Perceived control and learned helplessness among retarded and nonretarded children: A developmental analysis.

Abstract

Learned helplessness is produced by successive failures and by feedback attributing failure to uncontrollable causes. Retarded children appear to encounter both causal factors frequently and may thus be susceptible to helplessness. To test this possibility, children of low, average, and high IQ at three mental age levels were administered a response-initiation measure, a puzzle-repetition measure of perseverance after failure, and a questionnaire designed to gauge attributions for failure. Teachers also rated the children on a helplessness scale. Helplessness, as measured by the two questionnaires, declined with MA. On the three helplessness measures derived from the children themselves, there was an IQ x MA interaction: The low-IQ group showed more helplessness relative to nonretarded children at the upper MA level than to nonretarded children at the two lower levels. The results, although qualified in some respects, are consistent with the view that helplessness can be learned over time by children who repeatedly fail to effect the outcomes that they desire and who learn to attribute failure to factors beyond their control. Learned helplessness is the perception that one cannot control the outcomes that he or she experiences. This perception constitutes a general conceptual definition of learned helplessness; however, empirical research has linked helplessness to observable cognitive and behavioral effects, a number of which have come to be used by at least some investigators as operational definitions of the construct. These effects include (a) attributions of failure to stable, uncontrollable factors (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Diener & Dweck, 1978;