Tendencies to focus on fairness, personal responsibility, and causes of negative events: Moderating relationships between cognitions and emotions

Both appraisal theories of emotion (e.g. Lazarus & Smith, 1988) and the hopelessness theory of depression (Abramson, Metalsky & Alloy, 1989), predict that cognitive appraisals of situations will be related to negative affect. One reason for the sometimes weak results connecting attributions to depression and appraisals to specific emotions is hypothesized to be that all people do not engage in such cognitive analysis along the important dimensions with equal frequency. Through self-reports of 124 undergraduate students, the present study found empirical evidence for moderation of the attribution-depression relationship by rumination tendency scores, and of the unfairness-anger relationship by a tendency to think about personal responsibility. Implications for understanding cognition-emotion links, as well as for amelioration of pervasive negative emotion states are discussed.