Randy J. Paterson

“When you wake up in the morning, and you’re already miserable, what do you feel like doing?”

can choose what to eat, how to spend our time, how much exercise to get, and what to make priorities in our lives. All of these will influence—within the limits fate imposes upon us—how happy or miserable we become.

The bias seems to be stronger (and flipped to the negative), however, in the depressed. The attributions made by people in deepest misery tend to depend very much on whether the event is positive or negative. Positive events, like getting a promotion, scoring well on a test, or learning to water-ski, most often receive external attributions. The miserable will say that the task was just easy or that they were lucky. “Anyone could have passed that test,” they say. “Water-skiing is stupidly simple.”