Unsolvable Anagrams Task
Background
The Unsolvable Anagram Task is a tool to induce feeling of learned helplessness to study how uncontrollable negative outcomes or experiences impact future learning behavior, success attributions (e.g. 'ability' vs. 'luck'), stress or feelings of self-worth. It is commonly used as a behavioral measure of test-taking persistence and to study how people react to failure or lack of control. The basic task is to unscramble letter strings ('anagrams') back into words even though no actual word solutions exist.
N. T. Feather and J. G. Simon (1971) were among the first researchers to use unsolvable anagrams in an experimental setting to study the attributions of success and failure in oneself and others. At roughly the same time, Martin Seligman and colleagues studied the phenomenon of 'Learned Helplessness', a psychological state where an individual stops trying to change a negative situation, even if the situation changes, because they have previously learned that their actions do not matter. In one of their studies, for example, they found that students pretreated with unsolvable problems later failed to solve even simple anagrams.
The Millisecond Unsolvable Anagram Task is roughly based on the published procedure by Feather & Simon (1971) and can run 4 different experimental groups:
- Easy Anagrams for practice, Easy anagrams for the test
- Easy Anagrams for practice, Hard anagrams (including unsolvable ones) for the test
- Hard anagrams (including unsolvable ones) for practice, Easy anagrams for the test
- Hard anagrams (including unsolvable ones) for practice, Hard anagrams (including unsolvable ones) for the test
The practice anagrams are taken from Feather & Simon (1971). The test anagrams are provided by Millisecond and can easily be exchanged for a different set if needed.
Task Procedure
In all experimental groups, participants work on 5 anagrams as 'practice' anagrams before moving on to 15 test anagrams. A third of the difficult test anagrams are 'unsolvable anagrams'. Participants get 30sec to solve each anagram. For the test, participants are told that they need to solve at least 8 anagrams to 'pass' the test.
What it Measures
The Unsolvable Anagram Task is behavioral measure of test-taking persistence when confronted with lack of control.
Psychological domains
- Distress Tolerance: Ability to stay on a goal-oriented task while enduring emotional distress
- Self-Esteem: Subjective, overall evaluation of one's personal worth, value, and confidence in one's own abilities
- Problem-Solving, Strategic Thinking: Identifying the most efficient solution ahead of time rather than through trial-and-error
Main Performance Metrics
- Attempted Solutions: the number of submitted solutions for the test
- propCorrect: the proportion correctly solved test anagrams
Psychiatric Conditions
the Unsolvable Anagram Task is most frequently used with healthy volunteers to study universal cognitive responses to stress.
An anagram task in which difficulty of the items is manipulated as described in Feature & Simon (1971).
References
Search Google Scholar for peer-reviewed, published research using the Inquisit Unsolvable Anagrams Task.
Feather, NT & Simon, JG (1971). Attribution of responsibility and valence of outcome in relation to initial confidence and success and failure of self and other. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18, 173-188.
Calef, Richard, Choban, Michael, Calef, Ruth, Brand, Roberta, Rogers, Malcolm, & Geller, E. (1992). Effects of unsolvable anagrams on retention. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 30(2), 164-166.
Casanova, G., Domanic, J., Mccanne, T., & Milner, J. (1992). Physiological responses to non-child-related stressors in mothers at risk for child abuse. Child Abuse & Neglect, 16(1), 31-44.
Schneider, F., Gur, R., Alavi, A., & Seligman, M. (1996). Cerebral blood flow changes in limbic regions induced by unsolvable anagram tasks. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 153(2), 206-12.
Watterson, K., Giesler, R., & Piedmont, Ralph L. (2012). Religiosity and Self-Control: When the Going Gets Tough, the Religious Get Self-Regulating. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 4(3), 193-205.
Pawliczek, C., Derntl, B., Kellermann, T., Gur, R., Schneider, F., & Habel, U. (2013). Anger under Control: Neural Correlates of Frustration as a Function of Trait Aggression. PLoS One, 8(10), PLoS One, Oct 2013, Vol.8(10).