THE POSITIVE ANALOGUE OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS.
Item
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Title
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THE POSITIVE ANALOGUE OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS.
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Identifier
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AAI8112347
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identifier
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8112347
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Creator
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CURTIS, NAOMI JOYCE.
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Contributor
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Prof. William F. Oakes
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Date
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1981
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Social
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Abstract
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The theory of learned helplessness involves the detrimental effect on later learning which is assumed to result from the experience of a noncontingent relationship between outcomes and behavior, i.e., between responses and reinforcers. One implication of this concept is that the helplessness can result from the noncontingent occurrence of positive as well as negative outcomes.;Relatively little work has been done to replicate the cross-modal generalizability of learned helplessness, that is, whether the deficit can be produced on a cognitive task following an instrumental pretreatment (or vice versa). In the present research, it was hypothesized that (1) cross-modal learned helplessness would be replicated in a traditional negative outcomes condition; (2) similar performance deficit would be produced in a positive context; (3) differential cognitions (e.g. awareness, attributions, affect) would distinguish the groups, since learned helplessness has usually been interpreted as resulting from the phenomenal experience of uncontrollability.;A two-phase study was carried out, consisting of an instrumental pretreatment and a cognitive test task. For the instrumental pretreatment task, subjects aimed a light gun at a flat black and white target with a photoreceptor cell at the bullseye. The light beam was not detectable to the subjects; they thus received only the feedback intended by the experimenter. Half the experimental subjects received negative feedback, punishment (the sound of a tone), when they failed to hit the bullseye; the other subjects received rewards (the same tone) when they hit the bullseye. Within each condition, half the subjects received outcomes contingent on their performance. The other subjects, yoked to contingent subjects, noncontingently received the identical schedule of "hits" and "misses" as the contingent person they were yoked to, irrespective of their actual target-shooting performance. A control group received no pretreatment, but went directly to the anagrams test task. This anagrams task, the same for all subjects, was the main dependent measure, the measure of learned helplessness.;Consistent with outcomes predicted by the learned helplessness formulation, it was found that equal performance deficits resulted from receiving noncontingent outcomes cross-modally, both in an aversive context, as in previous research, and in the rewarding situation as well. There was no enhancement of performance for contingent groups. There was no greater awareness of noncontingency for any group, contingent or noncontingent, nor any differential experience of helplessness for contingent or noncontingent subjects. Different patterns of attributions did not distinguish the groups, nor did changed levels of anxiety, depression or hostility.;An important aspect of this research is that the learned helplessness effect, the behavioral decrement, took place in the absence of the cognitions usually adduced to explain the effect. Because feedback came from one source only (the apparatus--tone or no-tone), the "helpless" subjects were not aware of the noncontingency between response and feedback. For that reason, there was no link between cognitions and helplessness. The behavioral deficit occurred independently of any awareness of noncontingency or feelings of helplessness. The helplessness effect demonstrated here thus lends itself to explanation within the behaviorist framework, which posits no necessary relationship between cognitive variables and changes in behavior.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
