[Psychology] Learned Helplessness

Learned Helplessness is a mental state observed in both humans and animals, in which the subject is forced to experience aversive stimuli, or stimuli that are painful or otherwise unpleasant. As a result of this, the subject becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are avoidable, presumably because it has learned that it cannot control the situation.

Basically, the subject has learned that it is helpless in situations where there are bad stimuli, and has accepted that it has no control over the situation and so gives up. While researching this topic, I came across a comment that gave a great real life example of how that might apply to us. It was posted by someone called Sue on an article I was reading, and she had this to say on the topic:

"Learned helplessness is common in Maths classes. Students are typically asked to do say 10 questions on a topic. They are told not to look at the answers until the end. When they get many of the questions wrong because they don’t know how to answer them, they give up trying. They don’t ask for help. The result is an often said statement. “I hate Maths”.
As a teacher, I would ask the students to do the questions, one at a time and then look up the answer. If they were wrong, they had three choices. First, try to work out what they did wrong, and why. Then ask their peers. Then ask the teacher. If they got one answer correct, they had learned something. I also asked them acknowledge and act out their excitement about their success. The classroom would be noisy with kids talking to each other, and punctuating the air with yells."

I think this is something a lot of people can connect with, whether it's Maths, Physics, Physical Education or Food Tech. Most of us will have come across a subject at school that we just struggled with, seemingly more so than our peers. It's not that you can't do it, just that the way it's being taught isn't encouraging you to actually learn.

Learned Helplessness as a psychological concept came about as a result of the experiments that were conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier. By today's ethical standards, these experiments were fairly barbaric, but then the history of Science is full of these less than humane attempts at better understanding us. In a nut shell, these experiments were testing dogs responses to electrical shocks, where some dogs received electrical shocks that they could not predict or control, while others did not. They then placed the dogs in boxes with two chambers divided by a low barrier. One side was electrified and the other was not.

They noticed that some dogs would escape the shocks by jumping to the other side of the barrier, but others would not. The dogs that didn't try to escape the electrified floor were generally the dogs that has received shocks previously that they could not escape from. This was the birth of the theory of Learned Helplessness. There were many more experiments performed over the years, but I think the most interesting one was similar to the above dogs based experiment, but with people and sounds. The results were largely the same as before, showing that subjects who are put in situations where they feel like they have no control tend to just give up.

The team proposed that putting the participants in situations where they have no control results in three distinct deficits; motivational, cognitive and emotional. The cognitive deficit refers to the subject's idea that his situation is out of his control, while the motivational deficit results in the subject's lack of response to potential solutions. Finally the emotional deficit refers to the depressed state that can manifest when the subject is in this uncontrollable negative situation.

In trying to understand how learned helplessness can lead to depression, we need to understand the two types of learned helplessness that Seligman and his colleagues outlined. There's Universal and Personal helplessness, with the former being where the subject believes there is nothing that can be done to remedy the negative situation, and the later is where a subject believes that others could find a solution, but they themselves are incapable of doing so. These two different states of learned helplessness can lead to two very different types of depression. Those who feel universally helpless are more likely to blame external sources for their problems or lack of ability to solve them, while those who feel personally helpless are more likely to internalise that blame and find reasons in themselves to explain the situation; i.e. It's because I lack something that I am unable to deal with this problem.

This theory doesn't fully explain depression, but it does help identify the cause of at at least one type of depression that I'm sure some of you will be able to relate to in some way. As with most things to do with humans, things are a bit more complicated than with dogs. By understanding these concepts though, we can start to understand why we feel the way we do sometimes, and maybe work on new strategies and therapies to help deal with negative situations.

I for one can definitely relate to this concept, as that feeling of utter helplessness is something I'm fairly familiar with. However, I do believe that understanding the underlying causes of anxiety and depression are vital to helping yourself climb out of the dark pit you might find yourself in at certain points in your life. Refusing to address the causes of your negative feelings can lead to even worse symptoms of anxiety and depression, and can even lead to emotional exhaustion and cynicism or even burn out.

On the opposite end of the scale, there is Learned Optimism which through resilience training, can help people learn to develop a more optimistic outlook. It's more of a challenge to to learn optimism than it is helplessness, but it's well worth the work. If you would like to learn more, there is a really good TED talk on YouTube called The new era of positive psychology by Martin Seligman himself, so go check that out.

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What are your thoughts on this topic? Is it a concept you'd heard about already? Let me know your thoughts and feelings in the comments down below, and as always make sure to follow me for the latest Cryptocurrency, Technology, Internet and Pop Culture updates. If you're a fan of strange YouTube videos, you might want to follow me on Twitter. Until next time, Peace!

Sources:
Learned Helplessness on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness)
Learned Helplessness: Seligman’s Theory of Depression (+ Cure) (https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/learned-helplessness-seligman-theory-depression-cure/)
Image of Martin Seligman from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18258684)

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