PSY101 Week 9 learned helplessness

PSY101 Week 9 learned helplessness

1. PSY101
Learned Helplessness
Week 9
Dr. Russell Rodrigo

3. Learned
Helplessness
•Learned helplessness occurs when
an individual continuously faces a
negative, uncontrollable situation
and stops trying to change their
circumstances, even when they have
the ability todo so.

4. The Research on
Learned Helplessness
•The term was coined in 1967 by the American psychologistsMartin Seligmanand Steven Maier. The pair were conducting research onanimal behaviorthat involved delivering electric shocks to dogs.

5. Martin
Seligman’s
Experiments
That Led to the
Theory
Seligman and Maier were working with dogs at the time and testing their responses to electrical shocks. Some of the dogs received electrical shocks that they could not predict or control.
For this experiment, the dogs were placed in a box with two chambers divided by a low barrier. One chamber had an electrified floorand the other was not (Cherry, 2017).
When the researchers placed dogs in the box and turned on the electrified floor, they noticed a strange thing: Some dogs didn’t even attempt to jump over the low barrier to the other side. Further, the dogs who didn’t attempt to jump the barrier were generally the dogs who had previously been given shocks with no way to escape them, and the dogs who jumped the barrier tended to be those who had not received such treatment.

6. Martin Seligman’s
Experiments That
Led to the Theory
To further investigate this phenomenon, Seligman and Maier gathered a new batch of dogs and divided them into three groups:
1.Dogs in Group One were strapped into harnesses for a period of timeand were not administered any shocks;
2.Dogs in Group Two were strapped into the same harnesses but were administered electrical shocks that they could avoid by pressing a panel with their noses;
3.Dogs in Group Three were placed in the same harnesses and alsoadministered electrical shocks, butwere given no way to avoid them.

7. Result
Dogs from Group One and Group
Two were quick to figure out that
they only needed to jump over the
barrier to avoid the shocks, but most
of the dogs from Group Three
didn’t even attempt to avoid them.

8. Prof. Martin Seligman, has detailedthree key features:
becoming passive in the face of
trauma
1
difficulty learning that responses can
control trauma
2
can increase in stress levels
3

9. How do we learn to be helpless?
Seligman subjected study participants to loud, unpleasant noises, using a lever that would or would not stop the sounds.
The group whose lever wouldn’t stop the sound in the first round stopped trying to silence the noise subsequently. Not trying leads toapathyand powerlessness, and this can lead to all-or-nothing thinking.Nothing I do matters. I always lose.
This phenomenon exists in many animal species as well as in humans.

10. Learned
helplessness
in adults
In adults, learned helplessnesspresents as a person not using or learning adaptive responses to difficult situations.
People in this state typically accept that bad things will happen and that they have little control over them.
They are unsuccessful in resolving issues even when there is a potential solution.

11. Below are some examples
of situations that can lead
to learned helplessness in
adults:
1.Continuing to smoke despite several attempts to quit may cause a person to believe that they will always be a smoker.
2.Being unable to lose weight after making various dietary or lifestyle changes may cause a person to believe that it will never happen and give up trying.
3.Leaving a situation of domestic abuse can be very difficult. Women having this experience tend to leave several times before doing so for good. A person may believe that they can never escape the abuser, even when help and support are available.

12. Learned helplessness in
children
•Often, learned helplessness begins in
childhood.
•When caregivers do not respond
appropriately to a child’s need for help, the
child may learn that they cannot change
their situation. If this occurs regularly,
the state of learned helplessness may
persist into adulthood.
•Children with a history of prolonged
abuse and neglect, for example,can develop learned helplessness and feelings
of powerlessness.

13. Somecharacteristics
of learned
helplessness in
children include:
low self-esteem
low motivation
low expectations of success
less persistence
not asking for help
ascribing a lack of success to a lack of ability
ascribing success to factors beyond their control, such as luck

14. A2004 study examined the effects of learned helplessness on test taking in students. Each child involved took one of two tests. The first began with very difficult questions and the other with easier questions.
Students who took the first test seemed to become frustrated, doubted their academic ability, and missed the easy questions. The authors suggest that learned helplessness affected their test scores. Those who took the second test did not experience these effects.
Children may avoid learned helplessness by buildingresilience. Among the many factors that can contribute to resilience are a positive attachment to caregivers, humor, and independence.

15. Learned Helplessness in Relationships
and Domestic Violence
•Based on learned helplessness, a specific theory was
developed for victims of domestic violence called the
theory of cyclic abuse, a cycle that is sometimes known
as battered women syndrome.
•In this theory, a relationship in which domestic violence
has occurred is likely to continually involve violence
that’s doled out in a predictable and repetitious pattern.

16. Learned Helplessness in Relationships and
Domestic Violence Cont.
This pattern generally follows this structure:
1.Stage One: a period of tension-building in which the abuser starts to get angry, communication breaks down, and the victim feels the need to concede and submit to the abuser;
2.Stage Two: the acting-out period, in which the abuse occurs;
3.Stage Three: the honeymoon period, in which the abuser may apologize, show remorse, and/or try to make up for the abuse. The abuser might also promise never to abuse the victim again or, alternatively, blame the victim for provoking the abuse;
4.Stage Four: the calm period, in which the abuse stops, the abuser acts like it never happened, and the victim may start to believe the abuse has ended and the abuser will change (Rakovec-Felser, 2014).

17. The theory of
cyclic abuse posits
that not only will
abuse victims feel
helpless, theywill
also:
Re-experience the battering as if it were recurring even when it is
not;Re-
experience
Attempt to avoid the psychological impact of battering by avoiding
activities, people, and emotions;Attempt
Experience hyperarousal or hypervigilance;Experience
Have disruptedinterpersonal relationships;Have
Experience body image distortion or other somatic concerns;Experience
Develop sexuality and intimacy issues (Rakovec-Felser, 2014).Develop

18. It’s Likely to Be
Associated With . . .
Learned helplessness is, unsurprisingly, associated
with many negative symptoms, traits, and
tendencies, including:
•Age: The older one’s age, the more likely they are to
experience change or loss of roles and physical
decline. Residing in an institution is also linked to
learned helplessness (Foy & Mitchell, 1990);
•Stress, especially poverty-related stress (Brown,
Seyler, Knorr, Garnett, & Laurenceau, 2016);
•Anxietyand worry, specifically about tests for
students (Raufelder, Regner, & Wood, 2018);
•Greater negative response to anticipated pain
(Strigo, Simmons, Matthews, Craig, & Paulus, 2008).

19. It’s Most
Likely to
Promote…
Not only is learned helplessness often associated with other negative conditions, but it also seems to contribute to or cause many negative outcomes, including:
Negative health symptoms as well asnegative emotionsabout one’s disease (Nowicka-Sauer, Hajduk, Kujawska-Danecka,
Banaszkiewicz, Czuszyńska, Smoleńska, & Siebert, 2017);
Maladaptive perfectionism (Filippello, Larcan, Sorrenti, Buzzai, Orecchio, & Costa, 2017);
Turnover intentions (Tayfur, Karapinar, & Camgoz, 2013);
Burnout, or emotional exhaustion and cynicism (Tayfur et al., 2013);
Aggravated depression, anxiety, phobias, shyness, and loneliness in those already suffering (Cherry, 2017).

20. Why does learned helplessness affect some
people and not others?
A person’s experiences can increase their risk of developing learned helplessness.
It typically begins after experiencing repeated traumatic events, such as childhood abuse or domestic violence.
However, not everyone who goes through these things will develop learned helplessness.
People with a pessimistic explanatory style —causing them to view negative events as being unavoidable and resulting from their own shortcomings —are more likely to experience learned helplessness. People with an optimistic explanatory style are less likely to do so.

21. Attributional Theory
•Proposed by Fritz Heider (1958).
•Atheory that attempts to explain the interpretive process by which people make judgments about the causes of their own behavior and the behavior of others After studying how people explain others' behavior,
•Attribution theories typically focus on the process ofdetermining whether a behavior is situationally-caused (caused by external factors)or dispositionally-caused (caused by internal characteristics

22. Attributional Theory
Behavior is a product ofcapacity and motivation. Capacity refers to whether we areabletoenact a particular behavior—that is, whether our innate characteristics and our present environment make that behavior possible. Motivation refers to our intentions as well as how much effort we apply.
Heider contended that both capacity andmotivation are necessary for a particular behavior to occur.
For example, your ability to run a marathon depends on both your physical fitness and the weather that day (your capacity) as well as your desire and drive to push through the race (your motivation).

23. Correspondent Inference Theory
•Edward Jones and Keith Davis developed thecorrespondent inference theory.
•This theory suggests that if someone behaves in a socially desirable way, we
do not tend to infer much about them as a person.
•For example, if you ask your friend for a pencil and she gives one to you, you are
not likely to infer much about your friend's character from the behavior, because
most people would do the same thing in a givensituation—it is the socially
desirable response.
•However, if your friend refuses to allow you to borrow a pencil, you are likely to
infer something about her innate characteristics due to this socially undesirable
response.

24. Kelley’s Covariation Model
According to psychologist Harold Kelley’scovariation model, we tend to use three types of information when we’re deciding whether someone’s behavior was internally or externally motivated.
1.Consensus, or whether others would act similarly in a givensituation. If other people would typically display the same behavior, we tend to interpret the behavior as being less indicative of an individual's innate characteristics.
2.Distinctiveness, or whether the person acts similarly across other situations. If a person only acts a certain way in one situation, the behavior can probably be attributed to the situation rather than the person.
3.Consistency, or whether someone acts the same way in a givensituation each time it occurs. If someone’s behavior in a givensituation is inconsistent from one time to the next, their behavior becomes more difficult to attribute.

25. Kelley’s Covariation Model Cont.
When there are high levels of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency,we tend to attribute the behavior to the situation.
For example, let's imagine that you've never eaten cheese pizza before, and are trying to figure out why your friend Sally likes cheese pizza so much:
ØAll ofyour other friends also like pizza (high consensus)
ØSally doesn't like many other foods with cheese (high distinctiveness)
ØSally likes every pizza she's ever tried (high consistency)

26. Kelley’s Covariation Model Cont.
When there are low levels of consensus and distinctiveness, but high
consistency, we’re more likely to decide the behavior is due to
something about the person.
For example, let's imagine that you’re trying to figure out why your
friend Carly likes to go sky-diving:
ØNone of your other friends likes to go sky-diving (low consensus)
ØCarly likes many other high-adrenaline activities (low distinctiveness)
ØCarly has been sky-diving many times and she's always had a great time
(high consistency)

27. Weiner’s
Three-
Dimensional
Model
Bernard Weiner’s model suggests that people examinethree dimensionswhen attempting to understand the causes of a behavior: locus, stability, and controllability.
Locusrefers to whether the behavior was caused by internal or external factors.
Stabilityrefers to whether the behavior will happen again in the future.
Controllabilityrefers to whether someone is able tochange the outcome of an event by expending more effort.

28. Attribution
Errors
When we try to determine the cause of someone’s behavior, we are not always accurate. In fact, psychologists have identified two key errors that we commonly make when attempting to attribute behavior.
Fundamental Attribution Error, whichrefers to the tendency to over-emphasize the role of personal traits in shaping behaviors. For example, if someone is rude to you, you may assume that they’re generally a rude person, rather than assuming that they were under stress that day.
Self-Serving Bias, which refers to the tendency to give ourselves credit(i.e.make an internal attribution when things go well, but blame the situation or bad luck (i.e.make an external attribution) when things go poorly. According to recent research, people who are experiencing depression may not show theself-serving bias, andmay even experience a reverse bias.

29. Factors of
Learned
Helplessness
lack of self-esteemmotivation
childhooddomestic
violence
helpless

30. Seligman’s
Learned
Optimism Model
ØSeligman also identified another
component of the equation —
learned optimism.
ØIt’s essentially the polar opposite
of learned helplessness, where
you internalize a sense of
hopelessness about your
circumstances.
ØWith learned optimism, you
begin to challenge your thought
processes —and as a result,
change your behaviors and
outcomes.

31. How can I
learn to be
less helpless?
Resilience
•People can push back against learned helplessness by practicing independence from a young age and by cultivatingresilience, self-worth, and self-compassion.
•Engaging in activities that restoreself-controlcan also be valuable. For example, an elderly person who feels helpless in the aging process can engage in small exercises that they know will restore a sense of control.

32. Can therapy
help the
helpless?
•Your brain wants to deal with failure by
giving up. Yettherapy, especiallycognitive
behavioraltherapy, can be helpful for
exploring the origins of
perceivedhelplessness and addressing related
behaviors.
•Working with a therapist may help you
unlearn and "decondition" yourself. A
clinicianmay helpyou to change your
thinking style frompessimismto optimism,
and you can do this perhaps by reframing
situations and outcomes in a more positive light.

33. People with learned
helplessness can
overcome it.
The most common
treatment is therapy,
especiallycognitive
behavioral
therapy(CBT).
CBT helps people
overcome these types of
challenges by changing
how they think and act.
In therapy, people can:
receive support and encouragement
explore the origins of learned helplessness
develop ways to decrease feelings of helplessness
identify negative thoughts that contribute to learned helplessness
identify behaviors that reinforce learned helplessness
replace thoughts and behaviors with more positive and beneficial ones
improve self-esteem
work through challenging emotions
address instances of abuse, neglect, and trauma
set goals and tasks for themselves

34. Four strategies for treating helplessness-related
depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978):
1.Change the likelihood of the outcome. Alter the environment by increasing the likelihood of desired events and decreasing the likelihood of negative events;
2.Reduce the desire for preferred outcomes. This can be done by either reducing the negativity of events that are outside the individual’s control or by reducing the desirability of events that are extremely unlikely to happen;
3.Change the individual’s expectation from uncontrollability to controllability when the desired outcomes are attainable. In other words, help the depressed person realize when outcomes they desire are actually withintheir control;
4.Change unrealistic explanations for failure toward those that are external (not due to some inherent flaw in the depressed person himself), transient (not chronic), and specific (due to one specific problem rather than a larger pattern of problems). Likewise, change unrealistic explanations for success to those that are internal (due to some inherent strength in the depressed person), stable (chronic), and global (due to an overall competence rather than a specific area of competence).

35. Strategies that can help prevent students
from learning to be habitually helpless,
including:
1.Teachers providing praise and encouragement based on
the student’s abilities (e.g., “You’re good at math” or
“You have a knack for this subject, I can tell”) to help
them believe they are good at these tasks or subjects;
2.Teachers providing praise and encouragement based on
the student’s efforts (e.g., “Your hours of hard work paid
off on this test!”) to help them believe their effort will
make a difference;
3.Working on smart, individual goal-setting with students
to help them learn that goals can be achieved and that
outcomes are often within their realm of influence
(Catapano, n.d.).

36. Edutopia’s Andrew Miller (2015) suggests a
few very important strategies for teachers
and parents:
1.Curate and create learning resources (which include people, books, websites, and community organizations, among other resources) to help students become comfortable with not knowing the answer and with looking for the answer in the right places;
2.Use questionsforlearning rather thanaboutlearning (e.g., use questions that encourage the student to think about his own learning and thought patterns instead of just thinking about what he knows);
3.Stop giving students the answers. Instead, help them learn it at their own pace and through their own methods—they’ll be more likely to remember it this way!
4.Allow them to fail. Failing and trying again is vital for children—as long asyou are there to support them when they fail.

37. Most Interesting Research
In 2016, researchers in Brazil found some evidence that even zebrafish experience learned helplessness (do Nascimento, Walsh-Monteiro, & Gouveia).
Not even the simple tree shrew is safe from the effects of learned helplessness—research from 2016 confirmed the presence of such behavior in tree shrews who received uncontrollable shocks to the foot (Meng, Shen, Li, Li, & Wang, 2016).
in 2017 researchers discovered that, although learned helplessness has been observed in honey bees, they don’t display the “freezing” behavior that other species do (Dinges, Varnon, Cota, Slykerman, & Abramson).
n terms of more broadly applicable research on learned helplessness, many recent experiments are probing the link between learned helplessness and the brain.
An oft-cited study from researchers Kim and colleagues (2016) showed that brain activity in mice displaying non-helpless behavior was generally much higher than that of the helpless mice. However, this pattern was reversed in the part of the brain known as the locus coeruleus, which is involved in physiological responses to stress and panic.
This finding is interesting, as it suggests that individuals experiencing learned helplessness are directing their energy toward responding to their own distress, while more resilient individuals keep their energy more normally distributed.

38. •Research on the cellular basis of learned helplessness-related depression has shown that increased activity of the lateral habenula neurons (an area of the brain involved in communications between the forebrain and midbrain structures) in rats is associated with increased learned helplessness behavior (Li, Piriz, Mirrione, Chung, Proulx, Schulz, Henn, & Malinow, 2011).
•The implications of connecting learned helplessness to activity in specific parts of the brain are potentially huge; these findings could contribute to new and more effective methods of treating and preventing depression.
•This is the kind of exciting research that is happening right now—research that could have huge impacts on treating disorders and healing those who have suffered. Keep an eye out for the fascinating findings that continue to result from this line of research.

39. Discussion
Questions
Does overparenting lead to helplessness in children?
What is adult entitled dependence?
Are self-absorbed people more helpless?
Is learned helplessness related tofeeling like a victim?
How does helplessness relate to addiction?
Is learned helplessness linked to depression and anxiety?

40. Bottom line…
Learned helplessness can affect your life
in all sorts of ways —none of which are
particularly encouraging.
The good news is that it is possible to
“unlearn” learned helplessness.
Working with someone who can help you
recognize these patterns can be a huge
step forward in learning something new.

41. References
•Myers, D.,G.(2013). Psychology,10thEdition. New York: Worth Publishers.
•https://open.lib.umn.edu/intropsyc/part/chapter-8-remembering-and-judging/
•Boyes, Alice. “The Self-Serving Bias -Definition, Research, and Antidotes.”Psychology
Today Blog(2013, Jan 9).https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-
practice/201301/the-self-serving-bias-definition-research-and-antidotes
•Fiske, Susan T., and Shelley E. Taylor.Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture. McGraw-
Hill,
2008.https://books.google.com/books?id=7qPUDAAAQBAJ&dq=fiske+taylor+social+co
gnition&lr
•Gilovich, Thomas, Dacher Keltner, and Richard E. Nisbett.Social Psychology. 1st edition,
W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
•Sherman, Mark. “Why We Don't Give Each Other a Break.”Psychology Today Blog(2014,
Jun 20).https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/real-men-dont-write-
blogs/201406/why-we-dont-give-each-other-break