Abstract
Seligman's learned helplessness theory of depression assumes that depressed subjects underestimate the degree of contingency between responses and outcomes. Alloy and Abramson (1979) experimentally examined this assumption. Results, however, did not fully supported the assumption. This experiment re-examined this assumption by using a version of Alloy and Abramson's method. The results showed that depressed subjects did not underestimated the objective degree of contingency. On the other hand, nondepressed subjects overestimated the degree of contingency. These results, to some extent, supported Alloy and Abramson's results. Finally the author discusses that the scale used in this experiment should be recognized as a scale of subjective degree of success rather than the scale of the degree of contingency.
