Abstract:
The purpose of this research was to study the effects of learned helplessness under four conditions, namely contingent group and control group, noncontingent failure group, noncontingent success group and control group. The subjects were first year female university students from the University of Srinakharinwirot Pathumwan. Eighty subjects were randomly assigned into four groups. The Levine discrimination hypothesis testing was used as the training task. After the training task the subjects were asked to estimate their confidence in performing the subsequent task. Then the subjects were asked to work on the Standard Progressive Matrices, Set D and Set E. One-way Analysis of Variance and Scheffes Multiple Comparisons were utilized to test the following hypotheses. 1. The contingent group, the noncontingent success group, and the control group had significantly higher performance confidence in performing the task during the test task than the noncontingent failure group. 2. The contingent group, the noncontingent success group, and the control group gained higher scores in the Standard Progressive Matrices Set D and E than the noncontingent failure group in the test task. The research results supported these two hypotheses of the experiment (P<.001)