Experimental investigation of defensive pessimism and learned helplessness

Abstract

Defensive pessimists are considered to be adaptive because of their high academic performance. However, there are few experimental studies on this topic. Defensive pessimism (DP) in Japanese university students was investigated using the experimental procedure developed by Norem and Illingworth (1993). We investigated how DP individuals perform after experiencing failure using the learned helplessness paradigm and assessed salivary amylase activity as an empirical physiological parameter. The participants were prescreened into DP or strategic optimist (SO) groups and randomly assigned to either the d-condition, in which they had to list their thoughts about an upcoming task; or to the s-condition, in which they worked on a clerical accuracy task. After these manipulations, participants were asked to perform three arithmetic tasks, constructed such that all questions in the first and third tasks were solvable, but some questions in the second task was insolvable. An ANOVA indicated that there were no significant main effects or interactions on the performance of the first task after the manipulation. Anxiety of DP/d group was higher than in the SO/d group. These results question the validity of the DP experimental paradigm. On the third task, after the participants experimented failure, the DP group performed significantly worse than the SO group, suggesting that stress tolerance in the DP group was lower than in the SO group. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)