Learned Helplessness, Immunization and Importance of Task in Humans

Abstract

Prevention of laboratory induced learned helplessness in college students was demonstrated. Three groups of 20 subjects received failure, success, or success followed by failure (immunization) on blocks taken from the WISC and WAIS block design tests. Half of the subjects in each condition were informed that the task was valid in predicting IQ and college success (high task importance) while the other half was simply told that the task involved concept-formation learning (low importance). Following pretreatment all subjects were tested on a series of 20 patterned anagrams. High task importance—failure subjects had longer latencies on the anagrams relative to the high task importance—immunization subjects. The superior performance of the immunization condition relative to the failure condition indicates that learned helplessness in humans, as in infra-humans, can be prevented by prior success on a similar task. High task importance was generally associated with poorer anagram performance thereby supporting Roth and Kubal's (1975) findings which relate helplessness to the impact of “no control.”