What is learned helplessness?

Ciccarelli: Psychology_5 (5th Edition)
5th Edition
ISBN:9780134477961
Author:Saundra K. Ciccarelli, J. Noland White
Publisher:Saundra K. Ciccarelli, J. Noland White
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What is learned helplessness?

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Step 1

When People experience a series of failures and impediments, they drive by taking cues from the situation that it is uncontrollable hence stop taking any efforts to make things better. Thus, feeling passivity leads to heightened stress level, depressive state and loss of motivation to work towards personal physical health.

Step 2

Learned helplessness is the feeling of loss of control over challenging events thus leading to presumptions that they are helpless and incapable,  making them unmotivated to respond in the future.

Seligman (1975), postulated the theory of learned helplessness which has its origins in the early research on dogs. When the dogs were subjected to repeated exposures of sudden and painful electric shocks, they lost their ability to learn an escape response and hence just sat and endured pain.

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