AP PSYCHOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Seligman’s study of dogs was originally designed to study escape and avoidance learning but instead discovered a theory called learned helplessness. Learned helplessness-the tendency to fail to act to escape from a situation because of a history of repeated failures in the past.

Detailed explanation-2: -Learned helplessness is what social science researchers call it when a person is unable to find resolutions to difficult situations-even when a solution is accessible.

Detailed explanation-3: -Focus on what you can control As research shows, long-term learned helplessness is about being unable to control the outcome of situations. Accordingly, to overcome learned helplessness, you should identify things that you can control, and focus on them, rather than on what you can’t control.

Detailed explanation-4: -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.