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In Support Of White Et Al, They Observed Significantly Decreased Internal ...

In support of White et al, they observed significantly decreased internal health LOC in adolescents with CFS, than in healthy controls. In comparison to the parents of the healthy adolescents the parents of the adolescents with CFS also showed decreased internal health LOC. Thus adolescents with CFS and their parents tend to attribute their health to external factors, such as chance and the role of medical professionals. Brown and Seigel (1988) obtained similar evidence. A sample of adolescent females, were asked to make attributions about their most upsetting life events, alongside ratings of depression during recall, which were repeated ten months later. Internal attributions for controllable causes were found to be negatively associated with depression.De Valle & Norman (1992) also found that heart disease patients with a more external LOC tended to attribute the causes of their illness to fate and luck more than did those with an internal LOC, who believed that workload and fatty diet caused their disease (de Valle and Norman, 1992). There is also evidence that individuals who gain highly external scores on the influence of powerful others subscale of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale are likely to blame others for their condition, for example an individual might blame the doctors for their deterioration of health. Such scores are generally associated with poorer levels of psychological adjustment (Turnquist, Harvey, & Anderson, 1988).
However, it has also been suggested that internal attributions are adaptive. Bulman and Wortman (1977) found that individuals with spinal chord injuries who took responsibility for their circumstances were better adjusted, possibly due to a sense of control. Similarly, using meta-analysis on a combination of 27 studies, Roesch and Weiner (2001) assessed the interaction between causal attributions, coping and psychological illness in patients. They found that internal, unstable and controllable attributions were indirectly associated with positive psychological adjustment.It is possible that the inconsistencies apparent within the literature are the cause of the assessment of different types of illness. Variation in circumstances as a consequence of differences between illnesses may also contribute. For example, differences in the way individuals are treated by medical professionals and the amount which is known about the illness.Another problem for the findings in relation to CFS is outlined by Powell, Dolan and Wessely (1990). These authors point out that there is considerable overlap in symptomatology between CFS and depression, which is often measured to describe psychological adjustment. They assessed attributions amongst depressed and non-depressed sufferers of CFS and depressed individuals without CFS.

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