Learned helplessness, test anxiety, and acknowledgment of contingencies.

Abstract

Subjects designated as high-test-anx ious or low-test-anxi ous received either controllable or uncontrollabl e noise in a typical helplessness induction? One half of them subsequently received an acknowledgmen t of contingencies in the induction task, and the other half did not. An anagram task was then administered. Test anxiety theory successfully predicted group differences in anagram performance: Only high-test-anxious subjects were debilitated by the helplessness induction. The effects of providing acknowledgment of contingencies proved ambiguous, but this may have been due to the wording of the acknowledgment and the susceptibility of high-test-anx ious subjects to social dimensions of the task situation. Because of differences in terminology, learned helplessness theory has failed to take into account a large body of literature that has similarly employed experimenter-induced failure, and there are numerous competing explanations for impairments following a helplessness induction. Test anxiety theory suggests that the deficits underlying impaired performance are likely to be attentional in nature.

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