Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience

Seligman and Maier stumbled upon a phenomenon they called learned helplessness. The dogs had learned that pain and suffering were outside of their control. They had no power over what was happening to them, so their only point of recourse was to sit there and take it.

learned helplessness.

Negative events generally have more impact than positive ones. For example, it’s easy to acquire feelings of learned helplessness from a few failures, but hard to undo those feelings, even with many successes (Seligman 2006).

Two means have been discovered to produce depression in laboratory animals: uncontrollable punishment and isolation.

They had learned helplessness.

Life is stressful and depressing for a person who learns through childhood to be helpless.

The perpetual heightened level of anxiety coupled with the learned helplessness can lead to panic attacks when the detached youth experiences situations where they perceive pain or abandonment to be imminent.

The dogs that learned to escape shocks in the initial experiment by pressing a panel did the sensible thing in the latter experiment: they jumped the barrier to safety. The dogs that had no way to end the shocks in the initial experiment? Despite having the same opportunity and capability to hop to safety, they didn’t.