Later Theories of Learned Helplessness and Depression PDF

25/08/2020 Topic 3: Subtopic 3 Later theories of Learned Helplessness and depression BIOLOGICAL AND LEARNING PSYCHOLOGY Course coordinator: As...

25/08/2020 Topic 3: Subtopic 3 Later theories of Learned Helplessness and depression BIOLOGICAL AND LEARNING PSYCHOLOGY Course coordinator: Associate Professor Carla Litchfield 1 REVISED THEORY OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS (1978) When organisms experience uncontrollable outcomes, they explain it in terms of 3 attributional dimensions: (a) INTERNAL - EXTERNAL DIMENSION: Determines personal or universal helplessness (& accordingly self-blame) (b) STABLE - UNSTABLE DIMENSION: Determines 'chronicity' (persistence) (c) GLOBAL - SPECIFIC DIMENSION: Determines generalisability to new situations 2 1  25/08/2020 REVISED THEORY OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS (1978) EXAMPLE 1: You fail exam (negative outcome) Two possible explanations: a) I’m stupid (internal, stable, global) b) Exam was unfair (external, unstable, specific) EXAMPLE 2: You come top in exam (positive outcome) Two possible explanations: a) I’m brilliant (internal, stable, global) b) I was lucky (external, unstable, specific) 3 REVISED THEORY OF LEARNED HELPLESSNESS (1978) The revised theory assumes some people have a depressive (pessimistic) attributional style: 1) a tendency to give ‘internal, stable, global’ attributions for bad outcomes and 2) a tendency to give ‘external, unstable, specific’ attributions for good outcomes 4 2  25/08/2020 DEPRESSIVE REALISM HYPOTHESIS (TAYLOR & BROWN, 1988) Alloy and Abramson (1979) showed that: depressed college students were more accurate (realistic) in making judgments about their performance in an experimental task non-depressed college students tended to over-rate their performance 5 COGNITIVE THEORIES OF DEPRESSION Usually assume that depressed patients’ cognitions of reality are distorted FOR EXAMPLE: Beck’s theory proposes three types of distortion: 1. negative distortions about the SELF 2. negative distortions about the WORLD 3. negative distortions about OTHERS 6 3  25/08/2020 BECK’S COGNITIVE THEORY OF DEPRESSION Depressed people have negative schemas (sets of cognitions, beliefs, attitudes etc) about: SELF (I'm unlikeable) WORLD (nothing ever goes right), and OTHERS (nobody cares whether I live or die) 7 BECK’S COGNITIVE THEORY OF DEPRESSION Information is distorted in order to maintain these negative schemas FOR EXAMPLE: if therapist is LATE (they don't want to see me, I'm too hopeless) if therapist is EARLY (I'm so sick they have to rush to the office) Beck suggests distorted thinking is a major factor in maintaining depression 8 4  25/08/2020 HOPELESSNESS THEORY OF DEPRESSION (ABRAMSON, METALSKY, & ALLOY, 1989) ‘Hopelessness’ theory of depression: based on learned helplessness theory assumes depressed people generalise inappropriately from situations with uncontrollable outcomes to situations with controllable outcomes assumes depressed patients have an unrealistic attributional style 9 POSITIVE ILLUSIONS (TAYLOR, 1989) Cognitive theories of depression incorrectly assume that depressed patients distort reality whereas mentally healthy people are realistic It is the opposite: mentally healthy people distort reality (see world through ‘rose-tinted glasses’) depressed patients are more realistic 10 5  25/08/2020 OTHER APPLICATIONS OF HELPLESSNESS THEORY Martin Seligman is a strong advocate of attributional retraining to be both successful & happy: develop a healthy (‘optimistic’) attributional style 11 REFERENCES You don’t need to find these but they are given here to acknowledge sources Peterson, C., Maier, S.F. & Seligman, M.E.P. (1993). Learned Helplessness. New York: Oxford University Press. Seligman, M.E.P. (1975). Helplessness. San Francisco: Freeman. Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf. Seligman, M.E.P. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55, 5-14. Taylor, S.E. (1989). Positive Illusions: New York: Basic Books. Winefield, A.H. (1982). Methodological difficulties in demonstrating learned helplessness in humans. Journal of General Psychology, 107, 255-266. Sources for images are provided with the images or have been sourced as freely available for reuse (e.g. Pixabay) 12 6