Helplessness in Early Childhood: The Role of Contingent Worth - Essay Example

mindset study Research questions The research question of interest in the study seeks to define helplessness and how self-play gives a significant role in issues of susceptibility to helplessness based on accomplishment. The research was also seeking to view achievement-based helplessness as a syndrome that entails a number of cognitive effective and behavioral elements. What are the impacts of the syndrome of self-helplessness to young children? Previous studies relating to the topic The research was contacted to bring about solutions to issues raised by Dweck and some of her friends concerning the earlier studies on helplessness in young children. Firstly, very few studies have directly addressed and discussed the issue of helplessness in young children. A lot of the existing literature talks about the changes in improvement variables that tend to bring about helplessness to children at an older stage of their lives or even to adults. These variables include perceptions of ability or even personal control. The approach used though overlooked the likeness that a pattern of helplessness related to reduced patterns, negative self-perfection and negative effects too if they exist in young children is always linked to some other factors that are not commonly studied. Again, the tasks and the methods of assessment that were used earlier in other studies related to this study may not be entirely appropriate for the young children. Many of the procedures that were used in the past required the children to some mixed success and failure outcomes over diverse trials or to remember the past events that do not display any noticeable outcome. The young children might completely require a task in which performance results are very clear and visible to other people. Variables and how they were measured The study was aimed at defining self-helplessness by determining the ability of the small children to accomplish some given work that was in the form of puzzles and two other studies that made it possible to make a conclusive finding about the study topic. Methodology of the study The research was conducted in three different studies to understand the topic of study better and give out the required findings. The studies were conducted using an age-appropriate methodology and the use of an individual differences approach in order to find out whether some of the young children reveal a helpless prototype following a task failure. The procedure used was the same in all the three studies. The procedure was first to select an essential attribute of the helpless pattern that is found in the older children that might as well be found in some of the little children. Lack of perseverance at a task following a failure was the chosen attribute for these studies. This was followed by comparing the children who had different characteristic with the individuality of the helpless pattern to find out whether the most general pattern existed for younger children. In the three separate studies, pupils from pre-school, kindergarten and even first grade were given puzzles of popular cartoon characters that they worked on individually. The first three puzzles made up the failure trials and they were added a fourth puzzle that was solvable and some extra time was given to make them be in a position to complete it and it was named the success trial. After completion of the final puzzle, the person who was carrying out the experiment brought forth the four experiments the way they were, three incomplete and one complete puzzle. The children were then asked to choose one of the puzzles to finish and to choose to complete one of the unfinished puzzles was seen as an index of persistence in the face of earlier failure. Those children who chose to continue with one of the unfinished puzzles were then classified as being able to identify helplessness in young children. In a call to assess changes in affect related to the failure trials, the children who took part in the trials were asked to verify how and what they felt during each of the puzzle. They then chose their feeling from five faces that ranged from a big smile to a big frown. A conclusion was then drawn after the completion of the three studies. Findings from the study From the three studies that the researchers engaged in, they demonstrated that, when measures related to age are used and the differences that are evident in different individuals attended to, a great number of the children between the ages of four and seven years tend to display some certain characteristic of a helpless pattern linked to failure. In each of the different studies, behavioral, cognitive, and affective patterns were found corresponding to what is found in the older children. To be more specific, there are several children that were found to lack persistence, view mission failure as indicating that they are not in a position to perform that very particular mission, and finally, they have low expectations for their particular performance in the future and report more negative affect than the persistent children report. Conclusion and recommendations In their conclusion, the researchers highlighted some traditional helplessness models that have stressed character attributions as being the major precipitants of helpless reactions to malfunction. The researchers have however shown that even before these young children acquire mature trait conceptions, they tend to engage in worldwide self-blame. Again, the researchers displayed that the children who do not respond to criticism with universal self-blame also show the major features of the helpless pattern. To account for what they had found, the researchers projected that it was a point of deputation worth that was the original and the most basic requirement for the helplessness to happen to small children. They further proposed that beliefs of contingent worth and self-valuation goals could continue into adulthood and generate the most serious or extreme forms of helplessness. The researchers went ahead and integrated their study with Dweck and Legget model by suggesting that the fixed theories of the self are in most cases linked with some sense of contingent worth. They then gave evidence for both the young children and college students to support their study. The study is conclusive and the researchers have clearly displayed and passed their ideas very clearly. The study is also relevant to the current children situation globally as its findings have helped to understand young children clearly and know their behaviors clearly too. The findings from this study have added to the existing literature some information that will be important in the future for those willing to take the direction of this field. The most appropriate topic that needs to be studied is helplessness in young adults to add materials to the existing literature and let people know more about the aspect in young adults. Works Cited Burhans, Karen Klein, and Carol S. Dweck. Helplessness in Early Childhood: The Role of Contingent Worth. Child Development 66.6 (1995): 1719. Web. Read More