Factors identified by the Myers-Briggs personality inventory and their relationship to a learned helplessness style event.

Abstract

The present study was designed to assess the effectiveness of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in identifying personality factors that have been hypothesized to be present when persons display learned helplessness style behavior. The subjects were 48 students of Emporia State University, both upper class and freshmen. The researcher divided the 48 subjects at random into three groups. Each subject filled out the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and completed a learned helplessness task. The task had two sections of which the first part was a conditioning section that was to produce learned he1p1essness type of behavior. Each of the three groups received a different amount of helplessness style conditions. The second half of the task was identical for all subjects. The results were obtained by comparing the scores of all subjects on the second half of the task; that is, the identical half of the task to see if there were differences among groups in scores on the test. The scores in the identical half were then correlated with the results of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to see if the variability of the scores was related to personality factors identified by the Myers-Briggs. The results indicated that the learned helplessness style training did not produce statistically significant differences among groups. It was also found that the variability within the groups did not correlate strongly with the personality factors identified by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.