Journal Article10.1080/00221309.1982.9709933
Methodological Difficulties in Demonstrating Learned Helplessness in Humans
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TL;DR: It is concluded that the learned helplessness effect in humans is a genuine one, although dependent on a variety of situational and individual difference variables which need to be systematically explored before a satisfactory theory can be developed.
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Abstract: Summary This paper outlines methodological difficulties in experimentally demonstrating the learned helplessness effect in humans. It is argued that most of the reported attempts to do so have failed to overcome these difficulties although a new experimental paradigm is described which appears to avoid most of them. It is concluded that the effect is a genuine one, although dependent on a variety of situational and individual difference variables which need to be systematically explored before a satisfactory theory can be developed.
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Predictability and Timing of Self-Report in Learned Helplessness Experiments
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Uncontrollability versus perceived failure as determinants of subsequent performance deficits
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of uncontrollability from those of failure in the standard learned helplessness induction procedure involving instrumental tasks were attempted to dissociate the effect of helplessness from failure in an experiment with both university and high school students.
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Performance differences following exposure to predictable and unpredictable noncontingent outcomes in high and low achievers
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References
Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation
TL;DR: According to the reformulation, once people perceive noncontingency, they attribute their helplessness to a cause and this cause can be stable or unstable, global or specific, and internal or external.
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Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence.
TL;DR: The learned helplessness hypothesis is proposed, which argues that when events are uncontrollable the organism learns that its behavior and outcomes are independent, and that this learning produces the motivational, cognitive, and emotional effects of uncontrollabi lity.
2.4K
Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?
Lauren B. Alloy,Lyn Y. Abramson +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the learned helplessness theory of depression was used to predict the degree of contingency between responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingencies, and the predicted subjective judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments.
Effects of inescapable shock upon subsequent escape and avoidance responding.
TL;DR: Exposure of dogs to inescapable shocks under a variety of conditions reliably interfered with subsequent instrumental escape-avoidance responding in a new situation, indicating that interference is not due to acquisition, during the period of exposure to in unavoidable shocks, of inappropriate, competing instrumental responses.
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