Dr. Martin Seligman: Martin Seligman on Learned helplessness

Dr. Martin Seligman started to research about Learned helplessness at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression, when almost by accident Martin Seligman and his colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes that were opposite to the predictions of the then leading psychological theory of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism,

Martin Seligman developed the theory further, finding learned helplessness to be a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation - usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation - even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance. Seligman saw a similarity with severely depressed patients, and argued that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result in part from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.




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