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Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused by the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness, by way of their discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented.
Martin Elias Peter Seligman (/ ˈ s ɛ l ɪ ɡ m ə n /; born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Seligman is a strong promoter within the scientific community of his theories of well-being and positive psychology. [1] His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical ...
Seligman confronted dogs with a situation accompanied by a total lack of perceived control, which ultimately lead the dogs to give into the situation. They learned passiveness, helplessness. Seligman transferred his experiments to humans, speculating that perceived control is related to the development of, for instance, depression.
Seligman came to the concept of learned optimism through a scientific study of learned helplessness, the idea that a certain reoccurring negative event is out of the person's control. As he was performing tests to study helplessness further, he began to wonder why some people resisted helplessness-conditioning. He noticed that, while some ...
The "learned helplessness" model formed the theoretical basis of the original Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale statement on attributional style. [8] More recently, Abramson, Metalsky and Alloy proposed a modified "hopelessness theory". [7] This distinguished hopeless depression and more circumscribed pessimism.
For example, a person experiencing learned helplessness will likely give up after failing or repeatedly struggling to succeed at a particular task, whereas a person practicing learned optimism won ...
In 1978, Lyn Yvonne Abramson, Seligman and John D. Teasdale reformulated Seligman's 1972 work, using Heider's attribution theory. They proposed that people differed in how they classified negative experiences on three scales, from internal to external, stable to unstable, and from global to specific.
The theory of self-efficacy lies at the center of Bandura's social cognitive theory, which emphasizes the role of observational learning and social experience in the development of personality. The main concept in social cognitive theory is that an individual's actions and reactions, including social behaviors and cognitive processes, in almost ...