Learned Helplessness: It Can Happen to Anyone

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the first part of the experiment the dogs were divided into three groups: one was the control group, while the other two were coupled together and received painful electrical shocks. The first group of dogs, the control group, were placed in restraints but received no shocks. The dogs in the second group were placed in restraints and given a series of electrical shocks that could be halted if the dog pressed a lever. The third groups of dogs were placed in restraints, paralyzed with a drug, and received shocks along with the second group but had no control over when the shocks would stop (Geer et al., 1968). To the third group of dogs, the shocks were unavoidable, inescapable, and would start and stop at random, when really the dog from the second group actually controlling the shocks.
In the second part of the experiment, the dogs were placed in a shuttle box and given a warning sign a few seconds before the shocks would begin again. In this phase, however, all of the dogs had ...

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exposure leads the animal to believe they are helpless in changing or avoiding the unpleasant situation, and will eventually stop trying, or give up. This belief remains with them and is often applied to other situations as well.
This adaptive behavior can also be applied to humans. In early research of learned helplessness in humans, participants displayed helplessness in several tasks, and the helplessness model has been use to make sense of a variety of human adaptation failures (Canbeyli, Cemalcilar, & Sunar, 2003). One task in which humans display learned helplessness behaviors is in anagram solving, which is the primary focus of this study.
In order to investigate the ...

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