Learned helplessness

Learned helplessness is a pattern in which experience with uncontrollable aversive events reduces attempts to escape or influence later outcomes. It was first studied in animal experiments and later investigated in humans.

Controllability: The degree to which an agent’s actions can change the occurrence or timing of an outcome. Perceived lack of control is central to the experience that produces helpless behavior.
Martin Seligman: An American psychologist whose research helped establish learned helplessness as a theory of behavior and depression. Seligman helped develop the early theory from experiments on uncontrollable shock.
Depression: A mood disorder involving persistent low mood or loss of interest, with associated cognitive and physical symptoms. Helplessness became influential partly through attempts to explain depressive symptoms.
Operant conditioning: Learning in which consequences change the likelihood of a behavior occurring again. Learned helplessness emerged from questions about how consequences shape later action.
Escape learning: Learning to perform a response that ends an ongoing aversive stimulus. It shows the active response that uncontrollable experience can suppress.
Steven Maier: An American neuroscientist who studied stress, coping, and the neural basis of learned helplessness. Maier’s later work helped revise the original account of how passivity develops.
Cognitive behavioral therapy: A psychotherapy that targets links among thoughts, emotions, and behavior through structured methods. It can address pessimistic expectations and avoidance associated with helplessness.
Locus of control: A personality dimension describing whether people tend to attribute outcomes to their actions or external forces. It concerns generalized expectations of control, not the specific effects of uncontrollable events.
Avoidance learning: Learning a response that prevents or delays an anticipated aversive event. Reduced attempts to avoid harm extend beyond failures to escape ongoing events.
Overmier and Seligman experiment: A 1967 dog experiment in which prior uncontrollable shock impaired later escape learning. This study supplied the foundational animal evidence for learned helplessness.

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