ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the applicability of the learned helplessness hypothesis, a cognitive theory with profound implications for adaptive behavior, to children of varying ages. It argues that the weight of the evidence from the developmental literature strongly supports the oft-invoked notion that developmental factors play a significant role in the occurrence and manifestation of both helplessness and depressive phenomena in children. According to the refomulation, helplessness is mediated by the causal attributions that are activated by the effort to understand one’s inbility to control outcomes. Children appear to develop systematized attributional patterns that lend a degree of stability and predictability to their response to failure. Thus, developmentally based cognitive factors may influence the development of helplessness in children via the perception of uncontrollability or the nature of the causal attribution. Consideration of the range of adaptive consequences associated with the child’s causal attributions thus requires brief attention to representative studies in the developmental literature on social comparison.
