Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience.
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Abstract
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses-that nothing they did mattered-and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned helplessness is now very well-charted biologically, and the original theory got it backward. Passivity in response to shock is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged aversive events and it is mediated by the serotonergic activity of the dorsal raphe nucleus, which in turn inhibits escape. This passivity can be overcome by learning control, with the…
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2Topics & keywords
Topics
Keywords
- Learned helplessness
- Dorsal raphe nucleus
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Prefrontal cortex
- Serotonergic
- Raphe nuclei
- Extinction (optical mineralogy)
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