Learned Helplessness

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Learned Helplessness

February 16th 2012

In society today many people suffer from learned helplessness, it can be found in females, males, children, adults, and even in animals. This phenomenon has been around for several years now with more research done on this topic every year. Today’s term for learned helplessness is hopelessness depression. Learned helplessness is thought to be associated with depression and it is a good reasoning as to why humans in some situations just give up. It is also associated with ‘battered wife syndrome’, which will be defined and explained at a later time. There are many aspects of this phenomenon, may people do not recognize this term because of limited knowledge of it and few terms used for it, but it is interesting and is associated with broad range of topics. Learned helplessness can be an explanation for many problems we see with society today. This paper’s purpose is to acknowledge people about learned helplessness and to give a better understanding for the many acts we make or do not make for that matter.

Learned helplessness is a psychological term for a mental state where an animal or a person repeatedly comes in contact with an aversive stimulus that it cannot escape. They suffer from thinking they are powerless, which comes from persistent failure to succeed. The learned helplessness phenomenon is considered to be a major cause for depression and wife battered syndrome. Learned helplessness states that if we put an animal in a situation where they are looking for predictors, but they come to the conclusion that nothing helps and they are stuck, they will not try any contingencies (Olson, M. H., & Hergenhahn, B. R., 2009) (Learned Helplessness, 2010). There are motivational, cognitive, and emotional effects to learned helplessness. For motivation there is dogs that have been exposed to inescapable shocks that do not later have an escape response in the presence of shock. For cognition it is said that exposure to uncontrollable events affects the organism's tendency to identify contingent relationships between its behavior and outcomes. For emotion there are a variety of experiments that show how uncontrollable aversive events produce a larger emotional disturbance than controllable aversive events do (Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E., 1976).

Martin Seligman first established learned helplessness in 1967; he showed that animals can learn that they are helpless. Seligman did a study based from Rescorla’s shuttle box study, which was done in (1966); he did this because