Explanatory Style as a Predictor of College Performance in Students with Physical Disabilities

Attempts to modify the school environment to enhance the educational experience for students with physical disabilities have thus far been largely unsuccessful. For example, placing such students in a mainstreamed setting (Education Response Centre of the Alberta Department of Education, 1990) and the introduction of cooperative learning techniques into the curricula (Tateyama-Sniezek, 1990) have yielded inconclusive results and unimpressive success. Perhaps increased focus should be placed on more basic psychological characteristics of the individual, such as explanatory style. Explanatory style refers to the manner in which an individual habitually explains to himself or herself the occurrence of bad events. Whether an individual perceives these occurrences in an adaptive or maladaptive manner can profoundly influence the general quality of his or her life (Seligman, 1990). More specifically, the reformulated model of learned helplessness contended that when an individual is faced with a bad or aversive situation, he or she will tend to attribute that situation to some cause (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). Abramson and her colleagues stated that such causal attributions lie along three polar dimensions: 1) internal (it happened because of me) versus external (it happened because of something or someone else); 2) stable (this condition is permanent) versus unstable (this condition is temporary); and 3) global (this will interfere with everything I do) versus specific (this pertains only to this situation). The individual who habitually implements the internal-stable-global ends of the poles, or the pessimistic explanatory style, is at a greater risk for exhibiting depression-like deficits in cognition, mood, and motivation (Peterson & Seligman, 1984). Furthermore, research has shown that a pessimistic explanatory style may lead to a poorer quality of life in many different domains, which will be addressed below. For example, more pessimistic explanatory styles have been shown to correlate with higher rates of illness (Peterson, Seligman, & Vaillant, 1988; Peterson, 1988) and impairment in immunological functioning (Kamen-Siegel, Rodin, Seligman, & Dwyer, 1991). Additionally, Seligman, and Schulman (1986) examined insurance sales agents and found that agents with more pessimistic explanatory styles had higher rates of quitting and earned less in sales commissions than did their counterparts employing an optimistic explanatory style (external-unstable-specific). Phelps and Waskel (1993) also found that a pessimistic explanatory style was associated with lower levels of job satisfaction. Another life domain that is affected by explanatory style is athletic performance. Seligman, Nolen-Hoeksema, Thornton, and Thornton, (1990) found that world-class swimmers with pessimistic explanatory styles experienced diminished performance during swims following an artificially induced failure condition; whereas their more optimistic teammates either showed no such decline or showed an improvement in time. Finally, some research directly related to explanatory style and academic success (the topic of this article) has been conducted. Peterson and Barrett (1987) examined the explanatory style of university freshmen. These results showed that freshmen with a pessimistic explanatory style tended to achieve lower grade point averages in their first year of college. Furthermore, these results held even after controlling for the effects of ability and depression. Peterson and Barrett also found that freshmen with a pessimistic explanatory style were less likely to have specific academic goals and less likely to make use of academic advising. However, contrary to what Peterson and Barrett expected to find, explanatory style was not associated with goal efficacy (the degree to which students thought that they could achieve their academic goals). The present study was designed to examine the role of explanatory style in the academic performance of college students with physical disabilities. …