The mediating role of intelligence beliefs in the relationship between social-emotional competencies and learned helplessness in primary school students of Sari city in the academic year 2023

Learned helplessness or control of people is determined through initial interactions with social environments, and this process of helplessness is a way in which factors related to cognition, including beliefs, as well as emotional factors play a role in the amount of helplessness responses to social stimuli. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the mediating role of intelligence beliefs in the relationship between social-emotional competencies and learned helplessness in primary school students of Sari in the academic year 2023.

This research was practical in terms of purpose and the method of data collection is descriptive based on path analysis modeling. The statistical population includes all sixth-grade students of primary schools in Sari in the academic year of 2023. Based on non-random sampling and available methods, 218 people who met the criteria for entering the study were selected. The research tools included Quinles and Nelson's learned helplessness questionnaire (1988), Babaei's intelligence beliefs (1999), and Zhu and Ji's social-emotional competence questionnaire (2012). The data were analyzed by statistical software SPSS 18, Amos 23, path analysis, and bootstrap method with a significance level of 0.05.

In addition to confirming the model under study, the results indicated that there is a significant relationship between social-emotional competencies and intelligence beliefs with learned helplessness. Also, the mediating role of intelligence beliefs in the relationship between social-emotional competencies and learned helplessness in elementary school students was confirmed (P≤0.01).

The current research provides practical implications regarding making changes in the learned helplessness variable based on social-emotional competencies and intelligence beliefs in students.