Learned Helplessness: All of us were Right (And Wrong): Inescapable Shock has Multiple Effects

Abstract

Publisher Summary Organisms exposed to inescapable and unavoidable aversive events show later deficits in learning to escape such events when escape is possible This phenomenon, which has been called the “learned helplessness effect” and the “interference effect,” has received a great deal of recent attention and many of its characteristics are now known. This chapter explores the causes and explanations of this phenomenon, rather than all of its empirical characteristics, and present new evidence bearing on these issues. It also discusses inactivity hypotheses and examines that inescapable shock exposure induces reduced activity in the presence of shock. A discussion is presented on the research and theorizing directed at uncovering the mechanisms which produce the basic learned helplessness effect. The focus is on what exposure to inescapable aversive events does to the organism so that it later performs poorly in escape learning tasks. The implications of the work on learned helplessness for the psychology of learning in general is explored. The data presented in the chapter makes it clear that the existence of an activity deficit does not mean that the mechanisms that make up the learned helplessness hypothesis do not exist.