Learned helplessness, reactance, and cue utilization

The current study assesses the relationship between the exposure to unsolvable problems and the impact of environmental cues on performance. Subjects were exposed to no feedback, one failure, or four failures in a cognitive discrimination task. Then, subjects in each condition received a memory and visual search task wherein they were further divided according to the presence of task cues. One group of subjects received the test task without any additional cues, a second group received the same task with task-relevant cues, and a third group received the test task with task-irrelevant cues. Findings reveal and improvement in performance following a single failure (reactance) and a deterioration in performance following four failures (helplessness). The findings also show that under the no-feedback condition, task-relevant cues improved performance and task-irrelevant cues impaired it. Under the one failure condition, task-relevant cues facilitated performance, whereas task-irrelevant cues caused no performance change. Under the four failures condition, neither task-relevant cues nor task-irrelevant cues affected subjects' performance. Results were discussed in terms of a cognitive interference conceptualization of Learned Helplessness.