Learned helplessness: the role of individual differences in learned resourcefulness

The term 'learned resourcefulness' refers to an acquired repertoire of behaviours and skills by which a person self-regulates internal events (such as emotions, pain, and cognitions) that interfere with the smooth execution of a target behaviour. Sixty undergraduate students were rated as either high resourceful (HR) or low resourceful (LR) according to their scores on Rosenbaum's Self-Control Schedule. Subjects were then pre-treated with inescapable, escapable or control aversive tone followed by anagram solution testing. As hypothesized the learned helplessness phenomenon, the interference with new learning following inescapable aversive events, appeared only in LR subjects and not in HR subjects. No relationship was found between subjects' causal attributions for their performance on the noise task and their subsequent performance on the anagrams as would be predicted from the attributional part of the recent reformulation of the learned helplessness model. It was concluded that subjects' general repertoire of self-control skills, and their general expectations for self-efficacy, might be at least as important in explaining the generalization of helplessness from the training task to the test task as the kinds of causal attributions subjects make for their performance on the training task.