LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

In adults, learned helplessness presents as a person not using or learning adaptive responses to difficult situations. People in this state typically accept that bad things will happen and that they have little control over them. They are unsuccessful in resolving issues even when there is a potential solution.

What Is Learned Helplessness?

Learned helplessness occurs when an animal is repeatedly subjected to an aversive stimulus that it cannot escape. Eventually, the animal will stop trying to avoid the stimulus and behave as if it is utterly helpless to change the situation. Even when opportunities to escape are presented, this learned helplessness will prevent any action.

For example, a woman who feels shy in social situations may eventually begin to feel that there is nothing she can do to overcome her symptoms. This sense that her symptoms are out of her direct control may lead her to stop trying to engage herself in social situations, thus making her shyness even more pronounced.

Learned helplessness, in psychology, a mental state in which an organism forced to bear aversive stimuli, or stimuli that are painful or otherwise unpleasant becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are “escapable,” presumably because it has learned that it cannot control the situation

  1.    A student participated effectively in class room discussions but avoided working on writing tasks. When the issue was discussed with the students he mentioned, he is weak in writing and this weakness got worse in previous grades and he could not improve writing skills. The student most likely to suffer from......

                                    A.    learned helplessness 
                              B.    learning difficulties
                              C.    slow learning 
                               D.   frustration

2. How did the dogs demonstrate learned helplessness in Seligman's study?

They lay down and didn't try to escape the shocks.

They jumped over the fence to escape the shocks.

 They reacted when they heard the bell, even before they were shocked

.All of the answers are correct.