Psychology: Learned Helplessness Experiments

Learned Helplessness Experiments with Human Participants

• Associate Professor Carla Litchfield is the course coordinator for Biological and Learning Psychology.

Subsequent Research Questions

• Can learned helplessness be shown in humans?
• Can learned helplessness be shown with non-aversive outcomes (in humans or other animals)?

Hiroto & Seligman's 1975 Experiments

• Used human participants with a loud irritating noise as the uncontrollable stimulus.
• Participants were told the noise would stop if they solved a puzzle correctly.
• Group 1: could press buttons to turn off the noise (could control environment).
• Group 2: given puzzles that could not be solved (could not control environment).

Criticisms of Hiroto & Seligman's 1975 Experiments

• Used 4 experiments with 2 induction procedures (instrumental & cognitive) and 2 test tasks (instrumental & cognitive).
• Problems with the experiments: induction procedures confounded various extraneous variables with uncontrollability, leading to questions about the validity of the results.

Problems with Experiments Using Human Participants

• Amount and pattern of reinforcement don't all use yoking.
• Yoking may produce 'illusion of control'.
• Some experiments used different instructions.
• Perceived success/failure: most experiments confound uncontrollability and failure.
• Predictability/unpredictability: difficult to separate experimentally.
• People don't just give up altogether (like most dogs did).

Other Accounts of Human Helplessness

• Reactance (Brehm, 1966).
• Hypothesis testing (Levine et al., 1978).
• Egotism (Frankel & Snyder, 1978).
• State vs Action Orientation (Kuhl, 1981).
• Cognitive exhaustion (Sedek & Kofta, 1990).
• Secondary control (Rothbaum et al., 1982).
• Conditioned inattention (Lubow et al., 1981).