Abstract

The present study was designed to examine an attention redeployment exercise in alleviating the delilitating effects of noncontingency experiences of the type typically employed in learned helplessness studies. It was assumed that cognitive interference associated with anxiety is the source of the performance deficits observed in learned helplessness studies. For susceptible subjects, uncontrollability experiences elicit a task-irrelevant, negative focus on self. Subjects were assigned randomly to one of four conditions, and the experiment was conduced individually. Subjects received contingent or noncontingent reinforcements in the discrimination task; and practiced attentional redeployment in the form of imagination exercise or delayed shortly. After treatment phase, subjects performed the block-counting task. Additionally, subjects were asked to rate their mood on the MAACL before and after treatment phase. As predicted, the attentional redeployment alleviated the impairment of performance that typically follows a helplessness induction. And it was also found that the imagination exercise alleviated the anxious affect that follows uncontrollability experiences. The results are discussed in terms of a cognitive-attentional interpretation of learned helplessness studies. In addition, some limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research were discussed.