Learned Helplessness in Animals

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Abstract Our work on learned helplessness grew out of the study of animal learning. Indeed, the learned helplessness phenomenon was accidentally encountered in the mid-1960s during our attempts to test predictions of two-process learning theory. Because we (Steven Maier and Martin Seligman) were students of learning theories, the development of our explanatory principles was both constrained by and at the same time a reaction against these theories. Moreover, the controversy that surrounded learned helplessness research from roughly 1967 to 1975 concerned not so much the nature of the phenomenon and its limits but rather the clash between the explanation that we had offered and the tenets of traditional theories. In this chapter, we trace the development of learned helplessness in animals and evaluate its current status.