abstract—While the attributions of people with schizophrenia have been hypothesized to play a role in determining social behavior, contradictory predictions can be made about exactly what type of attributions contribute to social dysfunction. One possibility is that attributing undesirable events to internal, sta-ble, and global factors might lead to poorer social function. An alternate possibility is that attributing events in general to inter-nal, stable, and global factors might lead to better social func-tion. As a test of these hypotheses, 40 participants in a post-acute phase of schizophrenia were administered the Attribu-tional Style Questionnaire, the Positive and Negative Syn-drome Scale, and the Quality of Life Scale. Stepwise multiple regressions controlling for age and education indicated that a lack of negative symptoms and the tendency to make stable attributions for life events in general predicted more frequen