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The rationale for the narrow associationistic view stemmed from behaviorists' shunning cognitions in animals and it seemed that the integration of two conditional probabilities-the probability of shock given a response integrated with the probability of shock in the absence of that response and then generalized across all responses-must be highly cognitive. The learning theories of that era held that organisms could only learn associations or pairings, for example a response paired with shock strengthened this association (acquisition) or a response paired with no shock weakened this association (extinction). This was a radical suggestion for the 1960s. The animal must “detect” the lack of contingency as defined above and so must have “expected” that in the future shock would be independent of its responses. We theorized that helplessness was cognitive and that it was learned. When this is true of all responses, objective helplessness exists.īut being subjectively helpless is another matter. More formally, an animal is objectively helpless with respect to an important outcome (O) such as shock offset if the probability of (O), given a response (R) is not different from the probability of (O) given the absence of that response (notR). This decomposes into objective and subjective helplessness. The intuitive notion of helplessness entails, we reasoned, the belief that nothing one does matters. But what, we puzzled, could helplessness consist of? How did it come about? How could we test for it? After fifty years of research we believe we finally do understand it and this paper presents the evolution and destination of our theory.įrom the beginning we thought the phenomenon looked like helplessness, as first suggested by Overmier and Seligman in 1967.

We thought that a profound failure to escape was the phenomenon and we began to try to understand it. We arrived at Penn as first year graduate students in 1964. But to the experimenters' annoyance, they could not test this because the dogs often failed to escape altogether in the shuttlebox and passively waited the shock out ( Leaf, 1964 Overmier & Leaf, 1965). The two-factor theory of avoidance learning predicted that turning on the fear-inducing tone in the shuttlebox would generate fear and accelerate jumping. Twenty-four hours later the dogs were placed in a shuttlebox and were supposed to learn to escape shock by jumping a short barrier between the two chambers. To find out they restrained dogs in a hammock and the dogs got 64 mild-moderate electric shocks to their back paws, each shock heralded by a tone. In the early 1960s, Richard Solomon and his students at the University of Pennsylvania wanted to know how prior Pavlovian fear conditioning would influence later instrumental learning.

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We speculate that default passivity and the compensating detection and expectation of control may have substantial implications for how to treat depression. In addition, alterations of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex-dorsal raphe pathway can come to subserve the expectation of control. So animals learn that they can control aversive events, but the passive failure to learn to escape is an unlearned reaction to prolonged aversive stimulation. This passivity can be overcome by learning control, with the activity of the medial prefrontal cortex, which subserves the detection of control leading to the automatic inhibition of the dorsal raphe nucleus. 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. Passivity in response to shock is not learned. The mechanism of learned helplessness is now very well-charted biologically and the original theory got it backwards. 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. Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago.

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