Learned Helplessness

The classical learned helplessness model argues that individual attribution plays a significant role in creating the passive, hopeless, unassertive personality of the individual who exhibits the attitude and behavior. Attribution impacts the individual in the following three ways:

Attributing lack of control to internal factors leads to lowered self esteem, while attributing to external factors does not.

Attributing to stable factors should lead to an expectation of uncontrollability in future situations and extended across time.

Attributing lack of control to unstable specific factors should lead to short lived situation-specific helpless deficits.

We will now look at the case of the homeless veteran and a review of the literature on learned helple

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essed-anxious subjects…Depressed subjects perceptually distort the outcomes of skilled responding as being response-dependent, and they may show deficits at learning the consequences of responses. The deficits may reflect learned helplessness and are specific to depression” (Miller, Seligman, and Kurlander, 1975, 347). Despite some researchers beliefs that military combat exposure does not lead to learned helplessness in veterans, other in the literature suggest it does. In one study using dogs who were exposed to unavoidable electric shocks in one situation and later were unable to escape shock in a different situation where escape was possible, Maier and Seligman (1976, 3) demonstrated that “This effect was caused by the uncontrollability of the original shocks…There seem to be motivational, cognitive, and emotional effects of uncontrollability.” One theorization for this result in dogs was that whenever organisms are exposed to uncontrollable life events they begin perceive a relationship between their behavior and outcome. No amount of behavior allowed the dogs to escape from the shocks in the first experiment, therefore, they did not learn how to escape in a different situation with similar shocks. We can see that the h
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Approximate Word count = 2010
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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