Uncontrollability and self-blame in depression: Investigation of the paradox in a college population.

The so-called paradox in depression, that depressives blame themselves for events over which they feel no control, received empirical support in this study of 80 undergraduates. Scores on the Beck Depression Inventory were positively correlated with the ratings of helplessness and guilt perceived in various selfroles. Perceptions of helplessness and guilt covaried positively across roles for almost all subjects,, but particularly for depressives. In a recent literature review, Abramson and Sackeim (1977) observed that clinical descriptions of depressives have emphasized the ostensibly incompatible cognitions of helplessness and self-blame. Two prominent theories of depression, Seligman's (1975) and Beck's (1967), have focused on helplessness and self-blame, respectively. Although these theories have sometimes been viewed as complementary (e.g., Miller & Seligman, 1973), their merger results in a paradoxical view of depressives as blaming themselves for outcomes over which they feel no control. The research reported in this article had two major purposes: (a) to establish whether the paradox indeed exists and (b) to distinguish among several possible resolutions of it. College students completed several questionnaires, among them the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961), Levenson's (1973) multidimensional locus of control scales, and scales for rating various self-roles along dimensions including helplessness and guilt. Scores on the BDI were used as measures of depression (cf. Golin & Terrell, 1977; Klein & Seligman, 1976; Miller & Seligman, 1973, 1975). Levenson's instruments allowed inde