Learning To Be Depressed Seligman Summary

Outline: Learning to be Depressed Martin Seligman is a behavioral psychologist who hypothesized that the way people view power and control is learned from previous experiences. He proposed that those who fail at controlling their own life stop attempting to exercise any control of their own altogether. After repeated attempts of control and repeated failures, people start to attribute these failures to a lack of control and generalize lack of control to all situations, even if those situations are controllable. This feeling of lack of control turns into helplessness and becomes depression. With that being said, Seligman determined that a cause of depression is what he called “learned helplessness”. Seligman tested his theory in experimentation with dogs with the help of Steven Maier. Seligman had already done previous experiments with dogs surrounding the theory of classical conditioning, similar to Ivan Pavlov, so he used some of his previous findings to aid with his experiment about learned helplessness. In his previous experiment, Seligman found that dogs will learn to attribute a sound or a light to an electrical shock that is administered after the sound …show more content…
The dogs in the escape group and the no-escape group were put into harnesses, similar to Pavlov, and administered a shock that could only be stopped (controlled) by the escape group by pressing a panel with their head. The no-escape group was paired with a dog from the escape group, but they had no control over the shocks and could not stop them by pressing the panel. The pairing of both groups insured that both dogs had the same intensity and duration of the shock, the only difference being that only the escape group had control over the shocks. The no-harness control group did not participate in this part of the