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…

Acquired or learned helplessness is one of the most popular research subjects reported in the psychological literature in recent decades. The present study examined the relationship between involvement in decision-making at the school and learned helplessness among special-education teachers in the Israeli Arab sector. The importance of this study…

This article synthesizes findings regarding the development of competence and learned helplessness and factors influencing persistence and intrinsic motivation, suggests the process through which small differences in early achievement are magnified by the current structure of schools, and reviews evidence suggesting that the characteristics of a…

Research on bystander intervention has produced a great number of studies showing that the presence of other people in a critical situation reduces the likelihood that an individual will help. As the last systematic review of bystander research was published in 1981 and was not a quantitative meta-analysis in the modern sense, the present…

In the context of 7,637 high school students, the present study explored an hypothesized formulation of academic courage (defined as perseverance in the face of academic difficulty and fear) and its role in predicting academic performance (literacy and arithmetic) and various academic engagement measures (planning, task management,…

Almost 300,000 children in the United States from birth to 3 years of age are affected by a developmental disability. Disabilities have a lasting effect on a child's development and, in turn, may have a psychosocial impact on the child's family. In addition, the limitations of a child with a disability are often related to family members' stress,…

Objective: The psychiatric clerkship is a stressful experience that influences attitudes toward patients with psychiatric illnesses and influences recruitment into the field. This study focused on medical students' encounters with patients they found troubling or difficult, and whether specific themes regarding their emotional responses could be…

Research testing the reformulated theory of learned helplessness has been limited by the psychometric properties of instruments used to measure children's attributional style. Thus, the goal of this investigation was to modify a relatively new measure of attributional style that has demonstrated strong psychometric properties with young children…

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.…

Nonviolent resistance (NVR) is a new training model aimed at helping parents deal effectively with their helplessness, isolation, and escalatory interactions with their children. The purpose of this study is to evaluate training in NVR with the parents of children with acute behavior problems. Seventy-three parents (41 families) were randomly…

This study examined learned helplessness and its effect on test taking. Students were given one of two tests; the first began with extremely difficult questions and the other started with easy questions. The researchers hypothesized that those who took the test beginning with difficult questions would become easily frustrated and possibly doubt…

Suicidal youth tend to doubt the effectiveness of professional mental health treatment. This study examined whether exposure to films about suicidal and mentally disturbed persons supports this lack of belief. Exposure to three popular films featuring suicides or the mentally ill was compared to films that featured a heroic suicide unrelated to…

The relationship between epistemological beliefs and learned helplessness and between conceptual understanding and application reasoning in conceptual change learning were investigated for 212 high school science students. Results support the importance of epistemological beliefs in predicting conceptual change learning. Implications for science…

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.…

When children with learning disabilities fail to learn effective reading strategies, they lose enthusiasm and develop negative self-perceptions and attitudes, jeopardizing future achievement. In response, instructional approaches emphasizing clear explanation of reading strategies and discussion of processes for constructing meaning have been…