Underpinning the practice of career counsellors is a range of various theories and perspectives. The concept of self-esteem is a term frequently used by those in the helping professions and often with little regard for its limitations. This article argues that careers counsellors need to keep up-to-date with evolving theories that inform their…

Sutherland and Singh (2004) focus on the relationship between students' inappropriate behaviors and academic failure, articulating how this relationship may be mediated by learned helplessness in a reciprocally negative reinforcing cycle. In responding to their work, the authors suggest a thread of disciplined inquiry and contextual framework for…

Objective: The purpose of this study is to assess the extent to which intimate partner violence and different forms of child maltreatment occur within and across childhood and adulthood for a high-risk group of women. Method: Low-income adult women were interviewed, retrospectively, regarding their experiences with intimate partner violence and…

Individual differences in same-aged children's reasoning about effort and ability, as well as the consequences of different forms of reasoning in actual achievement situations, were investigated. It was hypothesized that different forms of children's reasoning would be related to different (helpless versus mastery-oriented) motivational patterns.…

The effects of contingency training, instructor expressiveness, and student incentives on student achievement and attributions were investigated in a simulated college classroom. The following conditions were involved: a contingency manipulation resembling an aptitude test; an instructor lecture; two levels of student incentive; and an achievement…

An exploratory study investigated the relationship between loneliness, coping strategies, and cognitive styles in a sample of 52 gifted students from rural Nebraska (mean age 17.25 years). Assessment measures consisted of the Woodward Loneliness Inventory, the Kalyan-Masih Coping Inventory I, and the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), which…

The reluctance of depressed people to try hard may result not from their low expectancy for success, as Learned Helplessness Theory suggests, but rather from egotistic motivation to preserve whatever self-esteem they still have. Two studies were conducted using a paradigm which permitted a direct comparison of Learned Helplessness Theory and…

The occurrence of unpredictable and often unavoidable aversive seizures in epilepsy bears a striking resemblance to the conditions known to induce learned helplessness. Additionally, depression and other characteristics associated with helplessness seem to occur more frequently among persons with epilepsy. Data from a national survey of…

The effects of different schedules of noncontingent reward on subsequent learning in children were investigated. In the first phase of the experiment subjects performed a block-design matching task and received one of three schedules of noncontingent reward, i.e., continuous reward (Group CRF), random reward on 50% of the trials (Group 50R), or no…

Examines three issues that are important in extending the learned helplessness model to clinical depressive disorders: first, the heterogeneity of clinical manifestations inherent in the depressive disorders, second, the process of constructing models for clinical depressive groups, and third, the problems involved in defining and identifying…

According to the learned helplessness hypothesis, the learning impairment typically displayed by subjects previously given insoluble problems results from the real learning of response-outcome independence. This learning is represented as a belief in helplessness that interferes with the subsequent acquisition of adaptive responses. Two…

These experiments are addressed specifically to the question of whether transituational transfer of immunizing and therapeutic effects will occur when these procedures involve responses and settings which are very different from those used in final testing. (Author/RK)

Discusses ways of dealing with the learned helplessness common in clinically depressed children undergoing foster care. Recommends social care treatment, which is inherent in daily living, and is guided by trained foster parents and caretakers. (SKC)

Tested efficiency of induced self-esteem in reducing various deficits caused by learned helplessness. Results indicated subjects who received induced self-esteem treatment showed significantly more deficit reversal. Results are discussed in relation to the usefulness of induced self-esteem as a form of treatment for helplessness depression.…