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Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. It was initially thought to be caused by the subject's acceptance of their powerlessness, by way of their discontinuing attempts to escape or avoid the aversive stimulus, even when such alternatives are unambiguously presented.
Martin Elias Peter Seligman (/ ˈ s ɛ l ɪ ɡ m ə n /; born August 12, 1942) is an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Seligman is a strong promoter within the scientific community of his theories of well-being and positive psychology. [1] His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical ...
[1] [2] For example, phobias related to survival, such as snakes, spiders, and heights, are much more common and much easier to induce in the laboratory than other kinds of fears. According to Martin Seligman, this is a result of our evolutionary history. The theory states that organisms which learned to fear environmental threats faster had a ...
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the only scientific explanation for why an animal's behaviour is usually well adapted for survival and reproduction in its environment. However, claiming that a particular mechanism is well suited to the present environment is different from claiming that this mechanism was selected for in ...
A drawing by Konrad Lorenz showing facial expressions of a dog - a communication behavior. X-axis is aggression, y-axis is fear. Dog behavior is the internally coordinated responses of individuals or groups of domestic dogs to internal and external stimuli. [1] It has been shaped by millennia of contact with humans and their lifestyles.
In a widely known experiment, [40] dog owners instructed their animals not to eat a treat, and then left them with an experimenter. When they returned, the owners were given a random report about whether their dog had eaten the treat. Interestingly, over multiple trials, dog behavior was uncorrelated with whether they had eaten the treat or not.
Many dogs never received the shock after the first trial. These results led to questioning in the term avoidance paradox (the question of how the nonoccurrence of an aversive event can be a reinforcer for an avoidance response?) Because the avoidance response is adaptive, humans have learned to use it in training animals such as dogs and horses.
Seligman shifted his focus to attempting to discover what it is that keeps some people from ever becoming helpless. The answer was optimism. Using his knowledge about conditioning people to be helpless in the lab, he shifted his focus to conditioning people to be optimists. The result of these experiments led to defining the processes of ...