Something goes wrong and you explain it to yourself in about a sentence, usually without noticing you did it. Peterson and Seligman identified three dimensions running through those sentences, and the combination is what separates a bad afternoon from evidence about your life.
Quick Answer: Explanatory style has three dimensions: permanence (lasting or temporary), pervasiveness (everything or just this), and personalisation (about me or about circumstances). Peterson and Seligman (1984) proposed that a habitual pattern of permanent, pervasive and internal explanations for bad events functions as a risk factor for depression. The correction is accuracy, not positivity — narrower explanations are usually also truer ones.
The Three Dimensions
- Permanence. "I always mess this up" versus "I messed that up." One implies the future; the other reports the past.
- Pervasiveness. "I am bad at my job" versus "I handled that meeting badly." One explanation spreads; the other stays put.
- Personalisation. "This is who I am" versus "the brief was ambiguous." Neither is automatically correct — the question is which one the facts support.
Why Accuracy Beats Cheerfulness
The instinct when reading this is to convert every explanation into a kinder one. That is not the mechanism, and it produces sentences you do not believe.
The mechanism is boundaries. Most sweeping explanations are sweeping because they were generated fast and under discomfort, not because the evidence supported them. Correcting them is a factual exercise: what actually went wrong, how long will it actually matter, how much of your life does it actually touch.
A precise account of a real failure is not optimistic. It just stops the failure standing in for everything else.
The Asymmetry Most People Miss
Explanatory style applies to good events too, and the pattern frequently runs opposite.
The same person who explains a setback as permanent and sweeping will often explain a success as temporary and narrow — the client was in a good mood, the question happened to be easy, anyone would have managed it. Both halves are the same habit pointed in different directions.
Noticing that asymmetry in your own explanations is usually more informative than trying to change either half. If bad events are about you and good ones are about luck, that is a pattern rather than a series of accurate readings.
How to Catch Your Own
The explanations are fast and mostly unspoken, so the practical move is to write one down after the fact — the version you actually gave yourself at the time, not the reasonable one you would give a colleague.
Then check it against the three dimensions. Where the sweeping version and the narrow version both fit the facts, the narrow one is the better description, because it does not smuggle in a prediction the evidence did not support.
How This Relates to the Optimism Test
They are related constructs measured differently. This test reads what you expect of the future; explanatory style reads how you account for the past.
They correlate modestly, which means a low band here does not tell you your explanatory style, and a good explanatory style will not necessarily move your band. If you want a lever rather than a reading, explanatory style is the one that responds to practice, because a habit of description is more tractable than a disposition.
Get the Reading First
The Optimism and Pessimism test takes about two minutes and gives you the expectancy side. The Locus of Control test sits closest to the personalisation dimension, and the Self-Esteem test covers the self-regard that both traditions overlap with.