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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 ...
This theory explains the importance of how someone consciously attributes the causes of events in their life. In 1972, Martin Seligman's learned helplessness theory of depression posited that if someone finds that their actions don't appear to help resolve their problems, they learn they are helpless, and this will cause them to become ...
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.
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 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 ...
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.
[1] [2] For example, phobias related to survival, such as snakes, spiders, and heights, are much more common and much easier to induce in the laboratory than other kinds of fears. According to Martin Seligman, this is a result of our evolutionary history. The theory states that organisms which learned to fear environmental threats faster had a ...