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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.
Seligman and colleagues accidentally discovered that the experimental conditioning protocol they used with dogs led to behaviors which were unexpected, in that under the experimental conditions, the recently conditioned dogs did not respond to opportunities to learn to escape from an unpleasant situation ('electric shocks of moderate intensity ...
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.
In psychology, preparedness is a concept developed to explain why certain associations are learned more readily than others. [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, anyone can learn optimism. Whether currently an optimist or a pessimist, benefits can be gained from exposure to the process of learned optimism to improve response to both big and small adversities. A learned optimism test (developed by Seligman) is used to determine an individual's base level of optimism.
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.
By contrast, technical parlance would use the term "negative reinforcement" to describe encouragement of a given behavior by creating a scenario in which an unpleasant factor is or will be present but engaging in the behavior results in either escaping from that factor or preventing its occurrence, as in Martin Seligman’s experiment involving ...
The shock continued until the dog moved into the other compartment. In doing this, the dog was escaping the shock by jumping the barrier into the next room. The dog could avoid the shock completely though by jumping the barrier before the 10 seconds of darkness led to a shock. Each trial worked this way with avoiding the shock as the response.