learned helplessness
a phenomenon in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable stressors results in individuals failing to use any control options that may later become available. Essentially, individuals are said to learn that they lack behavioral control over environmental events, which, in turn, undermines the motivation to make changes or attempt to alter situations. The phenomenon was first described in 1967 by U.S. psychologists J. Bruce Overmier (1938– ) and Martin E. P. Seligman (1942– ) after experiments in which nonhuman animals exposed to a series of unavoidable electric shocks later failed to learn to escape these shocks when tested in a different apparatus, whereas animals exposed to shocks that could be terminated by a response did not show interference with escape learning in another apparatus. A syndrome with three features developed: (a) a motivational deficit characterized by a failure to respond when challenged with further
aversive events, (b) an associative deficit characterized by impairment of learning from successful coping, and (c) an emotional deficit characterized by apparent underreactivity to painful events—although later research revealed by assaying corticoid levels that the animals were very stressed. In the 1970s, Seligman extended the concept from nonhuman animal research to clinical depression in humans and proposed a learned helplessness theory to explain the development of or vulnerability to depression. According to this theory, people repeatedly exposed to stressful situations beyond their control develop an inability to make decisions or engage effectively in purposeful behavior. Subsequent researchers have noted a robust fit between the concept and posttraumatic stress disorder.