Regulatory Focus and Task Performance:

Learned Helplessness Paradigm

Abstract

  The relationship between regulatory focus and task performance after people experience a stressful failure was investigated, based on the learned helplessness paradigm. The research examined the hypothesis that whereas there would be no difference in basic cognitive abilities for promotion focus and prevention focus before experiencing an event inducing learned helplessness, promotion focus would lead to better task performance than prevention focus after such an event. The participants (university students, N=57) were induced to have a promotion- or prevention-focused orientation. The results supported the hypothesis. The results also suggested that for mixed solvable and unsolvable tasks, the students with a prevention focus performed better than in those with a promotion focus. The results further suggested that the performance advantages of promotion and prevention focus differed, according to the context. A promotion focus was associated with resilience for recovering from setbacks and failures, whereas a prevention focus was suitable for performing mixed tasks.