ABSTRACT
This chapter examines role of attributions in determining the response to failure of learned helpless and mastery-oriented children. It reviews research that establishes the link between attributions and reactions to failure and that documents the nature of the performance change occasioned by failure. The chapter explores generality of individual differences in helplessness and presents findings that indicate how these individual differences develop. It shows how attributions can mediate the generalization of failure effects to novel achievement and academic situations and demonstrate how this phenomenon can account for individual differences in particular academic areas such as sex differences in verbal and mathematical achievement. The chapter describes research on the applicability of this learned helplessness analysis, developed in intellectual-achievement failure situations, to children’s responses to failure in social situations. It presents evidence that helpless and mastery-oriented children differ not only in the attributions they report when asked in the timing of their achievement-related cognitions and in the role played by causal attributions.
