Interference with judgements of control and learning as a result of prior exposure to controllable and uncontrollable feedback during concept-learning tasks.
Two experiments examined whether exposure to an uncontrollable relationship between an action and its outcome during a nonaversive pretreatment phase would attenuate subsequent ratings of control given to actions emitted by subjects. In Experiment 1, such an interference effect was demonstrated relative to a group that received prior training with a controllable action-outcome relationship, and relative to a group not exposed to any prior relationship. In Experiment 2, these effects were replicated, and interference was also found to occur when learning a maze task. Thus, the effects of helplessness were shown to be quite general, to be produced by a nonaversive induction procedure, and to occur most readily when the current contingency between action and outcome was weakest.
Reed
P
P
Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK. p.reed@ucl.ac.uk
Frasquillo
F
F
Colkin
C
C
Liemann
V
V
Colbert
S
S
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003210:Concept Formation; D005246:Feedback; D005260:Female; D006380:Helplessness, Learned; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D018782:Maze Learning; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation