Abstract
Forty-four educable mentally retarded and 44 nonretarded children of equivalent mental age were assessed with the Intellectural Achievement Responsibility (IAR) questionnaire. The students’ attributions on the IAR identified 35 mildly retarded and 36 nonretarded subjects who could be categorized as helpless or as mastery oriented. The retarded learners were significantly more helpless than were their nonretarded peers. The cognitive disposition of these 71 individuals was determined via Kagan’s Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT). No difference was observed in the cognitive style of retarded and that of nonretarded pupils, nor did reflective and impulsive subjects perform significantly differently on any of the four indices of helplessness. MFFT error and latency scores were not significantly correlated with measures of helplessness. The findings were interpreted as suggesting (1) that it is unlikely that cognitive disposition affects learned helplessness, and (2) the importance of environmental considerations in explaining the phenomenon of learned helplessness in mildly retarded learners.
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Gargiulo, R.M., O’Sullivan, P.S. & Barr, N.J. Learned helplessness in reflective and impulsive mentally retarded and nonretarded children. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 25, 269–272 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330352
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330352