Recent work in attribution theory has shown the importance of not only the distinction between beliefs in internal and external causes, but also between relatively fixed, stable causes and those more unstable and subject to change. The relationships of causal attributions for success and failure in achievement and social affiliation with perceptions of temporal continuity of past, present, and future and with optimistic expectations for future events were explored with a sample of 215 high school students. All subjects completed the Long-Term Personal Direction subscale of the Temporal Experience Questionnaire to measure temporal continuity, the Achievability of Future Goals subscale of the Future Time Perspective Inventory to measure optimism, the Hopelessness Scale to operationally define optimistic/pessimistic future expectations, and the Multidimensional-Multiattributional Causality Scale to measure causal attributions of ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck for both success and failure in achievement and social affiliation. Findings supported the hypothesis that more temporally oriented and optimistic adolescents were more likely to take personal responsibility for both achievement and affiliation successes and failures. The importance of the distinction between the internal attributions of effort and ability was also supported for achievement, as less optimistic and temporally oriented students were more likely to attribute failure to lack of ability, rather than to lack of effort. This finding suggests a consistency with the attributional pattern associated with learned helplessness. (Author/NRB)