129 FALL 2014 PSI CHI JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH COPYRIGHT 2014 BY PSI CHI, THE INTERNATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY IN PSYCHOLOGY (VOL. 19, NO. 3/ISSN 2164-8204) *Faculty mentor E xplanatory style is a personality variable referring to the habitual way in which individuals explain to themselves the cause of the negative events that befall them (Maier & Seligman, 1976). It spans three dimensions: internality, stability, and globality (Maier & Seligman, 1976). Individuals who typically make internal attributions ascribe the cause of the negative event to an internal factor. In contrast, individuals offering external attributions ascribe the cause to an external factor. A student failing an exam may make an internal attribution such as “I am stupid” or an external attribution such as “The exam was too hard.” Individuals who consistently make stable attributions believe that the cause of the negative event will last forever, whereas individuals offering unstable attributions expect this cause to be transient. A student who is on academic probation may make a stable attribution and believe that the factor responsible for this event will last forever or make an unstable attribution and regard this cause as temporary. Finally, individuals consistently offering global attributions believe that the negative event will impact other life areas, whereas individuals making specific attributions think that this event will be circumscribed. A student who drops out of college may make a global attribution and believe that the negative event will negatively impact his or her relationships, or make a specific attribution and think that the failure will not influence other life areas negatively (Maier & Seligman, 1976). The choice of dimensions of explanatory style was theoretically driven and reflected the researchers’ questions of interest (Peterson, 1991). Explanatory style originated from the reformulated learned helplessness model and sought to explain why individuals responded in different ways to major, negative life events. Individuals who typically offered internal, stable, and global attributions for negative events were more likely to behave passively in the face of challenge, were poor at problem-solv- ing, and eventually gave up. In contrast, individuals who offered external, unstable, and specific causal ABSTRACT. The current study attempted to predict grade point average (GPA) based on academic explanatory style in college students. Building our work on Barrett and Peterson’s study (1987), we hypothesized that college students with optimistic explanatory style would have significantly higher GPAs than college students with pessimistic explanatory style. We tested this hypothesis with 171 undergraduate students at a small liberal arts college by using the Academic Attributional Style Questionnaire (AASQ; Barrett & Peterson, 1987) and found a significant, but small, r = -.15, p = .44, negative correlation between academic explanatory style and GPA. Although our results pointed to the conclusion that college students with optimistic explanatory style have higher GPAs than college students with pessimistic explanatory style, explanatory style seems to have a weak predictive value for college GPA. Further research needs to replicate these findings and examine their practical significance. Alternative explanations and future research directions are discussed. Optimism and College Grades: Predicting GPA From Explanatory Style Viliyana Maleva, Kathryn Westcott, Mark McKellop * , Ronald McLaughlin, and David Widman Juniata College