What is learned helplessness?

Introduction

The concept of learned helplessness originated with experiments performed on laboratory dogs by psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman
and his colleagues. Seligman noticed that a group of dogs in a learning experiment were not attempting to escape when they were subjected to an electric shock. Intrigued, he set up further experiments using two groups of dogs. One group was first given electric shocks from which they could not escape. Afterward, even when these dogs were given shocks in a situation where they could avoid them, most of them did not attempt to escape. By comparison, another group, which had not first been given inescapable shocks, had no trouble jumping to avoid the shocks. Seligman also observed that even after the experiment, the dogs that had first received the unavoidable shocks seemed to be abnormally inactive and had reduced appetites.

After considerable research on the topic, Seligman and others correlated this “learned” helplessness with depression. It seemed to Seligman that when humans or other animals feel unable to extricate themselves from a highly stressful situation, they perceive the idea of relief to be hopeless and thus give up. The belief that they cannot affect the outcome of events no matter what force they exert on their environment seems to create an attitude of defeat. Actual failure eventually follows, thereby reinforcing that belief. It seems that the reality of the situation is not the crucial factor; what matters is the perception that the situation is hopeless.

Attributional Style Questionnaire

As research continued, Seligman discovered that exposure to uncontrollable negative situations did not always lead to helplessness and depression. Moreover, the results yielded no explanation of the loss of self-esteem
frequently seen in depressed persons. To refine their ability to predict helpless attitudes and behavior, Seligman and his colleagues developed a measuring mechanism called the attributional style questionnaire.

The attributional style questionnaire involves twelve hypothetical events, six bad and six good. Subjects are told to imagine themselves in the situations and to determine what they believe would be the major cause of the situation if it were to happen to them. After they complete the test, their performance is rated according to stability versus instability, globality versus specificity, and externality versus internality. An example of stable, global, internal perceptions would be a feeling of stupidity for one’s failure; an unstable, specific, and external perception might consider luck to be the cause of the same situation. The questionnaire has been used by some industries and corporations to identify people who may not be appropriate for certain positions requiring assertiveness and a well-developed ability to handle stress. It has also been used to identify individuals who may be at high risk for developing psychosomatic disorders so that early intervention can be implemented.

Perhaps the primary significance of learned helplessness is its model of how a person’s perception of a life event can influence that person’s behavior, thus affecting his or her life and possibly the lives of others. Seligman believes that the way people perceive and explain the things that happen to them may be more important than what actually happens. These perceptions can have serious implications for a person’s mental and physical health.

Perceptions of Helplessness

The human mind is so complex and the cognitive process so unknown that perception is one of the most confusing frontiers facing social scientists. Why do people perceive situations as they do, often in ways far different from how they actually transpire? If a person is convinced that an event occurred the way he or she remembers it, then it becomes that person’s reality. It will be stored that way and may be retrieved that way in the future—perhaps blocking opportunities for positive growth and change because the memory is based on an inaccurate perception.

If children are taught that they are “stupid” because they cannot understand what is expected of them, for example, then they may eventually stop attempting to understand: They have learned that their response (trying to understand) and the situation’s outcome are independent of each other. If such helpless feelings are reinforced, the individuals may develop the expectation that no matter what they do, it will be futile. They will then develop a new feeling—helplessness—that can be generalized to a new situation and can interfere with the future. Various studies have indeed shown that many people have been “taught” that no matter what their response, the outcome will be the same—failure—so there is no reason to try to do anything.

Role in Victimization

One example of this can be demonstrated in the area of victimized women and children. Some women's shelters and refuges have programs to retrain battered women and children in addition to protecting them. Efforts are made to teach them how to change their perceptions and give them new feelings of potency and control. The goal is to teach them that they can have an effect on their environment and have the power to administer successful positive change. For many women, assertiveness training, martial arts classes, and seminars on how to make a strong positive statement with their self-presentation (such as their choice of clothes) become matters of survival.

Children are in a much more vulnerable situation, as they must depend on adults to survive. For most children in the world, helplessness is a reality in many situations; they do not, in fact, have much control over what happens to them, regardless of the response they exhibit. Adults, whether they are parents, educators, church leaders, or older siblings, have the responsibility of being positive role models to help children shape their perceptions of the world. If children are allowed to express their feelings, and if their comments are listened to and considered, they can see that they do have some power over their environment and can break patterns of learned helplessness.

A therapist has described “Susan,” a client who as a child lived with the belief that if she argued or asserted her needs with her parents, they would leave her. In the past, if she had done so, her parents would often get into a fight, and one would temporarily leave. Susan became the “perfect” child, never arguing or seeming to be ungrateful; her perception was that if she asserted her needs, she would be abandoned, and if she then begged the parent who remained to tell the absent parent that she was sorry and would never do it again, that parent would return. In reality, her parents did not communicate well and were using their child as an excuse to get angry with each other and leave. The purpose was to punish the other adult, not to hurt the child.

When Susan became an adult, she became involved with a man who mistreated her, both physically and emotionally, but always begged forgiveness after the fact. She always forgave him, believing that she had done something wrong to deserve his harsh treatment in the first place. At her first session with a therapist, she was reluctant to be there, having been referred by a women’s shelter. She missed her second session because she had returned to her lover, who had found her at the shelter. Eventually, after a cycle of returns to the shelter, the therapist, and her lover, Susan was able to break free and begin the healing process, one day at a time. She told the therapist repeatedly that she believed that no matter what she did, the outcome would always be the same, and she would rather be with the man who abused her but paid attention to her than be alone. After two difficult years of concentrating on a new perception of herself and her environment, she began to experience actual power in the form of positive effectiveness on her life. She became able to see old patterns before they took control and to replace them with new perceptions.

Another example of the power that perceptions of helplessness can have concerns a man, “John,” who, as a young boy, was very attached to his father and used to throw tantrums when his father had to leave for work. John’s mother would drag him to the kitchen and hold his head under the cold-water faucet to stop his screaming. It worked, but John grew up with an impotent rage toward his mother and disappointment in his father for not protecting him. He believed that no matter how he made his desires known, his feelings would be drowned, as they had been many years before. As a teenager, John grew increasingly violent, eventually getting into trouble. He did not realize that his family was dysfunctional and did not have the necessary skills to get better.

John was never able to believe in himself, even though, fueled by raw rage and little confidence, he triumphed over his pain and terror to achieve an advanced education and a black belt in martial arts. He even made a career of teaching others how to gain power in their lives and how to help nurture the spirit of children. Yet after all this, he still does not have much confidence in his abilities. He is also still terrified of water, although he forces himself to swim.

Mind-Body Relationship

Research has provided validity for the suspected link between how a person perceives and influences his or her environment and that person’s total health and effectiveness. There is significant evidence that the mind and body are inseparable, and one can influence the other to the point of either breakdown or healing. Leslie Kamen, Judith Rodin, and Seligman have corroborated the idea that how a person explains life situations (a person’s explanatory style) seems to be related to immune-system functioning. Blood samples were taken from a group of older persons who had been interviewed about life changes, stress, and health changes. Those whose interviews revealed a pessimistic or depressive explanatory style had a larger percentage of suppressor cells in their blood. Given that suppressor cells are believed to undermine the body’s ability to fight tumor growth, these discoveries suggest a link between learned helplessness (as revealed by attitude and explanatory style) and susceptibility to diseases.

Studies have also been conducted to determine whether learned helplessness and explanatory style can predict illness. Results, though inconclusive, suggest that a person’s attitude and perception of life events do influence physical health some twenty to thirty years later and can therefore be a valuable predictor and a tool for prevention. Particularly if an illness is just beginning, a person’s psychological state may be crucial to healing.

New Research Directions

The concepts of helplessness and hopelessness versus control over life situations are as old as humankind. The specific theory of learned helplessness, however, originated with the experiments conducted by Seligman, Steven F. Maier, and J. Bruce Overmier at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1960s. The idea that helplessness could be learned has opened the door to many exciting new approaches to disorders formerly considered personality or biologically oriented, such as psychosomatic disorders, victimization by gender, depression (the “common cold” of mental disorders), and impaired job effectiveness.

The idea that they actually do have an effect on their environment is of tremendous importance to people suffering from depression. Most such people mention a general feeling of hopelessness, implying that they feel powerless over their reactions and behavior, which makes the journey out of depression seem overwhelming. Research-based evidence has shown that people do have the power to influence their perceptions of their environment and therefore change their reactions to it.

If the research on perception and learned helplessness is accurate, a logical next step is to find out how explanatory style originates and how it can be changed. Some suspected influences are how a child’s first major trauma is handled, how teachers present information to be learned (as well as teachers’ attitudes toward life events), and parental influence. Perhaps the most promising aspect of the research on learned helplessness is the idea that what is learned can be unlearned; therefore, humans really do have choices as to their destiny and quality of life. Considerable importance falls on those who have a direct influence on children, because it is they who will shape the attitudes of the future.

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