Learned helplessness, the interference with instrumental responding following inescapable aversive events, has been found in animals and man. This study tested for the generality of the debilitation produced by uncontrollable events across tasks and motivational systems. Four experiments with college students were simultaneously conducted: (a) pretreatment with inescapable, escapable, or control aversive tone followed by shuttlebox escape testing; (b) pretreatment with insoluble, soluble, or control discrimination problems followed by anagram solution testing; (c) pretreatments with inescapable, escapable, or control aversive tone followed by anagram solution testing; (d) pretreatments with insoluble, soluble, or control discrimination problems followed by shuttlebox escape testing. Learned helplessness was found with all four experiments: Both insolubility and inescapability produced failure to escape and failure to solve anagrams. We suggest that inescapability and insolubility both engendered expectancies that responding is independent of reinforcement. The generality of this process suggests that learned helplessness may be an induced "trait."Inescapable aversive events presented to animals or to men result in profound interference with later instrumental learning (e.g.,

Because of both methodological and theoretical limitations, previous studies of offspring of parents with affective disorders have rarely tested psychosocial models of depressive vulnerability. The current research is part of a longitudinal investigation of psychosocial risk for disorder in 8-to 16-yearold children of unipolar, bipolar, medically ill, and normal mothers. High rates of psychopathology, including depression, were found in children in the high-risk groups. The current study evaluated the separate contributions of maternal depressive history, current self-reported depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory scores), and chronic strains to observe relations between these ordinarily confounded variables and children's psychiatric diagnoses and current functioning. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that chronic strain added significantly to the prediction of several outcomes and that current depressive symptoms were more predictive of children's scores than was maternal history of affective disorder. Both chronic strains and current Beck Depression Inventory scores are viewed as concomitants of affective disorder but are not specific to it. Therefore studies of the risk to children conferred by parental disorder cannot assume that diagnostic status as such is a single risk factor and must attend to the effects of ongoing stressors and nonspecific symptoms.One path in the search for origins of and preventive interventions for depression leads to the study of vulnerabilities that children at high risk acquire during childhood. Although evidence is mounting that children of parents with affective disorders are at risk for increased psychopathology, especially depression (e.g., reviews by Beardslee, Bemporad, Keller, & Klerman, 1983;Morrison, 1983;Orvaschel, Weissman, & Kidd, 1980), the magnitude and mechanisms of such risk remain unclear. In particular, few studies of the associations between parental diagnostic status and child outcome have examined two variables that may be associated with parental diagnosis but may also exist independent of parental psychiatric status: ongoing family stress and parental depressive symptoms. Although these variables overlap with parental psychiatric conditions, they may contribute separately or differentially to children's outcomes.Family stresses, including chronic strains, negative life This research was funded in part by a Veterans Administration research grant to

Failure to escape, the defining characteristic of learned helplessness, was investigated with perceived and instructed locus of control 5s in a learnedhelplessness paradigm. Three groups, equally divided between internals and externals and counterbalanced for sex, received different treatments with an aversive tone prior to the testing for helplessness. The first group could neither escape nor avoid an aversive tone, the second group could escape the tone, and the third group was not exposed to the treatment. Eighteen escape-avoidance trials followed, using a human analogue to an animal shuttle box, in which 6s received an instructional set describing the task as skill or chance determined. In addition to a complete replication of learned helplessness in man, externals were significantly more helpless than internals, and chance-set 5s were more helpless than skill-set 5s. Since uncontrollability of noise, externality, and chance instructional set all impaired escapeavoidance in parallel ways, it was speculated that a common state may underlie all 3 dimensions-expectancy that responding and reinforcement are independent.

Cognitive, developmental, and psychodynamic theories all hypothesize that negative self-concepts acquired in childhood may induce vulnerability to depression. Children at risk because of maternal major affective disorder, compared with children of medically ill and normal mothers, were examined for evidence of negative cognitions about themselves, and were found to have more negative self-concept, less positive self-schemas, and more negative attributional style. It was further predicted that negative cognitions about the self would be related to maternal depression and chronic stress, and to the quality of perceived and actual interactions with the mother. In general, the predicted associations were obtained, supporting speculations about how maternal affective disorder is associated with stress and with relatively negative and unsupportive relationships with children that in turn diminish children's self-regard.

The attributional vulnerability model of depression has rarely been tested in prospective designs, or as an interaction of stressful events and cognitions, or with depression as a specific response outcome. Moreover, the model has rarely been applied to children. All these issues were addressed in this study of prediction of diagnoses during a six-month follow-up for a sample of children that included offspring of women with affective disorders presumed to be at high risk for depression. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses failed to support the attributional hypotheses: depression was best predicted by initial symptoms and by life stress but not by attributions for negative outcomes or the interaction of attributions and life-events. Non-affective diagnoses, on the other hand, were predicted by an interaction of life-events and attributions. The results suggest limitations in the range of application of the attributional model in clinical samples, at least with children and adolescents at risk.

Cumulative stress from the impact of life events has become an important variable in psychosomatic and psychological research. This article provides both short and long life events questionnaires that add to incidence information the remoteness or recency in time of a given experience. In the weight assignment system that leads to a single presumptive stress score, events remote in time have less influence than recent events. The reliability of weight assignment was checked in subject groups that differed by sex, age, and status. Women weighted life events as more stressful than did men; other differences in groups were less important. In spite of the sex differential, review of these data suggests use of the same weight assignments for all subgroups rather than differential weighting by sex and age. Reliability was also checked by test and retest methods: in contrast to common sense expectation, a disappointingly low level of reliability was found. The implications for investigative use of life events questionnaires are discussed.

Dysfunctional interactions between mothers with major affective disorders and their children may contribute to the children's high risk of disorder. This study investigated the behavior of mothers with recurrent unipolar depression, bipolar disorder, or chronic medical illness and of normal subjects toward their children during a directly observed conflict discussion task. In addition, lifetime history of depression, current mood, and chronic stress were investigated as predictors of maternal interaction. Unipolar depressed women displayed relatively more negative, less positive, and less task-focused behaviour toward their children. Current mood and chronic stress, more than psychiatric history, contributed to the prediction of interaction style.

No abstract