ABSTRACT
Recently considerable interest has focused on the consequences of uncontrollable stress and the ways in which individuals cope with it. Whether uncontrollable stressors elicit giving-up behavior (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) or renewed efforts to master problems (Silver & Wortman, 1980; Wortman & Brehm, 1975) has been an ongoing debate within social psychology. Much of the research on this issue has been experimental in design; the evidence to date yields inconsistent findings (Wortman & Silver, 1987). However, both the learned helplessness model and Wortman and Brehm's "integrative reactance model" predict that when individuals perceive aversive events as controllable, they will engage in problem-solving efforts; when individuals perceive events as uncontrollable, they will (fairly quickly, according to Abramson et al. and eventually according to Wortman and Brehm) reduce their problem-solving attempts.
