Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence.
@article{Maier1976LearnedHT,
title={Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence.},
author={Steven F. Maier and M. Seligman},
journal={Journal of Experimental Psychology: General},
year={1976},
volume={105},
pages={3-46}
}\, SUMMARY In 1967, Overmier and Seligman found that dogs exposed to inescapable and unavoidable electric shocks in one situation later failed to learn to escape shock in a different situation where escape was possible. Shortly thereafter Seligman and Maier (1967) demonstrated that this effect was caused by the uncontrollability of the original shocks. In this article we review the effects of exposing organisms to aversive events which they cannot control, and we review the explanations which…
Figures and Tables from this paper
2,114 Citations
Learned Helplessness: All of us were Right (And Wrong): Inescapable Shock has Multiple Effects
- Psychology, Biology
- 1979
Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience.
- Psychology, BiologyPsychological review
- 2016
It is speculated that default passivity and the compensating detection and expectation of control may have substantial implications for how to treat depression.
Learned helplessness: validity and reliability of depressive-like states in mice.
- Psychology, BiologyBrain research. Brain research protocols
- 2005
Learned helplessness in the rat: Effect of response topography in a within-subject design
- Psychology, BiologyBehavioural Processes
- 2011
Interconsequence generality of learned helplessness
- Psychology, Biology
- 1979
It was suggested that learned helplessness follows the rules of stimulus and response generalization, but the triads tested in the appetitive situation did not exhibit learning helplessness, and they exhibited a trauma-like effect.
Learned helplessness, inactivity, and associative deficits: effects of inescapable shock on response choice escape learning.
- Psychology, BiologyJournal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes
- 1980
These experiments explored whether exposure to inescapable shock produces a subsequent deficit in the organism's propensity to associate its behavior with shock termination, and found that inescapables shock produced slow learning of the correct choice for escape, even though active choices occurred on every trial.
Learned helplessness as conditioned inattention to the target stimulus.
- Psychology, Biology
- 1986
It is concluded that learned helplessness probably involves more than a single mechanism and that the passive exposure procedure may not be appropriate for demonstrating genuine helplessness deficits.
Exposure to inescapable shock produces both activity and associative deficits in the rat
- Psychology, Biology
- 1978
The time course of learned helplessness, inactivity, and nociceptive deficits in rats
- Psychology, Biology
- 1979
Uncontrollable shock proactively increases sensitivity to response-reinforcer independence in rats.
- Psychology, Biology
- 1984
The results support the prediction that uncontrollable aversive events can increase an animal's sensitivity to noncontingent response-reinforcer relationships.
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 145 REFERENCES
Generality of learned helplessness in man.
- Psychology
- 1975
Learned helplessness, the interference with instrumental responding following inescapable aversive events, has been found in animals and man. This study tested for the generality of the debilitation…
Learned helplessness in the rat.
- Psychology, BiologyJournal of comparative and physiological psychology
- 1975
Rats, as well as dogs, fail to escape shock as a function of prior inescapability, exhibiting learned helplessness.
Prior exposure to inescapable electric shock in rats affects extinction behavior after the successful acquisition of an escape response
- Psychology, Biology
- 1974
Frustation and learned helplessness.
- Psychology, EducationJournal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes
- 1975
The transfer of learned helplessness from one aversive motivator, shock to another, frustration is reported, and inescapably shocked rats failed to learn to hurdle-jump, whereas escapably or nonshocked animals learned the frustration escape response.
Escape learning deficit after overcrowded rearing in rats: Test of a helplessness hypothesis
- Psychology, Biology
- 1974
The results indicate that impaired learning following overcrowded rearing does not result from helplessness-like behavior, and rats given inescapable shock failed to perform the shuttlebox task, regardless of the size of the population with which they were reared.
Alleviation of learned helplessness in the dog.
- PsychologyJournal of abnormal psychology
- 1968
A theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of dogs given inescapable shock in a Pavlovian harness later seem to “give up” and passively accept traumatic shock in shuttlebox escape/avoidance training and the importance of instrumental control over aversive events in the cause, prevention, and treatment of such behaviors was discussed.
Learned helplessness in the rat: time course, immunization, and reversibility.
- Psychology, BiologyJournal of comparative and physiological psychology
- 1975
The effects of inescapable shock in the rat parallel learned helplessness effects in the dog are reversed and rats that first learned to jump up to escape were not retarded later at bar pressing to escape following inescapables shock.
The role of expectations and attributions in the alleviation of learned helplessness.
- Psychology
- 1975
The purpose of the investigation was to determine whether altering attributions for failure would enable learned helpless children to deal more effectively with failure in an experimental…
Failure to escape traumatic shock.
- PsychologyJournal of experimental psychology
- 1967
Dogs which had first learned to panel press in a harness in order to escape shock subsequently showed normal acquisition of escape/ avoidance behavior in a shuttle box, supporting a learned "helplessness" explanation of interference with escape responding.