PSYC 3450 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Systematic Desensitization, Learned Helplessness, Discrimination Learning
27 Apr 2017
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In the learned helplessness experiments, two dogs were connected to same shock device, and were shocked simultaneously, at random intervals, 64 times: one dog could stop the shocks by pressing a button. It was as if they"d given up hope of escape. In an analogous experiment, two groups of humans were exposed to intermittent aversive noise in phase 1: as with the dogs, one could stop the noise, the other could not. In phase 2, both humans were tested on an escape learning task. Interestingly, depressed individuals who had not participated in phase 1 showed a similar impairment of escape learning to those that had experienced inescapable noise. Summary: martin seligman"s theory of learned helplessness holds that depression is caused by the belief that behavior cannot prevent negative experience. Some individual difference allowed a minority of subjects to show resilience.
