The learned helplessness hypothesis is criticized and reformulated. The old hypothesis, when applied to learned helplessness in humans, has two major problems: (a) It does not distinguish between cases in which outcomes are uncontrollable for all people and cases in which they are uncontrollable onlyfor some people (univervsal vs. personal helplessness), and (b) it does not explain when helplessness is general and when specific, or when chronic and when acute. A reformulation based on a revision of attribution theory is proposed to resolve these inadequacies. According to the reformulation, once people perceive noncontingency, they attribute their helplessness to a cause. This cause can be stable or unstable, global or specific, and internal or external. The attribution chosen influences whether expectation of future helplessness will be chronic or acute, broad or narrow, and whether helplessness will lower self-esteem or not. The implications of this reformulation of human helplessness for the learned helplessness model of depression are outlined.

We present a revision of the 1978 reformulated theory of helplessness and depression and call it the hopelessness theory of depression. Although the 1978 reformulation has generated a vast amount of empirical work on depression over the past 10 years and recently has been evaluated as a model of depression, we do not think that it presents a clearly articulated theory of depression. We build on the skeletal logic of the 1978 statement and (a) propose a hypothesized subtype of depressionhopelessness depression, (b) introduce hopelessness as a proximal sufficient cause of the symptoms of hopelessness depression, (c) deemphasize causal attributions because inferred negative consequences and inferred negative characteristics about the self are also postulated to contribute to the formation of hopelessness and, in turn, the symptoms of hopelessness depression, and (d) clarify the diathesisstress and causal mediation components implied, but not explicitly articulated, in the 1978 statement. We report promising findings for the hopelessness theory and outline the aspects that still need to be tested. In this article, we present a revision of the 1978 reformulated theory of helplessness and depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) and call it the hopelessness theory of depression. Our motive for proposing the revision is that, although the 1978 reformulation has generated a vast amount of empirical work on depression over the past 10 years (see Sweeney, Anderson, & Bailey, 1986, for a meta-analysis of 104 studies) and recently has been evaluated as a model of depression (Bamett & Gotlib, 1988; Brewin, 1985; Coyne & Gotlib, 1983; Peterson & Seligman, 1984), the 1978 article did not explicitly present a clearly articulated theory of depression. Instead, it presented an attributional account of human helplessness and only briefly discussed its implications for depression. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that much controversy currently exists about the status of the reformulated theory of depression. Some reviewers have argued that it has strong empirical support (Peterson & Seligman, 1984), others have contended that it has a weak empirical base (Barnett & Gotlib, 1988; Coyne & Gotlib, 1983), and still others have suggested it never has been tested adequately (Ab

The authors investigated the emergence of gender differences in clinical depression and the overall development of depression from preadolescence to young adulthood among members of a complete birth cohort using a prospective longitudinal approach with structured diagnostic interviews administered 5 times over the course of 10 years. Small gender differences in depression (females greater than males) first began to emerge between the ages of 13 and 15. However, the greatest increase in this gender difference occurred between ages 15 and 18. Depression rates and accompanying gender differences for a university student subsample were no different than for a nonuniversity subsample.There was no gender difference for depression recurrence or for depression symptom severity. The peak increase in both overall rates of depression and new cases of depression occurred between the ages of 15 and 18. Results suggest that middle-to-late adolescence (ages 15-18) may be a critical time for studying vulnerability to depression because of the higher depression rates and the greater risk for depression onset and dramatic increase in gender differences in depression during this period.

SUMMARYHow are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency.In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were presented with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies.Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support.The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.

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