Pessimistic explanatory style, stress, and illness

College students completed questionnaires measuring their explanatory style and health status. Four weeks later, they completed questionnaires measuring major life events, hassles, and health status. Contrary to the prediction of the reformulated helplessness model, the occurrence of bad life events did nor interact with explanatory style to predispose poor health. However, the tendency to explain bad events with stable and global causes was related to reports of hassles. Reports of hassles were in turn related to poor health status. These results were obtained even when initial health status was held constant. Implications of these results were discussed, particularly with regard to the helplessness reformulation as a diathesis-stress model.