Examples Of Learned Helplessness

In the eleven academy award winning 1959 movie, Ben-Hur, the main protagonist, who shares names with the movie’s title and also a brave and fearless soldier and nobleman get whipped twice for no apparent reason by the Consul of Rome after having spent some time as a galley slave in a Roman Battleship. His face shows pain, but he does not retaliate; the Roman Consul quips that he is brave enough to take offence but smart enough not to respond. This is a textbook example of learned helplessness. In psychology, learned helplessness is defined as the behavior of an organism to ignore, assume and/or submit to pain or other unfavorable stimuli after having been repeatedly exposed to the said unpleasant stimuli for an extended period of time (Hiroto & Seligman, 1975). The concept that this submission can lead to clinical depression or mental illness is known as the learned helplessness theory. With depression contributing to 60% of
The group one and two dogs were all able to escape the electric shock by jumping over the barrier but the group three dogs remained inert (Hiroto & Seligman, 1975). This is one of the most studied and analyzed research with regard to learned helplessness and is still the subject of fresh academic journals today. In essence, it depicted retardation, a seemingly opposite form of cognition where the subjects learned through unlearning as correctly argued by the conductor of this and a series of five other experiments in their article Learned Helplessness: Theory and Evidence by Steven F Maier and Martin E. P Seligman. In it they laid out the results and analysis of this and kindled experiments, forming the foundation of concepts relating to learned helplessness on which the hypothesis of its cognitive premises is set (Maier & Seligman,