Many subareas share a common interest in students' "motivational resilience," defined broadly as patterns of action that allow students to constructively deal with, overcome, recover, and learn from encounters with academic obstacles and failures. However, research in each of these areas often progresses in relative isolation, and…

This research investigated the influence of parental practices on helpless behaviors of struggling readers during homework tasks. Parents (N = 36) of elementary students reported on their children's helpless behaviors, such as task avoidance and negative affect, during homework assignments, and on the nature and frequency of their support.…

This paper describes work with two children, placed for late adoption who have suffered relational trauma. The paper explores the long-term consequences of such trauma, which includes problems with affect regulation, difficulties in generalising from one experience to another and shifts between phantasies of omnipotent control and sudden…

It was hypothesized that combined individual child vulnerability (anxious solitude) and interpersonal stress (peer exclusion) would predict the strongest responses to experimentally manipulated behavioral peer rejection. Results indicated that in a sample of 3rd graders (N = 160, 59% girls), anxious solitary excluded children displayed more…

This research examined the role of mothers' cognitions about children's self-control in their responses to children's helplessness. Mothers and their four-year-old children (N = 109) were asked to work on a difficult task in the laboratory. Mothers' hostility and warmth as well as children's helpless (vs. mastery) behavior were coded every minute.…

Tested the hypothesis that psychological adjustment to epilepsy would be a joint function of subjects' (N=50) perceived repertoire of self-control skills and the extent to which they were exposed to uncontrollable seizures. Results showed that high-resourceful epileptics exposed to lower frequencies of seizures coped better with their disability.…

The article explores attribution theory and the concept of learned helplessness in teaching learning disabled individuals. Suggestions are given for areas of future research with learning disabled populations. The discussion includes current teaching techniques which may be related to the self regulatory behaviors and perception of personal…

Drawing upon the works of Paulo Freire and Lev S. Vygotsky, this paper argues that the institution of special education inculcates helplessness rather than autonomy, discusses the cognitive behavior modifications that enable self-control and self-mediation of learning, and proposes the educational ideal of student empowerment and autonomy. (JDD)

Individual differences in industriousness are discussed. It is proposed that reinforcement for increased physical or cognitive performance, or the tolerance of aversive stimulation, gives a reward value to the sensation of high effort and reduces effort's aversiveness. Applications for self-control, moral development, and education are described.…