Explanatory style refers to how people explain the events of their lives. There are three facets of how people can explain a situation that can lean toward optimism or pessimism:
Stable vs. Unstable: Changing across time or unchanging across time.
Global vs. Local: Universal throughout one’s life or specific to a part of one’s life.
Internal vs. External: Cause of an event as within oneself or outside oneself. It refers to human's habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic, depressive explanatory style attributes failures to stable, global, and internal causes.
Other definition:
Explanatory Style refers to one's habitual way of explaining life's events. A negative explanatory style attributes failures to stable, global, and internal causes. It often results in the development of learned helplessness, which occurs when people believe that they cannot change what happens to them.
Other definition:
Explanatory style refers to how individuals describe their successes and failures to others, indicating an optimistic or pessimistic bent, which researchers believe tells much about the teller's psychological state |
Glossary / Lexicon