Abstract
The reformulated learned helplessness theory predicts that individuals who make internal, stable, global attributions for negative outcomes (i.e. depressive attributors) are more likely to become depressed when confronted with uncontrollable failures. To test this hypothesis, depressive attributors and nondepressive attributors (individuals making external, unstable, specific attributions) were exposed to either a solvable or an unsolvable cognitive task. They were later tested on a solvable test task. The results partially supported the reformulated learned helplessness theory, i.e. the theory is to predict an unsolvable task significantly impaired the performance of both depressive and nondepressive attributors. On the other hand, contrary to the theory's prediction, depressive attributors showed significantly less impairment in their performance than nondepressive subjects regardless of the pre-treatment. Additionally, path analysis revealed that the stability dimension of attributional style was found to be mildly related to test performance.
