Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience - PMC
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing ...
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Jul 1. Published in final edited form as: Psychol Rev. 2016 Jul;123(4):349–367. doi: 10.1037/rev0000033 Abstract Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned helplessness is now very well-charted biologically and the original theory got it backwards.…
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