Psychologists have recently argued that an individual's causal beliefs relate to a variety of behaviors and outcomes. One approach by researchers concerned with the role of causal explanation is to ask if people show habitual patterns of explanation for good and bad events. If so, then explanatory style becomes an individual difference of considerable consequence. All the behaviors and outcomes affected by causal explanations per se may be under the more distal influence of a person's explanatory style, which helps to determine the particular causal explanations he or she offers in specific situations.

The reformulation of the learned helplessness model accords central status to causal explanations and explanatory style (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). According to the original helplessness model, exposure to uncontrollable events produces passivity and low morale (Seligman, 1975). The reformulated model proposes that causal beliefs affect the nature of helplessness following uncontrollable events. Specifically, one can predict the potent psychological state of helplessness, which underlies failure, depression, illness and disease, and perhaps even death.

Both laboratory and field research demonstrate that the consistent determinant of this state of helplessness is uncontrollable events (Maier & Seligman, 1976; Peterson & Stunkard, 1989; Seligman, 1975; Thoits, 1983). However, sometimes the helplessness produced by uncontrollability is devastating – pervasive and enduring.