Learned helplessness in Black and White children identified by their schools as retarded and nonretarded: Performance deterioration in response to failure

The life experience of retarded children may heighten susceptibility to learned helplessness. Earlier literature has supported this hypothesis but has failed to demonstrate a key feature of the helplessness syndrome: performance deterioration in response to failure feedback. This study was designed to fill this gap. Children who had been identified by their school systems as retarded and nonretarded but were similar in mental age were administered a series of concept formation problems designed to reveal the children's use of strategies. When feedback was veridical the groups did not differ in their use of effective strategies, but when feedback became consistently negative the groups diverged markedly. Under negative feedback, retarded children showed striking deterioration in strategy usage (p < .001), but nonretarded children showed no deterioration. Consistent with these findings, teachers rated retarded children as significantly more helpless than their nonretarded peers on a checklist of relevant school behavior. Additional findings suggested that black retarded children may be more susceptible to helplessness than are their white counterparts. Finally, group differences in children's verbalizations during problem solving bore little relation to group differences in actual performance. Overall, the findings point to helplessness deficits in retarded children that may interfere significantly with expression of their actual abilities. The learned-helplessness model (see Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) provides an explanation of certain behavioral deficits that do not result directly from deficient ability. Deficits in perseverance and even in problem-solvi ng effectiveness, the model suggests, can result from a learned perception that one cannot control outcomes. Such a perception, known as "learned helplessness," has been shown to be caused by repeated failure to exercise control (see Seligman, 1975) and by feedback suggesting that failures result from stable, uncontrol