PSYCH 111 Chapter Notes - Chapter VIII: Health Psychology, Behaviorism, Learned Helplessness

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5 Apr 2016
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Learning to be depressed, p. 240 - 247. Martin seligman, a well-known and influential behavioral psychologist, proposed that our perceptions of power and control are learned from experience. He believes that when a person"s efforts at controlling certain life events fail repeatedly, the person may stop attempting to exercise control altogether. If these failures happen often enough, the person may generalize the perception of lack of control to all situations, even when control may actually be possible. This person then begins to feel like a pawn of fate and becomes helpless and depressed; seligman termed this cause of depression learned helplessness. This is one of several classic studies in this book that used animals as subjects. However, this one, probably more than any of the others, raises questions about the ethics of animal research. Dogs received electrical shocks that were designed to be painful (though not physically harmful) in order to test a psychological theory.

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