Seligman's Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness is an engrained reaction to perceived unavoidable situations or outcomes. This adaptive behaviour is a process of interest for various health reasons, and thus is an area of focus within many psychological studies. It is a complex mental state, which encompasses multiple attributing factors. Helplessness transpires when deficits develop in response to expectation of uncontrollability. The learned helplessness model presented by Seligman claims the behaviour exponentially alters cognitive, motivational and emotional conduct as a result of continuously surrendering to perceived inevitability. This notion leads to the contentious proposal that depression is a learned response to stressful events in which seem inescapable.
Depression encompasses severe feelings of despondency and dejection. Seligman asserts the depressed affect is the emotional product of learning outcomes are uncontrollable. From Seligman’s experiments it became evident causal attributions, or LOC determines the nature, symptoms and chronicity of helplessness deficits, as well as general morale. Situations in which subjects make external attribution to outcomes they believe are as likely to happen to themselves as to relevant others are labeled circumstances of universal helplessness. During Seligman’s investigations, EXTERNAL ATTRIBUTORS PREDOMINANTLY expressed learned HELPLESSNESS. This infers a fourth, emotional deficit exists, lowered self-esteem, which governs attitude towards oneself in comparison with others in similar situations. Seligman insinuates individuals who believe desired outcomes are independent of their abilities, but are reliant upon external sources, will learn to exhibit helplessness in the form of lowered self-esteem when faced with adversity. These individuals are thus more susceptible to depressive mindsets. Intriguingly, cognitive and motivational deficits occur in both internal personal, and external universal helplessness. Conversely, Abramson conclusively demonstrated that lowered self-esteem only occurs in internal personal helplessness. This inconsistency highlights the shallow approach employed by Seligman to associate LHT symptoms, leaving it vulnerable to exploitation and thus diminishing its validity in explaining the concept of depression. The LHT provides ambiguous and insignificant support to the cause of depression due to a number of terminal procedural and conceptual issues. Levis76 highlights the foundational lack of definitional clarity within the LHT of depression with regards to specifying the nature, scope and types of depression. Klein