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Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness comes to us from the behavioral theories of Watson, Pavlov, Skinner, and others who argued that negative and positive reinforcement represent tools of behavior modification. However, when a person is said to exhibit ‘learned helplessness’ it means that both behaviorally and psychologically the individual has developed the attitude that they have lost control over the reinforcers in their environment. When such an attitude and behavior manifests itself, learned helplessness quite often develops into hopelessness, passivity, and an inability to be assertive or take control over one’s self and/or environment (Learned 1).

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 helplessness in order to demonstrate how this concept is an adequate explanation for the modern phenomenon of homeless veterans. A conclusion will address some strategies for improving this situation.

When it comes to the homeless veteran, learned helplessness goes a long in explaining the underlying dynamics that manifest in veterans feelings hopeless, feelings that they lack control, and the attitude towards self of being a passive victim. Before reviewing the literature regarding learned helplessness and it co-variants, we need to ...

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Learned Helplessness. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:49, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1685830.html