In particular, a negative cognitive style is defined as the tendency to attribute negative life events to stable causes that will persist over time, global causes that affect many areas of the individual’s life, and internal causes that are inherent to the person ( Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale,

1978), and to infer negative characteristics about oneself and negative consequences about one’s future as a result of the life event. Cross-sectional and prospective studies show relations between negative cognitive style and depression (e.g., Alloy et al., 2000, Alloy et al., 2006 and Safford et al., 2007). A reliable and valid measurement of cognitive vulnerability is thus of crucial importance to empirical studies in this field ( Haeffel et al., 2008). Negative cognitive style is most commonly assessed using Vorinostat cost the Cognitive Style Questionnaire (CSQ; Alloy et al., 2000), which was developed from the Attributional Style Questionnaire (Peterson et al., 1982). The click here CSQ focuses on 24 hypothetical events (12 positive, 12 negative) relating to successes and failures in academic achievement, employment,

and interpersonal relationships. For each event, participants are told vividly to imagine themselves in that situation, and then to write down the one major cause of the event. Next, participants are asked to rate the extent to which the named cause was the result of (a) internal versus external much factors (i.e., caused by themselves or other people/circumstances), (b) specific versus global factors (whether the cause of the event has implication for all areas of life or only that specific situation),

and (c) stable versus unstable factors (whether the cause will persist and always lead to the same outcome in the future). In the final section of the CSQ, participants are asked about the meaning of the event (rather than its cause), rating whether the event (d) means that other negative/positive events will happen to them, (e) means that they are flawed/special in some way, and (f) matters to them. Despite its observed satisfactory psychometric properties (Alloy et al., 2000 and Haeffel et al., 2008), the length of the CSQ is problematic (Haeffel et al., 2008), with participants often taking more than 30 min to complete responses to the 24 hypothetical events. This reduces the potential clinical utility of the measure, and led Haeffel et al. (2008) to conclude that “future research is needed to determine whether a brief version of the CSQ can be created that maintains the reliability and validity of the full scale” (p. 833). The main aim of the present study was to create a Short-Form version of the CSQ with satisfactory psychometric properties. A second aim was to establish whether the Short-Form CSQ could be reliably administered remotely via the Internet.