ABSTRACT
Individual strivings to exert, maintain, or restore a sense of personal control over the environment have long been considered to be a core and basic type of motivation (Bandura, 1977; Burger, 1992; DeCharms, 1968; Skinner, 1996; White, 1959). Early research on the control motive in humans was particularly focused on how control deprivation affects cognitive and emotional functioning (e.g., Hiroto & Seligman, 1975; Seligman, 1975). In his seminal work, Seligman (1975) proposed that prolonged and stable experiences of uncontrollability (operationalized as responseoutcome non-contingency) result in the learned helplessness syndrome, including cognitive deficits (understood as the inability to detect new contingencies), a depressed mood, and the inability to pursue important goals. Since then, numerous studies have shown that a lack of contingency between action and outcome results in deterioration of performance and affective disruption (e.g., Hiroto & Seligman, 1975; Kofta & Se˛dek, 1989; Tennen, Drum, Gillen & Stanton, 1982). Extending Seligman’s original framework, Sedek and Kofta (1990; see also Kofta & Sedek, 1998) developed the idea that prolonged, inefficient investment of cognitive effort is a critical aspect of uncontrollable situations, leading to the emergence of cognitive exhaustion. In this mental state, a person shows cognitive deficits in problem solving
and avoidance learning associated with a negative mood. Inspired by this theoretical idea, subsequent studies investigated these cognitive deficits at the levels of basic processes of selective attention, as well as of reasoning and the formation of meaningful mental models (Kofta, 1993; Kofta & Sedek, 1998; Ric & Scharnitzky, 2003; von Hecker & Sedek, 1999). Several cognitive malfunctions observed in this line of experimental research appear to be shared by people suffering from clinical depression or with elevated depressive mood (e.g., von Hecker & Sedek, 1999; Kofta & Sedek, 1998; McIntosh, Sedek, Fojas, Brzezicka-Rotkiewicz, & Kofta, 2005). Also, very much in line with these findings, Hertel and her colleagues (e.g., Hertel, 2000; Hertel & Hardin, 1990; Hertel & Rude, 1991) showed that memory malfunctioning in depressive patients is not due to limited cognitive resources, but to lack of cognitive initiative, i.e., deficits of focal attention to relevant stimuli. Once attentiondirecting stimuli were introduced to experimental instructions, memory deficits of depressive participants disappeared.1
