学習性無力感の形成と原因帰属及び期待変動について

摘要

Fourty five students were assigned to one of four conditions ; inescapable, escapable, control and noise. At first, the base-line performance level of all subjects were estimated in pretest phase. Then the experiment was consisted of three experimental blocks, each of which had pretreatment phase and test phase. Subjects in the inescapable condition performed insolvable anagram tasks and were exposed to the aversive stimulus (noise) of which termination was independent of their own behavior. Subjects in the escapable condition could terminate the aversive stimulus by solving the anagram tasks. Subjects in the control condition and the noise condition had notreatment, but in the noise condition aversive stimulus was directly given during performing test problems. As predicted, test performance of the inescapable gpoup was poorer than the escapable or the control group and similar to the noise group. This result provides support for the learned helpless hypothesis on the cognitive task. In addition, subjects who could not escape from noise attributed their failures to task difficulty rather than to their ability, and showed more irrational expectancy changes. Some implications were discussed.