The influence of success or failure on learned helplessness behaviors in children

This study investigated the extent to which experimental conditions of success or failure influenced behaviors on subsequent tasks. Causal attributions for personal performance outcomes were measured before and after the experimental manipulations. Subjects were 192 children from Grades 1 and 4 attending two different types of schools in Jamaica, West Indies. Data analyses showed that children in the failure condition, regardless of school type, grade level, achievement ranking, or gender, exhibited a greater degree of behaviors associated with the learned helplessness effect than children in the success condition. No relations were found between the two measures of causal attributions or between behaviors assessed by the Behavior Test and verbal responses to the Performance Questionnaire