Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience

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

influences. Lack of self-knowledge inevitably led to lack of self-responsibility. Thus humanity felt victimized by evil spirits. Fear of them often led to submission to them —and this happened on a quite conscious and intentional level.

learned helplessness. According to this theory, if we learn that outcomes are independent of our responses—that nothing we do matters—then we will internalize that lesson and carry it with us to other situations. Even if, objectively, we are not helpless, we will feel helpless. And so we will be less likely, whatever future problems we face, to tak

Of the many thousands of concepts that have risen up in psychology, only a handful can survive the concentrated and thoroughgoing scrutiny of our scholarly community. Locus of Control is one of those few.

The camp inmate was frightened of making decisions and of taking any sort of initiative whatsoever. This was the result of a strong feeling that fate was one’s master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course. In addition, there was a great apathy, which contributed in no small part to the feeling

“Wrong, the rat will become depressed and engage in extreme inaction otherwise known as learned helplessness. Alyona and Louie will I’m sure attest that we can already see this happening with our rat friend here. A similar experiment was done with dogs and it worked.”