ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of human learned helplessness (LH) deals with the performance effects of the exposure to unsolvable problems (“helplessness training”). Theories of LH (Seligman, 1975) have argued that the expectancy of no control is the main antecedent of these deficits. People exposed to unsolvable problems may become convinced that they would fail to control outcomes in the task, which, in turn, reduce effort expenditure in the task and produce performance deficits. However, there is accumulative evidence that these deficits may be also affected by the cognitive process of mental rumination, which involves the conscious processing and elaboration of information related to the failure situation (Kuhl, 1984; Martin & Tesser, 1989). This chapter focuses on the nature of mental rumination during exposure to unsolvable problems and its behavioral consequences.
