Learned helplessness and depression in a clinical population: A test of two behavioral hypotheses.

Abstract

This study was undertaken to extend the learned helplessness phenomenon to a clinical population and to test the competing hypotheses of Seligman and Lewinsohn. Ninety-six male hospitalized psychiatric and medical patients were divided into three levels of depression according to their scores on the Short Form of the Beck Depression Inventory. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: (a) One group was treated with an 80-dB tone, which could be terminated by making an active response; (b) a second group was treated with the tone with a passive escape contingency; (c) a third group was treated with an inescapable tone; and (d) a no-noise group served as a control. After treatment, subjects were tested on an anagram-solving task. Inescapable noise produced as much deficit in the low-depressed subjects as was present in the depressed no-noise control subjects. Passive escape subjects did as well as active escape subjects. Results replicate the learned helplessness phenomenon in a group of clinical depressives and support Seligman's model of depression.The learned helplessness phenomenon has been proposed as a model for clinical depression (Miller & Seligman,

When Does Stress Help or Harm? The Effects of Stress Controllability and Subjective Stress Response on Stroop Performance

“…Previous research has shown that current depression can moderate the effects of controllable stress on cognitive task performance (Klein et al, 1976; Miller and Seligman, 1976; Price et al, 1978). In addition, sex differences in physiological and psychological responses to stress are consistently noted in stress research (e.g., Ordaz and Luna, 2012).…”

“…Researchers have defined uncontrollability as non-contingency between instrumental actions and outcomes (Oakes and Curtis, 1982), as repeated failure feedback regardless of responses (Klein et al, 1976; Jones et al, 1977; Kilpatrick-Tabak and Roth, 1978; Hirt and Genshaft, 1981) or as both non-contingency and failure (Hiroto, 1974; Hiroto and Seligman, 1975; Benson and Kennelly, 1976; Klein and Seligman, 1976; Miller and Seligman, 1976; Price et al, 1978; Kofta and Sedek, 1989). We structured the manipulation of uncontrollability to include both non-contingency and increased rates of failure.…”

Depression, cognitive skill, and metacognitive skill in problem solving

“…Metacognitive skills are thought to be necessary for effective problem solving (Flavell, 1976;Slife et al, 1985), and research has indicated that depressives are often relatively poor problem solvers (Klein, Fencil-Morse, & Seligman, 1976;Price, Tryon, & Raps, 1978). General metacognitive skill has typically been divided into two components: knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition (Brown, 1975(Brown, , 1977Brown & Palinscar, 1982;see Cavanaugh & Perlmutter, 1982, for a similar distinction).…”

Attribution and affect in learned helplessness and depression

“…109-120) reported impaired performance on cognitive tasks following uncontrollable electric shock, but no deficits following an equal number of controllable shocks. Rodin (1976), Benson and Kennelly (1976), and Cohen, Rothbart, and Phillips (1976) used a cognitive induction (insolvable problems) and reported interference on performance of cognitive tasks, as did , Klein, Pencil-Morse, andSeligman (1976), Teasdale (1978), and Price, Tryon and Raps (1978). reported shuttlebox learning deficits following exposure to ines capable noise which were reversed by a "therapy" consisting of solvable problems.…”