Learned Helplessness and Dependence on the Judgment of Others (open access)

Learned Helplessness and Dependence on the Judgment of Others

The relationship between learned helplessness (Seligman, 1975) and dependence on the judgment of others, as measured by an Asch-type conformity task, was investigated. Relevant constructs were reviewed: helplessness, locus of control, depression, self-esteem, dependency, and Campbell's (1961) epistemological weighting hypothesis. It was reasoned that experience with uncontrollable outcomes would not only result in learned helplessness, but also subjects' confidence in their own ability to control outcomes would be undermined so that they would rely heavily on the judgments of others as opposed to their own. Anxiety, psychological reactance, frustration, anger, or some combination of these resulting in a facilitation of performance was offered as a possible explanation for the unexpected results. Most plausible was that subjects' resulting performance deficits may have represented loss of initiative to control social reinforcers. It this is so, the deficits seen in helplessness experiments should be greater when test tasks involving social reinforcers are utilized. Further research is needed to clarify the interrelationship of helplessness, depression, and conformity/anti-conformity.
Date: December 1978
Creator: Towns, James Philip
System: The UNT Digital Library
Dependence Upon Oil and its Influence on Foreign Policy (open access)

Dependence Upon Oil and its Influence on Foreign Policy

This investigation is concerned with determining what influence, if any, results from the dependence upon foreign sources of petroleum by the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The influence that petroleum plays upon the changing attitudes of these four nations towards Israel and the Arab nations is ascertained by the utilization of primary and secondary sources. The study analyzes all the resolutions that have been adopted by the United Nations Security Council in the years between 1948 and 1976 dealing specifically with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Other chapters analyze each of the four nations to which attention is being directed. This study concludes that the growing and continuing dependence upon Arab oil has influenced the foreign policies the four nations have assumed toward the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Date: December 1978
Creator: Hamel, Howard C.
System: The UNT Digital Library
Celestial concomitants of human behavior (open access)

Celestial concomitants of human behavior

The objective of this dissertation is to provide a sensitive and replicable test of selected astrological hypotheses. One such testable astrological notion is the idea that the angular relationships between the heavenly bodies at a person's birth time are predictive of his or her personality traits. In this study a sample of 155 volunteers was administered the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF) and a correlation between the frequencies for the subjects' four astrological aspects (sextiles, trines, squares, and opporitions) and the Q4 scale (Tension/Relaxation) of the 16PF was determined.
Date: December 1978
Creator: Noblitt, James Randall
System: The UNT Digital Library