Learned Helplessness in Children

8/6/2019 Learned Helplessness in Children

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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1986, Vol. 51,No. 2,435-442 Copyright 1986 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.0022-3514/86/$00.75

LearnedHelplessnessin Children:A Longitudinal Studyof Depression,Achievement, and ExplanatoryStyle

Susan Nolen-HoeksemaUniversityof PennsylvaniaMartin E. P. SeligmanUniversity of Pennsylvania

Joan S.GirgusPrinceton University

In this longitudinal study, the depressive symptoms, life events, and explanatory styles of 168 schoolchildrenwere measuredfivetimesduring the courseof 1 year. Measuresof school achievement wereobtained onceduring the year. Depressive symptoms and explanatory styles were found to be quitestableover the year. Aspredicted by the reformulated learned helplessness theory, explanatory styleboth correlated with concurrent levels of depression and school achievement and predicted laterchanges in depression during the year. Depression also predicted later explanatory styles. The im-plications of these results forinterventionwithchildrenwithdepressivesymptomsorschoolachieve-ment problems are discussed.

The reformulated theory of learned helplessness (Abramson,Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) makes a set of predictions aboutthe emotional and behavioral development of children. Itclaims that there should be an identifiable set of children whoare at particular riskfor the behavioral and emotional deficitsofhelplessness.Specifically, children whopossessan attributional(hereinafter referred to as explanatory) style that habituallyleads them to view the causes of bad events as stable in time,global in effect, and internal to themselves will beonce theyencounter bad eventsespecially vulnerable to a defined clus-ter of helplessness deficits. The cluster consists of (a) loweredresponse initiation (passivity), (b)cognitivedeficits, (c)sadness,(d) lowered self-esteem, and (e) lowered assertiveness and com-petitiveness.

In this study, we tested the prediction that children with amaladaptive explanatory style would exhibit more helplessnessdeficits than children withoutthe maladaptive style. In linewithprevious research, helplessness deficits were operationalized asdeficits in achievement-oriented behaviors and as the motiva-tional, cognitive, and emotional deficits of depression. Thisstudywas longitudinal, with measures of explanatory style andhelplessness deficits taken five times in 1year.This longitudinaldesign allowed us both to examine the causal influence of ex-planatory style on helplessness and to obtain data on the stabil-

This research was supportedby United States Public Health ServiceGrant MH-19604 to Martin E. P. Seligman.

The authors wish to thank Michael Fabrizi, Christine McKinley, PatRoberts, KarenRutberg, and PeterSchulman for theirassistanceinthisstudy. Wealso gratefullyacknowledge the cooperation of the principalsand teachers of Cambridge Elementary School and South BrunswickElementary School.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema is now at the Department of Psychology,Stanford University.

Correspondenceconcerning this article should beaddressed to Mar-tin E. P. Seligman, Department of Psychology, UniversityofPennsylva-nia, 3815 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104.

ity ofexplanatory styleand depressive symptomsinelementaryschool children.

LearnedHelplessness TheoryAccording to the original learned helplessness theory (Maier

& Seligman, 1976; Maier, Seligman, & Solomon, 1969; Selig-man, 1975), experience with uncontrollable events can lead tothe expectation that no responses in one's repertoirewill con-trol future outcomes. This expectation of no control leads tomotivational deficits (lowered response initiation and loweredpersistence), cognitive deficits (inability to perceive existing op-portunities to control outcomes), and, in humans, emotionaldeficits (sadness and lowered self-esteem). These deficits are col-lectively knownas learned helplessness deficits.

Seligman (1975) pointed out the similarities between theselearned helplessness deficits and the motivational, cognitive,and emotional deficits of human depression. He argued that atleast some depressions may be the result of expectations thatnothingonedoescancontrol important outcomes. The originalhelplessness theory, however, had at least four important inade-quacies. First, it could not explain when helplessness deficitswould be stable in time and when they would be unstable. Sec-ond, it could not explainwhen helplessness deficits would gen-eralize to multiple domains of outcomes and when they wouldbe specific to one domain. Third, it could not explain why peo-plewould lose self-esteem when they perceived they were help-less. Finally, the original helplessness theory could not accountfor individual differences in humans' susceptibility to helpless-ness.

Abramson et al.(1978)proposed a reformulation of helpless-ness theorythat wasdesigned toresolvethe inadequacies in theoriginal theory. According to this reformulation, the explana-tions peoplegive forgood and bad outcomes influence theirex-pectations about future outcomes, and thereby influence theirreactionsto outcomes. Three dimensions along which explana-tions can vary were said to influence the helplessness deficits

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436 S. NOLEN-HOEKSEMA, i.GIRGUS, AND M. SELIGMANindividuals experience following an event. First, causes can bestable in time or they can be unstable. If the person explainsabad event by a cause that is stable rather than unstable in time,he or shewill expect bad events to recur in the future and help-lessnessdeficits will be chronic. Second, causes can have effectsinmany areas of an individual's life, or theycan effect onlyonearea. If a person explains a bad event by a causethat has globaleffects instead of by a cause that influences only that specificevent, he or shewill expect bad events to occur in multiple do-mains and helplessness deficits will generalize across domains.Third, causes can either be internal or external to the individ-ual. If aperson explains a bad event by acause internal tohim-self or herself rather than external, he or she will be more likelyto show lowered self-esteem.

Abramson et al. (1978) explained the individual differencesin vulnerability to helplessness by arguingthat people who ha-bitually explainbadeventsbyinternal, stable, and global causes(and explain good events byexternal, unstable, specific causes)will be more likely to experience general and lasting symptomsof helplessness than will people with the opposite style. The re-formulated model thus is a diathesis-stress model, in which abad explanatory style is viewed as a factor that predisposes theindividual to helplessness in the face of bad events.

Abramson et al. (1978) applied this reformulated helpless-ness theory todepression andpredicted that persons whohabit-ually explain bad events by internal, stable, and global causeswill be more prone to depressive episodes than persons withoutthis maladaptive explanatory style. This prediction has beenconfirmed by a number of studies usingadultsand several usingchildren (fora reviewseePeterson&Seligman, 1984).

Seligman et al. (1984) administered the Children's Depres-sion Inventory(CDI;Kovacs, 1980) and theChildren's Attribu-tional Style Questionnaire (CASQ) to 96 elementary schoolchildren on two separate occasions, 6 months apart. The CDIisa self-report measure of depressive symptoms, modeled afterthe Beck Depression Inventory (Beck & Beck, 1972). TheCASQ is a forced-choice measure of a child's tendency tochoose internal, stable, and global causes or external, unstable,and specific causes for events. Seligmanet al. (1984) found thatthe maladaptive explanatory style was significantly correlatedwith high-depression scores each time the questionnaires wereadministered. These results have been replicated by Kaslow,Rehm, and Siegel (1984)and Smucker (1982). Inaddition,Sel-igman et al. (1984) found that the children's explanatory stylescores at the first testing period significantly predicted theirlevel of depression 6 months later.

These results provide some confirmation for the model of de-pression among children. They do not, however, assess one im-portantcomponent of the model: life events. As mentioned ear-lier, the model is adiathesis-stress model, which states that it isin the face of maladaptive life events that explanatory stylecomes into play. In the present study, we tested this predictionof a significant interaction between explanatory style and lifeevents in the development ofdepression in children.

These previous studies of learned helplessness theory alsodonot address the basic question of whether young children canhavea stable cognitive style that can lead toepisodes ofdepres-sion. Many claims have been made about the level of cognitivedevelopment necessary for one to experience hopelessness and

self-blame (see Bemporad, 1982; Cytryn & McKnew, 1974).And, although most researchers do not dispute the existence ofdepressive symptoms in young children, some claim that thesesymptoms are unstable developmental phenomena, of littledanger to the long-term mental health and functioning of thechild (Lapouse, 1966; Lefkowitz & Burton, 1978). In the pres-ent study, we examined the stability of depressive symptomsand explanatory styleby measuring children's levelsof depres-sion and explanatory style patterns 3 months, 6 months, 10months, and 12monthsafter an initial assessment of these vari-ables. We then asked whether a consistent, maladaptive explan-atory style was associated with both concurrent and future de-pressions, aspredicted by the reformulated helplessness theory.The reformulated helplessness theory offers a strong predictionconcerning the causal influence of explanatory style on depres-sion. It predicts that there will be a group of children who havea maladaptive explanatory style but who are not currently de-pressed and that these children will be more likely to becomedepressed over time than children without a maladaptive ex-planatory style.

Testingthisprediction was the primary purposeof this study.In previous studies (Golin, Sweeney, &Schaeffer, 1981), cross-lagged panel correlational analyses (Kenny, 1975) were used toassess the relative causal influences of depression and explana-tory style on each other. However, this method of analysis hasbeen convincingly criticized and rejected by Rogosa (1980).Therefore, we used a series of regression analyses to test thecausal predictions of the reformulated theory. The multiwavedesign of this study allowed us to test ourpredictions repeatedly.

Learned helplessness theory has also been used to explaindeficits in achievement-oriented behaviors (Dweck, 1975;Dweck &Repucci, 1973;for a review, seeDweck &Wortman,1982). Dweck andothershave found that some children tend toexplain academic failure in terms of stable and global causes(e.g., stupidity) and explain success in terms of unstable, spe-cific causes (e.g., luck).Aspredicted, these explanatory patternscorrelate with decreased persistence, decreased initiation oftasks, lowered quality of problem-solving strategies, and low-ered expectations for future success. Most previous studies onthe relation between causal explanations and achievement be-haviors have focused only on ability versus effort explanationsfor successand failure, and they have used only performanceonlaboratory tasks as dependent measures of achievement behav-iors. In this study, we wished to apply the reformulated theorymore directly to predict actual achievement-related behaviorsin school. Wemeasured achievement-related behaviors in twoways: a standardized achievement test and a teacher-rated scaleof helpless behaviors in the classroom. We then examined therelation between these two measures and explanatory style.

Poor school achievement in children has been viewed as apotential sign of depression (Brumback &Staton, 1983; Cant-well &Carlson, 1979; Weinberg, Rutman, Sullivan, Penick, &Dietz, 1973). A fewrecent studies indicate that even lowlevelsof negative affect can impair performance on cognitive tasks(Kaslow, Rehm, & Siegel, 1984; Masters, Harden, & Ford,1979). Little systematic data exist, however, on the relation ofdepressive symptomsandschool-achievement problems in chil-dren not under psychiatric care. In the present study, we exam-


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HELPLESSNESS IN CHILDREN: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY 437ined the relation between depressive symptoms and our twomeasures ofachievement problems.

To summarize, we predicted that the maladaptive explana-tory style would be associated with higher levels of depression,lower school achievement, and higher incidences of helpless be-haviors in the classroom. In addition, we predicted that chil-dren who have the maladaptive explanatory stylewill be morelikely to become depressed during the year or to maintain a highlevel ofdepression. Wealso lookedat the influenceofdepressiveepisodes on the development of a maladaptive explanatorystyle. We further predicted that the maladaptive explanatorystyle would interact with the experience of bad life events toproduce an evengreater vulnerability to depression than eitherexplanatory style or events produce alone. Finally, the presentstudy was designed to provide data on the stability of explana-tory style and depressive symptoms in elementary school chil-dren.

MethodSubjects. The parents of all 308 children in the third, fourth, and

fifth grades of two elementary schools in central NewJeiseywere askedto permit their children to participate in this study. The positive re-sponse rate was 56%, yielding a sample of 168 children (87 male and81 female). The children were predominantly white,from middle-classfamilies, and, at the outset of the study, ranged in age from 8 to 11 years.The attrition rate for subjects over the year of the study was 18%. Drop-outs resulted primarily from moves out of the school district and physi-cal illness. None of the children who participated were receiving psychi-atric care at the outset of the study. One child began receiving psycho-therapy for depression after the second testing session (April 1983). Theanalyses reported here include hisdata.

Measures. The CDI (Kovacs, 1980), a 27-item modification of theBeck Depression Inventory, isdesigned for use withpreadolescent chil-dren. Each item consists of a list of three statements representing sever-ity levels of a symptom of depression. Item choices are assigned a nu-merical value of from 0 to 2. High scores on the CDI indicate highlevels of depression. Children's CDIscoreshave been found tocorrelatemoderately with psychiatric ratings of depression (r = .54;Kazdin,1981). The internal reliability of the CDI (alpha; Cronbach, 1951) in anonclinic sample is .78.

The CASQ (Seligman et al., 1984) is a48-item forced-choice measureofexplanatory style. Each item presents a hypothetical event and twopossible explanations for why that event occurred. Respondents are in-structed to imagine the event happening to them, then tochoose whichof the two explanations best describes why the event would happen tothem. An exampleof an itemfrom the CASQis

Youget an "A" on a test.A. I am smart.B. I am smart in that subject.

The two explanations hold two of the explanatory dimensionscon-stant whilevarying the third. In the example, the stability and interaal-itydimensions are held constant, whereas the global-specific dimensionisvaried. There are 16events that pertain to eachof the three explana-tory dimensions. Half of the events are positive and half are negative.Thus, there are sixsubscales on the CASQ: the intemality, stability, andglobality scales for bad events, and the intemality, stability, and globalityscales for good events. Acomposite explanatory style score for positiveevents (labeled CP) is obtained by adding the child's scores on each ofthe three subscales for positive events. A composite explanatory stylescore for negative events (labeled CN) is obtained by summing the

scores for the subscales fornegative events. An overall explanatory stylescore (labeled CPCN)isobtained bysubtracting thecomposite negativescore from the composite positive score. The lower the overall stylescore, the morethechild explains badevents interms ofinternal, stable,and global causes, while explaining good events in terms of external,unstable, and specific causes. The coefficient alphas (Cronbach, 1951)for the CP, CN, and CPCN scales are .71, .66, and .73, respectively(Seligmanetal., 1984).

The Life Events Questionnaire (LEQ; adapted from Coddington,1972) is abrief checklist ofmajor lifeevents that isdesigned for usewithelementary school children. The subjects were instructed to check offthose events that had happened to them in the last 2months.Asubject'sscoreon the LEQ is the number of events, out of a possible 21, checked.

In the final administration of the questionnaires to the children, weasked their teachers to complete the Student Behavior Checklist (Fin-chatn &Cain, 1984). This checklist asks teachers to rate the extent towhich a child engages in learned helplessness (LH) or mastery oriented(MO) behaviors in the classroom.An example of an LH item is "wantstodoeasy problems rather than hard ones." Anexampleof an MO itemis "tries to finish assignments even when they are difficult." Teachersrate, on a 5-point scale, the frequency with which a child engages ineach behavior. The child's ratings on the 12 LH items are summed togive a total LH score, and ratings on the 12 MO items are summed togive a total MO score. Fincham and Cain (1984) found coefficient al-phas of .90 for the LH scaleand .94 for the MO scale.

Once a year, all children in the two schools take the CaliforniaAchievement Test (California Testing Bureau, 1982).This standardizedachievement test includes tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension,and math skills. The children's scores from each of these three subtestsas wellas their scores on the entire battery in the form ofpercentile rankina national sample were obtained.

Procedures. The CDI, CASQ, and LEQ were administered to thechildren in January 1983, March 1983, June 1983, October 1983, andJanuary 1984. These administrations willbe referred to as Administra-tions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, respectively. The questionnaires were read aloudto groups of approximately 30 children at one time, while the childrenread along and answered each question. All administrations took placeina room in the children's school during school time.

At Administration 5, the teachers of the children in the study weregiven a Student Behavior Checklist (PBC) to nilout for each child. Fourofeight teachers returned the checklists, yieldingdataon 65 of the chil-dren in the study.

The children's scores on the California Achievement Test were ob-tained from school records. The children took this test in April1983,after Administration 2.

ResultsAspredicted, a maladaptive explanatory stylewasassociated

with higher concurrent levels of depression and higher levelsofdepression at subsequent testing periods. Depression also ap-peared to influence subsequent explanatory style. But explana-tory style at time n remained a significant predictor of depres-sion at time n + 1 even after the effects of depression at times nand n - 1 on explanatory style were controlled. Further, wefound no evidence that the significant correlations betweenex-planatory style and depression were due to semantic redun-dancy in the CDI and the CASQ. In linewith thediathesis-stressmodel of depression, the interaction of a maladaptive explana-tory style and the experience of several bad life events was re-lated to higher levels of future depression. A maladaptive ex-planatory style also wassignificantly associated with lower lev-els of achievement and more helpless behaviors in theclassroom.


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438 S. NOLEN-HOEKSEMA, J. GIRGUS, AND M. SELIGMANMeans, ranges, and standard deviations of the CDI. The

means, ranges, and standard deviationsofscores on the CDI forthefiveadministrationsareshownin Table 1. These means arecomparable to those found in third-, fourth-, and fifth-gradechildrenbySeligman et al. (1984) and by Smucker (1982). Alsopresented in Table 1 are the percentagesofchildrenwith scoresof 16 or more on the CDI at each administration (16 was theaverage of the scores representing one standard deviation abovethe mean CDI score across all five administrations; 16 is alsothe cutoff score recommended byKovacs(1980) fordesignatinga "severe" level of depression). Levels of depressive symptomswere highest at the June testing period, then declined substan-tially in the October and January 1984 testing periods.

Stability. Also seen in Table 1 are the stability correlationsbetween CDI scores across the five testing periods. Levels ofdepression were quite stable over periods of 3 months, 6months, 10 months, and 12 months. Table2 presents the corre-lations between the children's composite explanatory stylescores (for good events and bad events, i.e., CPCN) across thefive testing periods. These stability correlations for explanatorystyle were statistically significant, but they werenot as substan-tial as the stability correlations for depression (see Table 1).

Synchronous correlations. Explanatorystyle scores were sig-nificantly correlated with concurrent depression scores at eachtesting period (Table 3). The more often children chose inter-nal, stable, and global explanations for bad events and external,unstable, and specific explanations for good events, the morelikely they were to have a high score on the CDI. Within thesecond, third, fourth, and fifth testing periods, explanatorystyles for both good events (CP) and bad events (CN) signifi-cantly correlated with CDI scores, although CN was alwaysmore highly correlated with CDI than was CP (only CN wassignificantly correlated with CDI scores in the first administra-tion). Studies using adults have typically found CN almost ashighly correlated with depression scores as CPCN (Seligman,Abramson, Semmel, & von Baeyer, 1979). In all but the firstadministration of this study, however, CPCN was more highlycorrelated with CD] than eitherCP or CNalone.Thismaysim-ply be the result of the higher reliability of the CPCN scale.However, the higher correlation between CPCN and CDI mayalso reflect the importance of good events or of an optimisticbias in children in the prevention of depression (Alloy andAbramson, 1979).

Table1Summary Statisticsfor the Children'sDepression Inventory (CDI)

% with score r"withAdministration n M Range SD of!6ormore CDI 1

CDI1 164 8.39 CM6 6 / 1 9 O SCDI 2 153 8.08 0-36 7.77 18.3 .71CDI 3 158 8.75 0-41 9.31 23.3 .66CDI 4 150 7.57 0-47 9.27 19.0 .46CDI 5 139 4.98 0-48 7.48 10.4 .51

Note. CDI 1 was administered inJanuary 1983; CDI 2 in March1983;CDI 3 in June 1983; CDI 4 in October 1983; and CDI 5 in January1984."Allrssignificantat/x.OOl.

Table2Stability Correlationsfor the Children's AttributionalStyle Questionnaire (CASQ)Administration CPCN 1 CPCN2 CPCN 3 CPCN4

CPCN2CPCN3CPCN 4CPCN 5

.43

.44.44

.35.61.42.57

.50

.53 .52Note. CPCN = Composite positive minus composite negative score.CPCN 1,2,3,4, and 5 = CASQscoresat administrations 1,2,3,4, and5, respectively. Al l ps < .001.

It ispossible, however, that only one or two of the six individ-ual dimensionsofexplanatorystyle (i.e., the internality, stabil-ity, and globality scales for good and bad events) actually ac-count for the correlation between explanatory style anddepres-sion. Weexamined all 30 correlations between the individualexplanatory style dimensions and concurrent depression acrossthe fivetesting sessionsand the 24correlations betweentheindi-vidual dimension scores at one testing session and depressionscores at the next testing session. Of the total 54correlations,43 were statistically significant in the predicted direction (i.e.,the individual dimension wassignificantlycorrelated with con-current or future depression as predicted by the theory). Thecorrelations between theexplanatory style dimensions for nega-tive events and depression were usually higher than the corre-lations between the explanatory style dimensions for positiveevents and depression, as in the analyses of the composite ex-planatory style scale reported above. These data indicate notendencies for just one or two dimensions to account for therelation between explanatory style and depression.

Semantic overlap of the CDI and CASQ. Wewere concernedthat the significant correlationsbetween scores fromthe CASQand the CDI in Table 3 might be due to semantic similaritiesbetween certain items on the CASQ and itemson the CDI. TheCASQ includes a number of items that present the child withthe choice between an explanation for the given event that is anegative self-statement and an explanation that is not. Sim-ilarly, the CDI includes items that ask children to ratehowposi-tively they feel about themselves. To test whether similaritiesbetween the two questionnaires could account for the corre-lations between them, we removed these items from the twoquestionnaires for the data from the final testing period. Wethen examined the correlations both between these two short-ened measures and between the original CASQ and CDI andtheir revisedversions.'

1 The items removed from the CDI were numbers 2 ("Nothing willwork out forme"),3 ("I do everythingwrong"), 5 ("I am bad"), 7 ("Ihate myself"), 8("All bad things are my fault"), 24 ("I'll never be asgoodas otherkids"),and 25 ("Nobody loves me").The remaining CDIitems referred to somatic complaints (i.e., "I am tired all the time"),anhedonia (i.e., "Nothing is fun"), and misbehavior (i.e., "I get intofights all the time"). The CASQ items that were removed all presentedthe childwitha choicebetweena statement that was self-derogatory andone that was not (i.e., "I am stupid" vs. "Teachers make hard tests")These items included numbers 6, 7, 10,11, 26,29, and 38.


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HELPLESSNESS IN CHILDREN: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY 439The correlation between the GDI with its self-esteem items

removed and CPCN scores from the original CASQ (r =46)was identical to the correlation between the original GDI andCASQ. Similarly, removing the negative self-statements fromthe CASQ altered its correlation with the GDI only slightly (the/changes from -.46 to -.41). Finally, the correlation betweenthe two revised measures (r = -.44) is almost identical to thecorrelation between the original GDI and CASQ (r = -.46).Thus, there is no evidence from these analyses that semanticredundancy in the CDI and the CASQ accounts forthe relation-ships between the two measures seen in this study.2

Life events. The number of life events reported by the chil-dren also significantly correlated with CDI scores at each test-ingperiod (Table 3). Note that the children were asked to indi-cate which of the events on the LEQ had happened since theprevious administration of the questionnaire. Thus, thesig-nificant correlations showninTable 3indicate that thenumberof events prior to an administration wasrelated to the level ofdepression reported at the administration.

Some items on the LEQ are quite subjective in nature (e.g.,"Your friends have been less friendly lately"). We werecon-cerned that depression might bias children's perception ofsuchevents (cf.Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979) and,thus, in-crease their endorsement of such items. As a result, we removedthe most subjective items from the LEQ and correlated this re-vised measure with the CDI. The correlations between this re-vised LEQ and the CDI were almost identical to those betweenthe original LEQ and CDI scores.

Longitudinal analyses: Explanatory style, life events, and de-pressivesymptoms. Table 4 presents correlations between com-posite explanatory style scores and the CDI scores obtained atthe next administration. Across all testing periods, childrenwho made more internal, stable, and global explanations forbad events and external, unstable, and specific explanations forgood events developed or maintained a higher level of depres-sion than did children without this maladaptive explanatorystyle. The correlations between earlier depression and later ex-planatorystyle werealso significant, indicating that depressionpredicts later explanatorystyle aswell. Indeed, the correlationsbetween earlier depression and later explanatory style are oftenlarger than the correlations between earlier explanatory styleand later depression. We performed regression analyses inwhich we looked at the ability of explanatory style to predictchanges in depression over time, after first controlling for the

Table 3Correlations BetweenDepression Scoresand ConcurrentExplanatory Style Scores and ConcurrentLife Events (LE) Scores

TestCDI1CDI 2CDI 3CDI 4CDI 5

rwith concurrentCPCN score

-.34-.48-.32-.29-.46

r with concurrentLE score

.26

.29

.29

.32

.40

Table4CorrelationsBetweenthe CompositeAttributional StyleQuestionnaire(CASQ) Scores and Children's DepressionInventory (CDI) Scores AcrossAdministrationsAdministration CDI 1 CDI 2 CDI 3 CDI 4 CDI 5

CPCN1CPCN2CPCN 3CPCN 4CPCN5

Note. CPCN

-.45-.42-.41-.35

-.33-.50-.45-.47

-.26-.38-.40-.46

-.23-.28-.30-.32

-.31-.39-.36-.36

= Composite positiveminus composite negativescore.All

influences ofprior depression on later explanatory style and de-pression. The results of these analyses are presented below.

1. CASQ scores at time predict CDI scores at time n +1with CDI at time npartialed out. The most straightforward testof the role of explanatory style in the development of later de-pression is to look at the partial correlation between CPCNscores from the CASQ at time n and CDI scores at time + 1,with CDI at time n partialed out.We performed this test fourtimes using the data from this study. The partial correlationsbetween CASQat time n and CDI at time n + 1 for the foursuccessive pairs of administrations were .33(p = .03), .37 (p =.04), .29(p =.009), and .36(p =.002). Thesedata indicate thatexplanatory style is a significant predictor of changes in level ofdepression overtime.

Depression also predicted changes in explanatory style. Thepartial correlations between CDI scores at time n and CPCNscores at time n + 1with CPCN scores at time n held constantwere .41 (p < .0001), .50(p < .0001), .49 (p < .0001), and .52(p < .0001), across the four pairs of adjacent administrations,respectively.

2. CASQ scores at time n predicted CD!scores at time +1 with CDI scores at time n and at time n - 1partialedout.Because depression seems to predict subsequent explanatorystyle, CASQ scores might predict later CDI scores only becauseearlier depression causes explanatory style.Weanalyzedfor thispossibility bylookingat whether CPCN scores from the CASQat time were predictive of CDI scores at time n + 1 with CDIscores from both time n and time n - 1partialed out.In thisway, we held constant, statistically, the effects of prior and cur-rent depression on explanatory style, then examined the powerofexplanatory style to predict later depression.

Specifically, we first took each subject's averageCDI score forthe third, fourth, and fifth administrations. We then looked atthe partial correlation between these average CDI scores andthe CPCN scores from the second administration, after we firstpartialed out CDI scores from the first and second administra-tions (i.e., the regression equation was average of CDI scores attimes3, 4, and 5 = CDI at time 1 + CDI at time 2 +CPCN at

Note. CDI = Children's Depression Inventory. CPCN = Compositepositive minus composite negativescore. Allps < .001.

2 Of course, this analysis addresses only the superficial similaritiesbetween items on the CASQ and the CDI.It does not address the possi-bility that a bad explanatory style may be simplya symptomofdepres-sion. This possibility isaddressed byanalyses reported later inthis arti-cle.


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HELPLESSNESS IN CHILDREN: A LONGITUDINAL STUDY 441Although the central hypothesis that maladaptive explana-

tory style is an independent risk factor for future depressionwassupported in this study, the details of the model will only beadequately tested iffuture studiescan follow depression and ex-planatory style in children for a much more extended period oftime. In such studies, the relation between explanatory styleandclear episodes of depression in children could be examined, andthe influence of each variable on the other could be clarified.

The present study used questionnaires to measure depres-sion. It may be argued that high levels of self-reported depres-sive symptoms do not necessarily correspond to a depressivedisorder. Clearly, another important addition to future studieswould be clinical interviews for depression. Such studies couldthen test the model as it applies toclinically depressed children.Even so, children's reports of severe personal distress on theGDI should be taken seriously, because the results from thisstudy and others (Kaslow et al., 1984) indicate that self-re-ported depression is related to impairment in cognitive func-tioning.

The results of this study support the reformulated helpless-ness theory's assertion that explanatory stylewill be an impor-tant target for therapyand prevention with children who showsymptoms of depression or problems in school achievement.Dweck (1975) and others (Andrews&Debus, 1978; Chapin &Dyck, 1976; Fowler & Peterson, 1981) havealready shown thatchildren who are given attribution retraining show decreasesin helplessness deficits in cognitive tasks and that the effects ofretraining persist for at least several months. Future studiesmight test the therapeutic role of retraining explanatory stylein children who showsymptoms of depression. Depressed chil-dren could be taught to question their initial maladaptive expla-nations for events and to consider more external, unstable, andspecific explanations for bad events and more internal, stable,and global explanations for good events. Such training clearlyshould be conducted with an understanding of the actual lifecircumstances and abilities of the child, so that the child learnsto make explanations that are both optimistic and reasonable.The results of this study lead us to predict that such trainingwould result in the reliefofpresent depressive symptomsand alower likelihoodof future depressive symptoms.

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