Learned helplessness, depression, and the attribution of failure

Abstract

Depressed and nondepressed college students received experience with solvable, unsolvable, or no discrimination problems. When later tested on a series of patterned anagrams, depressed groups performed worse than nondepressed groups, and unsolvable groups performed worse than solvable and control groups. As predicted by the learned helplessness model of depression, nondepressed subjects given unsolvable problems showed anagram deficits parallel to those found in naturally occurring depression. When depressed subjects attributed their failure to the difficulty of the problems rather than to their own incompetence, performance improved strikingly. So, failure in itself is apparently not sufficient to produce helplessness deficits in man, but failure that leads to a decreased belief in personal competence is sufficient.