On the Cognitive Component of Learned Helplessness and Depression

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter presents data that bears directly on the existence of cognitive deficit and proposes that the deficit stems either from perceptual or from expectational bias toward non-contingency. The learned helplessness theory successfully integrates the animal and human data within a single theoretical framework. The present state of animal research strongly indicates that helpless animals have trouble learning later contingencies but has not yet isolated whether the deficit is perceptual or expectational. The present state of human research tends less strongly to indicate that depressed and helpless humans have trouble learning later contingencies. Learned helplessness argues that organisms actively form a subjective representation of the degree to which an outcome is dependent upon responses. This representation has been variously called a perception, belief, or expectation of control. The learned helplessness theory is cognitive. It is one of the few learning theories which postulates subjective representations of contingencies as a mediator between objective contingencies and behavioral effects. The chapter examines evidence bearing on the judgment of contingency in animals and humans as it bears on helplessness theory. The chapter also critically examines the findings offered in support of cognitive deficit in helpless animals and humans, with particular reference to the separation of this deficit from hypothesized motivation and activity.