vi) TSS Theo oa oe a ge 0 Personal ae eT ie) 1a waite STEVEN F. MAIER MARTIN E. P. SELIGMANLEARNED HELPLESSNESS A Theory for the Age of Personal Control Christopher Peterson Steven F. Maier Martin E. P. Seligman New York = Oxf OXFORD uaaeeere PRESSOxford University Press Oxiord New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dares Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc. First published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 First issued as an Oxford University Press Paperback, 1995 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means. , mechanical, it ‘or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication Data Peterson, Christopher Learned heipleseness : a theory for the age of personal control / CChuistopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier, Martin E. P. Seligman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-19-504466-5 ISBN 0-19-504467-3 (PBK) 1, Hepleness Poycology) 2, Locus of control. 3. pathological. 1. Maier, Steven F. Il. Seligman, Martin, E. P. 9876 Printed in the United States of America ‘on acid-free paperContents 1. Introduction, 3 The Phenomena of Helplessness and Personal Control, 4 The Theory of Learned Helplessness, 8 Three Uses of ‘Learned Helplessness,” 8 Learned Helplessness: Inward, Downward, and Outward, 10 Why Learned Helplessness Has Been Controversial, 11 Why Learned Helplessness Has Been Popular, 13 2. Learned Helplessness in Animals, 17 The First Learned Helplessness Experiments, 17 Learned Helplessness Theory, 20 The Controversy, 29 Contiguity versus Contingency, 33 resentation and Ex ition, 44 What We Know, 56 What We Don’t Know, 57 3. The Biology of Learned Helplessness, 60 Norepinephrine, 61 Gamma-aminobutyric Acid, 67 Endogenous Opiates, 81 Transmitters, Neuromodulators, and Hormones, 88 Corticotropin Releasing Hormone (CRH), 88 Issues Omitted, 92 What We Know, 94 What We Don’t Know, 95x Contents 4. Learned Helplessness in People, 98 Criteria of Learned Helplessness, 99 Operationalizing Learned Helplessness in the Laboratory, 100 ‘A Meta-analysis of Human Helplessness Studies, 106 Other Aspects of Human Helplessness, 109 The Generality of Learned Helplessness among People, 113 Cognition and Self-report, 114 Other Explanations, 120 What We Know, 138 What We Don’t Know, 139 5. The Attributional Reformulation, 141 Historical Background: Attribution Theory and Theorizing, 141 Causal Explanations and Locus of Control, 144 The Reformulated Learned Helplessness Model, 146 Assessing Explanatory Style, 155 Empirical Studies of Explanatory Style, 163 What We Know, 178 What We Don’t Know, 179 6. Learned Helplessness and Depression, 182 What Is Depression?, 182 The Reformulation of the Learned Helplessness Model of Depression, 191 Modernity and Depression, 208 Controversies, 211 What We Know, 223 What We Don’t Know, 223 7. Learned Helplessness and Social Problems, 227 Criteria for Learned Helplessness, 228 Survey of Applications, 231 What We Know, 259 What We Don’t Know, 259 8, Learned Helplessness and Physical Health, 264 Some Ground Rules, 265 Risk Factors for Illness, 266 Mechanisms, 283 Health and IlIness in Animals versus People, 294 What We Know, 296 What We Don’t Know, 297image not availableimage not availableimage not available4 Learned Helplessness external determinants of our actions (hence the word “response”) and ignored individual initiation. The favorite concept of this pre- vious generation of motivational theorists was “stimulus,” which is derived from a Latin word meaning “cattle prod.” Explanations that focus on the individual as a source of action have since become popular. Here are the sorts of explanations the students of today learn: When an individual expects that nothing she does matters, she will become helpless and thus fail to initiate any action. Successful action flows from a sense of self-efficacy. Individuals generate and monitor their own actions, reinforce them- selves, and correct their unsuccessful actions. Individuals decide among goals and choose the most highly pre- ferred. These explanations represent a dramatic shift in the way that our actions are conceived. One of the catalysts for this change, and the subject of this book, was the work on personal control and its flip side, what we call helplessness. THE PHENOMENA OF HELPLESSNESS AND PERSONAL CONTROL Consider the following vignettes, which capture the range of topics that we cover in subsequent chapters. All of them have some per- tinence to personal control and helplessness. Passivity in the Laboratory Rat Suppose that a white rat is placed in a steel chamber. A mildly painful electric shock is conveyed through the floor. The rat scram- bles about frantically. Five seconds later, the shock is turned off. One minute later, the shock goes on again, and the rat again is frantic. In rapid succession, it rears up, climbs the walls, tears at the floor, and freezes. This pattern of shock coming on and going off regardless of what the rat does is repeated eighty times. By the end of the session, the rat huddles in the corner, and each time the shock comes on, the rat takes it, motionless. This experience of uncontrollable shock changes the rat. When it is later placed in a shuttlebox, in which merely running to the other side will turn off the shock, the rat will move very little, making noimage not availableimage not availableimage not available8 Learned Helplessness that the customer must have been feeling flush that day. He wanted to quit but didn’t know where he could get another job. THE THEORY OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS According to some theorists, all of these vignettes capture what is meant by learned helplessness. The theory behind this phenome- non is straightforward. It consists of three essential components: contingency, cognition, and behavior, which we now discuss in turn. Contingency refers to the objective relationship between the per- son’s action and the outcomes that he then experiences. The most important contingency here is uncontrollability: a random relation- ship between an individual’s actions and outcomes. The opposite contingency, controllability, obviously occurs when the individual’s actions reliably produce outcomes. Cognition refers to the way in which the person perceives, ex- plains, and extrapolates the contingency. This process consists of several steps. First, the person must apprehend the contingency. His perception of it may be accurate, or he may see it as something it was not. So, for example, a controllable event may be perceived as uncontrollable, or vice versa. Next, the person explains what he has perceived. A failure might be explained as being caused by hard luck or stupidity. Third and finally, the person uses his perception and explanation to form an expectation about the future. If he ex- periences a failure that he believes was caused by his own stupid- ity, then he will expect to fail again when he finds himself in situ- ations requiring intelligence. Behavior refers to the observable consequences of (non)contingency and the person's cognitions about it. Most typically, helplessness studies measure someone's passivity versus activity in a situation different from the one in which uncontrollability was first encoun- tered. Does the individual give up and fail to initiate any actions that might allow her to control this situation? In addition, helpless- ness theory claims that other consequences may follow as well from the individual’s expectation of future helplessness: cognitive retar- dation, low self-esteem, sadness, loss of aggression, immune changes, and physical illness. THREE USES OF “LEARNED HELPLESSNESS” One immediate result of the three-part theory just outlined is that learned helplessness has been used in three ways: to refer to non-image not availableimage not availableimage not available12 Learned Helplessness Behaviorism flourished partly through strict adherence to a method: objective measurement. Its predecessors, structuralism and func- tionalism, were mired in subjective reports. In contrast, Pavlov and Thorndike made the associationism of the British empiricists objec- tive. (It must be remembered that British associationism stressed associations between ideas.) The dog displayed its association by a countable number of drips of saliva, the cat by a plottable curve of lever presses. This methodological concern soon crept into the metaphysics of behaviorism and resulted in a forty-year confusion between epistemology and ontology. The response, which was measurable, became what was learned, and the association, which was an inference, was dismissed, first as unimportant and then as nonexistent. Learning theorists argued that if the animals had given up and ceased responding, the data must necessarily be false. Helpless an- imals must have been engaged in some learned motor response that competed with jumping in the shuttlebox. For years, we tested these different accounts of the helplessness phenomenon. Another source of controversy surrounding learned helplessness has stemmed from a long-standing debate within the social sciences between those who simplify phenomena in their attempt to under- stand them versus those who complicate them. ““Complophiles” fo- cus on the richness and complexity of human behaviors and despair when faced with attempts to reduce them to a few simple laws. “Simplophiles” strategically ignore this richness and try to explain as much as they can about human behavior with the fewest possible principles. We are card-carrying simplophiles in a field dominated by complophiles. Learned helplessness has tried to explain a variety of very com- plex phenomena—unipolar depression, sudden death, victimiza- tion, among others—with very few principles. In our efforts to ex- plain animal helplessness, the principles that we proposed— expectations and learning of noncontingency—were more complex than those used by S-R (stimulus-response) learning theorists, and so we were once thought of as complophiles. But in trying to ex- plain failures of human adaptation using a theory of helplessness, we in effect became simplophiles. Nowhere is this dispute more clear than in the field of depres- sion. We have spent much of the last fifteen years looking for sim- ilarities among people suffering different degrees of depression: col- lege students, demoralized women on welfare, prisoners, and unipolar depressed patients. We have argued that the simple pro-image not availableimage not availableimage not available16 Learned Helplessness Perhaps the very facts of life are now different for those of us in the here and now. Is there now actually more personal control, which is distributed over more individuals than ever before? We think so. The upshot of this is that social and economic change in the second half of the twentieth century may have legitimized and even helped to create the notion of personal control. With this change it became more viable to explain human action as centered in the initiative of individuals and less viable to explain it in terms of the pushes and pulls of the environment. Notions like learned helplessness, self- efficacy, and locus of control were spawned by Rhinestone Refrig- erators, political assassinations, and general affluence. We end this chapter on a somber note. What is the future of no- tions like personal control? We believe that it may be limited. An overriding belief in one’s own control presents two problems: it brings increased depression in its wake, and it makes meaning in one’s life difficult to find. NOTES 1. Let us be explicit about the use of pronouns here. “We’ three were not all involved in every study and theoretical pronouncement mentioned here— far from it. Learned helplessness has been the work of numerous individuals. We use “we” simply to make the text flow smoothly.image not availableimage not availableimage not available20 Learned Helplessness LEARNED HELPLESSNESS THEORY The classical conditioning phase of the Overmier and Leaf (1965) experiments involved administering 10-second tones to a dog fol- lowed by 0.5-second shocks to its feet. This produced later failure to learn to escape and avoid in the shuttlebox. Of course, because this was classical conditioning, the dogs were unable to alter the sequence of events or the events themselves. Our first experiments investigated just which aspects of this classical conditioning proce- dure were critical. Were the tones necessary? Did the shocks have to be brief? And so on. These studies revealed that the essential feature was that the dog be given a sufficient number of shocks that it could do nothing to prevent or terminate. The occurrence of the tones and the duration of the shocks were not essential. Indeed, the delivery of eighty 5-second inescapable and unavoidable shocks became the standard procedure used to produce and study later failure to learn in the shuttlebox. Why does exposure to inescapable shock produce a dog who does not learn a very simple shuttlebox task later on? We proposed an answer (Maier, Seligman, & Solomon, 1969; Seligman & Maier, 1967; Seligman, Maier, & Solomon, 1971). When shock is inescapable, the dog learns that it is unable to exert control over the shock by means of any of its voluntary behaviors. It expects this to be the case in the future, and this expectation of uncontrollability causes it to fail to learn in the future. We further suggested that the expectancy reduces the dog’s incentive to attempt to escape, thereby producing a deficit in its response initiation. And it also interferes with the actual learning of response-shock termination relationships, thereby producing a cognitive deficit. Here is the theory of learned helplessness in unvarnished form. It has three components: (1) critical environmental conditions; (2) translation of these conditions into an animal's expectations; and (3) alteration of the animal's psychological processes by these expecta- tions. We now explicate this theory more fully and attempt to give you some idea of why it proved so controversial. Control, Contingency, and Contiguity Although it may seem obvious that animals can learn the degree to which their behavior exerts control over important environmental events, the traditional S-R approach did not allow for this. For S-Rimage not availableimage not availableimage not available24 Learned Helplessness between response and reinforcement should undermine it. If the animal does not expect its responses to increase the probability of reinforcement, then why try? Cognition. In addition, as already discussed, we proposed that ex- posing an animal to uncontrollable shock also results in a cognitive deficit, an interference with what the animal actually learns when exposed to the relationships between its own behavior and shock. In this situation, there is an alteration in the manner in which the animal processes information concerning the learning task, rather than just a diminution in its response initiation or movement. When inescapably shocked animals are given a subsequent learning task that involves escape, they do occasionally respond appropriately and turn off the shock. But they differ from normal animals in what they learn about these episodes and what they come to expect about the future. Animals previously exposed to inescapable shock may not regis- ter the contiguity between their response (jumping the hurdle, for example) and the cessation of shock. This could happen in a variety of ways. For example, learning that some particular external cue such as a light or a tone is “irrelevant” in predicting the occurrence of a reinforcing event such as food or shock reduces the “associa- bility” of the cue (Mackintosh, 1975). Associability here means the ability of the cue to be later associated with the reinforcing event when there is a predictive relationship between them. Exposing an animal to a random relationship be- tween a cue and a reinforcer interferes with it developing an asso- ciation between them if they are subsequently made contingent. Al- though a number of mechanisms have been proposed for this reduced associability, one possibility is that the animal is not attentive to the external cue. Another possibility is that the animal may cease pay- ing attention to internal cues. In any case, this perceptual bias re- quires, first, the perception of noncontingency between act and out- come during inescapable shock and, second, the expectation that this will later be true in a different learning situation. Animals previously exposed to uncontrollable shock may accu- rately register the co-occurrence of their behavior with the termi- nation of shock but then not expect the relationship to hold in the future. They have an expectational tendency rather than a percep- tual block. In other words, they might not “attribute the cause” of shock termination to their response and so have no expectation that