TRUE ARC

Explanatory Style Assessment

Discover How You Explain Life's Events

This assessment measures your explanatory style — the habitual way you explain why good and bad events happen in your life. Research in positive psychology shows that explanatory style is one of the strongest predictors of resilience, motivation, and overall well-being.

This tool helps you understand your patterns across three key dimensions: Permanence, Pervasiveness, and Personalization.

Name Date

Instructions

Take as much time as you need to answer each question. On average the assessment takes about 15 minutes. There are no right or wrong answers.
Read the description of each situation and vividly imagine it happening to you. You may not have experienced every situation described — that's perfectly fine.
For each situation you will see two possible explanations, labeled A and B. Choose the explanation that would be more likely to occur to you naturally — not what you think you should say or what would sound best to others.
If neither response feels like a perfect fit, go ahead and select the one that comes closer to how you would actually think about it.
Select only one response per question. Please answer every question.
Your results will be calculated automatically once you've finished all 48 questions.

Your Results

Dimension Scores

Composite Scores

Score	Calculation	Result

Your Overall Optimism

Your Hopefulness

Understanding the Three Dimensions

Permanence — "How long will this last?"

Optimists tend to see bad events as temporary and good events as long-lasting. Pessimists do the reverse — they believe bad situations will persist and good ones are fleeting.

Pervasiveness — "How much of my life does this affect?"

Optimists contain setbacks to the specific area where they occurred, while seeing successes as evidence of broad, transferable strengths. Pessimists allow failures to bleed into every area of life while treating wins as narrow and situational.

Personalization — "Whose fault is it? Who gets the credit?"

Optimists take appropriate credit for good outcomes and look for external, situational factors behind bad ones. Pessimists blame themselves for setbacks while attributing successes to luck or others.

Remember: explanatory style is a learned pattern, not a fixed trait. Whatever your scores reveal, these patterns can be understood and, with practice, reshaped.

Discuss your results with your True Arc coach to identify specific strategies for building a more optimistic explanatory style.