Saturday, November 6, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
LIVE AND LET LIVE
Live and let live is the spontaneous rise of non-aggressive co-operative behaviour that developed during the First World War particularly during prolonged periods of Trench Warfare on the Western Front. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is the Christmas Truce of 1914.
It is a process that can be characterised as the deliberate abstaining from the use of violence during war. Sometimes it can take the form of overt truces or pacts negotiated locally by soldiers. At other times it can be a tacit behaviour—sometimes characterised as "letting sleeping dogs lie"—whereby both sides refrain from firing or using their weapons, or deliberately discharge them in a ritualistic or routine way that signals their non-lethal intent.
This behaviour was found at the small-unit level, sections, platoons or companies, usually observed by the "other ranks" e.g. privates and non-commissioned officers. Examples were found from the lone soldier standing sentry duty, refusing to fire on exposed enemy soldiers, up to snipers, machine-guns teams and even field-artillery batteries.
Tony Ashworth in his book Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System researched this topic based upon diaries, letters, and testimonies of veterans from the war. He discovered that 'live and let live' was widely known about, at the time, and was common usually at specific times and places. It was often to be found when a unit had been withdrawn from battle and was sent to a rest sector.
During the First World War, 1914–1918, the Higher Commands, Division, Corps and Army Commanders and their staffs were aware of this un-aggressive behaviour, and in some cases used to analyse casualty statistics to detect it. As a counter, raids or patrols were often ordered to foster the correct "offensive spirit" in the troops.
The Live and Let Live system was fragile at best and was thus easily broken by the use of lethal force
It is a process that can be characterised as the deliberate abstaining from the use of violence during war. Sometimes it can take the form of overt truces or pacts negotiated locally by soldiers. At other times it can be a tacit behaviour—sometimes characterised as "letting sleeping dogs lie"—whereby both sides refrain from firing or using their weapons, or deliberately discharge them in a ritualistic or routine way that signals their non-lethal intent.
This behaviour was found at the small-unit level, sections, platoons or companies, usually observed by the "other ranks" e.g. privates and non-commissioned officers. Examples were found from the lone soldier standing sentry duty, refusing to fire on exposed enemy soldiers, up to snipers, machine-guns teams and even field-artillery batteries.
Tony Ashworth in his book Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System researched this topic based upon diaries, letters, and testimonies of veterans from the war. He discovered that 'live and let live' was widely known about, at the time, and was common usually at specific times and places. It was often to be found when a unit had been withdrawn from battle and was sent to a rest sector.
During the First World War, 1914–1918, the Higher Commands, Division, Corps and Army Commanders and their staffs were aware of this un-aggressive behaviour, and in some cases used to analyse casualty statistics to detect it. As a counter, raids or patrols were often ordered to foster the correct "offensive spirit" in the troops.
The Live and Let Live system was fragile at best and was thus easily broken by the use of lethal force
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian language film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the film), who must employ his fertile imagination to help his family during their internment in a Nazi concentration camp.
At the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor and the film won both the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot
2 Awards
3 Reception
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
[edit] Plot
The first half of the movie is a whimsical, romantic comedy and often slapstick. Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni), a young Italian Jew, arrives in Arezzo where he plans to set up a bookstore, taking a job in the interim as a waiter at his uncle's hotel. He lives with his uncle Eliseo. Guido is both funny and charismatic, especially when he romances a local school teacher Dora (portrayed by Benigni's actual wife Nicoletta Braschi). Dora, however comes from a wealthy, aristocratic Italian (non-Jewish) family. Dora's mother wants her to marry a well-to-do civil servant, but Dora falls instead for Guido. Guido ends up stealing her away at her engagement, from her aristocratic but arrogant fiancé. Several years pass in which Guido and Dora marry and have a son, Giosué (Italian equivalent of Joshua) (Giorgio Cantarini). Dora and her mother (Marisa Paredes) are estranged due to the unequal marriage until a reconciliation takes place just prior to Giosue's fourth birthday.
In the second half, World War II enters the stage. Guido, Uncle Eliseo, and Giosué are taken to a concentration camp on Giosué's birthday. Dora demands to join her family and is permitted to do so. When Dora boards the train she is the only one wearing red, as everyone else is wearing dark coloured clothes. Guido hides Giosué from the Nazi guards and sneaks him food. Uncle Eliseo is gassed, though the others do not know. In an attempt to keep up Giosué's spirits, Guido convinces him that the camp is just a game, in which the first person to get 1,000 points wins a tank. He tells him that if he cries, complains that he wants his mother or complains that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn 1,000 points. To further prove that the camp is a game he pretends to translate the guard's instructions.
Guido convinces Giosué that the camp guards are mean because they want the tank for themselves and that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game. He puts off every attempt of Giosué ending the game and returning home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant death and people and all their sicknesses, he does not question this fiction because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence.
Guido maintains this story right until the end, when—in the chaos caused by the American advance—he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. After trying to find Dora, Guido is caught, taken away and shot dead by a Nazi guard, but not before making his son laugh one last time by imitating the Nazi guard as if the two of them are marching around the camp together. Giosué manages to survive and thinks he has won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp. He is reunited with his mother, not knowing that his father has died. Years later, he realizes the sacrifice his father made for him and also, that it was for that sacrifice that he is still alive today. In the film, Giosué is around four and a half years old, however both the beginning and ending of the film are narrated by an older Giosué recalling his father's story and sacrifice for his family
At the 71st Academy Awards in 1999, Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor and the film won both the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Contents [hide]
1 Plot
2 Awards
3 Reception
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
[edit] Plot
The first half of the movie is a whimsical, romantic comedy and often slapstick. Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni), a young Italian Jew, arrives in Arezzo where he plans to set up a bookstore, taking a job in the interim as a waiter at his uncle's hotel. He lives with his uncle Eliseo. Guido is both funny and charismatic, especially when he romances a local school teacher Dora (portrayed by Benigni's actual wife Nicoletta Braschi). Dora, however comes from a wealthy, aristocratic Italian (non-Jewish) family. Dora's mother wants her to marry a well-to-do civil servant, but Dora falls instead for Guido. Guido ends up stealing her away at her engagement, from her aristocratic but arrogant fiancé. Several years pass in which Guido and Dora marry and have a son, Giosué (Italian equivalent of Joshua) (Giorgio Cantarini). Dora and her mother (Marisa Paredes) are estranged due to the unequal marriage until a reconciliation takes place just prior to Giosue's fourth birthday.
In the second half, World War II enters the stage. Guido, Uncle Eliseo, and Giosué are taken to a concentration camp on Giosué's birthday. Dora demands to join her family and is permitted to do so. When Dora boards the train she is the only one wearing red, as everyone else is wearing dark coloured clothes. Guido hides Giosué from the Nazi guards and sneaks him food. Uncle Eliseo is gassed, though the others do not know. In an attempt to keep up Giosué's spirits, Guido convinces him that the camp is just a game, in which the first person to get 1,000 points wins a tank. He tells him that if he cries, complains that he wants his mother or complains that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn 1,000 points. To further prove that the camp is a game he pretends to translate the guard's instructions.
Guido convinces Giosué that the camp guards are mean because they want the tank for themselves and that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game. He puts off every attempt of Giosué ending the game and returning home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant death and people and all their sicknesses, he does not question this fiction because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence.
Guido maintains this story right until the end, when—in the chaos caused by the American advance—he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. After trying to find Dora, Guido is caught, taken away and shot dead by a Nazi guard, but not before making his son laugh one last time by imitating the Nazi guard as if the two of them are marching around the camp together. Giosué manages to survive and thinks he has won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp. He is reunited with his mother, not knowing that his father has died. Years later, he realizes the sacrifice his father made for him and also, that it was for that sacrifice that he is still alive today. In the film, Giosué is around four and a half years old, however both the beginning and ending of the film are narrated by an older Giosué recalling his father's story and sacrifice for his family
SHARE YOUR DREAMS
Dreamsbox allows you to anonymously share dreams or nightmares. You may also browse and read other people's dreams in addition to rating them. We recently added the option for you to create your own private dream log, allowing you to keep record of all your dreams. Enjoy.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
BE HELP
Learned helplessness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
Learned helplessness, as a technical term in animal psychology and related human psychology, means a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. [1]
Contents [hide]
1 Foundation of research and theory
1.1 Seligman and Maier
1.2 Later experiments
2 The attributional reformulation
3 Differences between humans and animals
4 Health implications
4.1 Physical health
4.2 Psychological health
4.3 Social impact
5 Extensions
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
[edit] Foundation of research and theory
[edit] Seligman and Maier
The American psychologist Martin Seligman's foundational experiments and theory of learned helplessness began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression. Quite by accident, Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes that opposed the predictions of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism, then a leading psychological theory.[2][3]
In part one of Seligman and Steve Maier's experiment, three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Group One dogs were simply put in the harnesses for a period of time and later released. Groups Two and Three consisted of "yoked pairs." A dog in Group 2 would be intentionally subjected to pain by being given electric shocks, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. A Group 3 dog was wired in parallel with a Group 2 dog, receiving shocks of identical intensity and duration, but his lever didn't stop the electric shocks. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random, because it was his paired dog in Group 2 that was causing it to stop. For Group 3 dogs, the shock was apparently "inescapable." Group 1 and Group 2 dogs quickly recovered from the experience, but Group 3 dogs learned to be helpless, and exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression.
In part two of the Seligman and Maier experiment, these three groups of dogs were tested in a shuttle-box apparatus, in which the dogs could escape electric shocks by jumping over a low partition. For the most part, the Group 3 dogs, who had previously "learned" that nothing they did had any effect on the shocks, simply lay down passively and whined. Even though they could have easily escaped the shocks, the dogs didn't try.
In a second experiment later that year, Overmier and Seligman ruled out the possibility that the Group 3 dogs learned some behavior in part one of the experiment, while they were struggling in the harnesses against the "inescapable shocks," that somehow interfered with what would have been their normal, successful behavior of escaping from the shocks in part two. The Group 3 dogs were immobilized with a paralyzing drug (Curare), and underwent a procedure similar to that in part one of the Seligman and Maier experiment. A similar part two in the shuttle-box was also undertaken in this experiment, and the Group 3 dogs exhibited the same "helpless" response.
However, not all of the dogs in Seligman's experiments became helpless. Of the roughly 150 dogs in experiments in the latter half of the 1960s, about one-third did not become helpless, but instead managed to find a way out of the unpleasant situation despite their past experience with it. The corresponding characteristic in humans has been found to correlate highly with optimism: an explanatory style that views the situation as other than personal, pervasive, or permanent. This distinction between people who adapt and those who break down under long-term psychological pressure was also studied in the 1950s in the context of brainwashing.
[edit] Later experiments
Other experiments were performed with different animals with similar results. In all cases, the strongest predictor of a depressive response was lack of control over the aversive stimulus. One such later experiment, presented by Watson & Ramey (1969), consisted of two groups of human babies. One group was placed into a crib with a sensory pillow, designed so that the movement of the baby’s head could control the rotation of a mobile. The other group had no control over the movement of the mobile and could only enjoy looking at it. Later, both groups of babies were tested in cribs that allowed the babies to control the mobile. Although all the babies now had the power to control the mobile, only the group that had already learned about the sensory pillow bothered to use it.[4]
A similar experiment was done with people who performed mental tasks in the presence of distracting noise. People who could use a switch to turn off the noise had improved performance, even though they rarely bothered to do so. Simply being aware of this option was enough to substantially counteract its distracting effect.[5]
[edit] The attributional reformulation
Later research discovered that the original theory of learned helplessness failed to account for people's varying reactions to situations that can cause learned helplessness.[6] Learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation,[7] but at other times generalizes across situations.[5]
An individual's attributional style or explanatory style was the key to understanding why people responded differently to adverse events.[8] Although a group of people may experience the same or similar negative events, how each person privately interprets or explains the event will affect the likelihood of acquiring learned helplessness and subsequent depression.[9]
People with pessimistic explanatory style—which sees negative events as permanent ("it will never change"), personal ("it's my fault"), and pervasive ("I can't do anything correctly")—are most likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.[10] Cognitive behavioral therapy, heavily endorsed by Seligman, can help people to learn more realistic explanatory styles, and can help ease depression.
Bernard Weiner's attribution theory (1979, 1985, 1986) concerns the way that people attribute a cause or explanation to an unpleasant event. Attribution theory includes the dimensions of globality/specificity, stability/instability, and internality/externality.[11] A global attribution occurs when the individual believes that the cause of negative events is consistent across different contexts. A specific attribution occurs when the individual believes that the cause of a negative event is unique to a particular situation. A stable attribution occurs when the individual believes the cause to be consistent across time. Unstable attribution occurs when the individual thinks that the cause is specific to one point in time. An external attribution assigns causality to situational or external factors, while an internal attribution assigns causality to factors within the person.[9]
[edit] Differences between humans and animals
There are several aspects of human helplessness that have no counterpart among other animals. One of the most intriguing aspects is "vicarious learning (or modelling)": that people can learn to be helpless through observing another person encountering uncontrollable events.[12] However, studies with animals have shown that many species can learn through observation.[13] Thus, this "difference" may not exist between humans and nonhumans.
Apart from the shared depression symptoms between human and other animals such as passivity, introjected hostility, weight loss, appetite loss, social and sexual deficits, some of the diagnostic symptoms of learned helplessness—including depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation—can be found and observed in human beings but not necessarily in animals.[10]
[edit] Health implications
Whatever their origins, people who suffer uncontrollable events reliably see disruption of emotions, aggressions, physiology, and problem-solving tasks.[14][15] These helpless experiences can associate with passivity, uncontrollability and poor cognition in people, ultimately threatening their physical and mental well-being.
[edit] Physical health
Learned helplessness can contribute to poor health when people neglect diet, exercise, and medical treatment, falsely believing they have no power to change. The more people perceive events as uncontrollable and unpredictable, the more stress they experience, and the less hope they feel about making changes in their lives.[16] [17]
Young adults and middle-aged parents with a pessimistic explanatory style are likely to suffer from depression.[18] People with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to be poor at problem-solving and cognitive restructuring, and also tend to demonstrate poor job satisfaction and interpersonal relationships in the workplace.[19][16] Those with a pessimistic explanatory style also tend to have weakened immune systems, and not only have increased vulnerability to minor ailments (e.g. cold, fever) and major illness (e.g. heart attack, cancers), but also have a less effective recovery from health problems.[20]
[edit] Psychological health
Learned helplessness can also be a motivational problem. Individuals who have failed at tasks in the past conclude erroneously that they are incapable of improving their performance.[21] This might set children behind in academic subjects and dampen their social skills.
Children with learned helplessness typically fail academic subjects, and are less intrinsically motivated than others. They may use learned helplessness as an excuse or a shield to provide self-justification for school failure. Additionally, describing someone as having learned to be helpless can serve as a reason to avoid blaming him or her for the inconveniences experienced. In turn, the student will give up trying to gain respect or advancement through academic performance.[22]
[edit] Social impact
Child abuse by neglect can be a manifestation of learned helplessness: when parents believe they are incapable of stopping an infant's crying, they may simply give up trying to do anything for the child.[23]
Another example of learned helplessness in social settings involves loneliness and shyness. Those who are extremely shy, passive, anxious and depressed may learn helplessness to offer stable explanations for unpleasant social experiences. However, Gotlib and Beatty (1985) found that people who cite helplessness in social settings may be viewed poorly by others, resulting in a situation that reinforces the problematic thinking. A third example is aging, with the elderly learning to be helpless and concluding that they have no control over losing their friends and family members, losing their jobs and incomes, getting old, weak and so on.[24]
Social problems resulting from learned helplessness seem unavoidable; however, the effect goes away with the passage of time.[25] Nonetheless, learned helplessness can be minimized by "immunization" and potentially reversed by therapy. People can be immunized against the perception that events are uncontrollable by increasing their awareness of previous positive experiences.[26] Therapy can instruct people in the fact of contingency[27] and bolster people's self esteem.[28]
[edit] Extensions
The American sociologist Harrison White has suggested in his book Identity and Control that the notion of learned helplessness can be extended beyond psychology into the realm of social action. When a culture or political identity fails to achieve desired goals, perceptions of collective ability suffer.
According to author Jane Mayer,[29] Seligman gave a talk at the Navy SERE school in San Diego in 2002, which he said was a three-hour talk on helping U.S. soldiers to resist torture, based on his understanding of learned helplessness.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
Learned helplessness, as a technical term in animal psychology and related human psychology, means a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. [1]
Contents [hide]
1 Foundation of research and theory
1.1 Seligman and Maier
1.2 Later experiments
2 The attributional reformulation
3 Differences between humans and animals
4 Health implications
4.1 Physical health
4.2 Psychological health
4.3 Social impact
5 Extensions
6 See also
7 References
8 External links
[edit] Foundation of research and theory
[edit] Seligman and Maier
The American psychologist Martin Seligman's foundational experiments and theory of learned helplessness began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression. Quite by accident, Seligman and colleagues discovered that the conditioning of dogs led to outcomes that opposed the predictions of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism, then a leading psychological theory.[2][3]
In part one of Seligman and Steve Maier's experiment, three groups of dogs were placed in harnesses. Group One dogs were simply put in the harnesses for a period of time and later released. Groups Two and Three consisted of "yoked pairs." A dog in Group 2 would be intentionally subjected to pain by being given electric shocks, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. A Group 3 dog was wired in parallel with a Group 2 dog, receiving shocks of identical intensity and duration, but his lever didn't stop the electric shocks. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random, because it was his paired dog in Group 2 that was causing it to stop. For Group 3 dogs, the shock was apparently "inescapable." Group 1 and Group 2 dogs quickly recovered from the experience, but Group 3 dogs learned to be helpless, and exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression.
In part two of the Seligman and Maier experiment, these three groups of dogs were tested in a shuttle-box apparatus, in which the dogs could escape electric shocks by jumping over a low partition. For the most part, the Group 3 dogs, who had previously "learned" that nothing they did had any effect on the shocks, simply lay down passively and whined. Even though they could have easily escaped the shocks, the dogs didn't try.
In a second experiment later that year, Overmier and Seligman ruled out the possibility that the Group 3 dogs learned some behavior in part one of the experiment, while they were struggling in the harnesses against the "inescapable shocks," that somehow interfered with what would have been their normal, successful behavior of escaping from the shocks in part two. The Group 3 dogs were immobilized with a paralyzing drug (Curare), and underwent a procedure similar to that in part one of the Seligman and Maier experiment. A similar part two in the shuttle-box was also undertaken in this experiment, and the Group 3 dogs exhibited the same "helpless" response.
However, not all of the dogs in Seligman's experiments became helpless. Of the roughly 150 dogs in experiments in the latter half of the 1960s, about one-third did not become helpless, but instead managed to find a way out of the unpleasant situation despite their past experience with it. The corresponding characteristic in humans has been found to correlate highly with optimism: an explanatory style that views the situation as other than personal, pervasive, or permanent. This distinction between people who adapt and those who break down under long-term psychological pressure was also studied in the 1950s in the context of brainwashing.
[edit] Later experiments
Other experiments were performed with different animals with similar results. In all cases, the strongest predictor of a depressive response was lack of control over the aversive stimulus. One such later experiment, presented by Watson & Ramey (1969), consisted of two groups of human babies. One group was placed into a crib with a sensory pillow, designed so that the movement of the baby’s head could control the rotation of a mobile. The other group had no control over the movement of the mobile and could only enjoy looking at it. Later, both groups of babies were tested in cribs that allowed the babies to control the mobile. Although all the babies now had the power to control the mobile, only the group that had already learned about the sensory pillow bothered to use it.[4]
A similar experiment was done with people who performed mental tasks in the presence of distracting noise. People who could use a switch to turn off the noise had improved performance, even though they rarely bothered to do so. Simply being aware of this option was enough to substantially counteract its distracting effect.[5]
[edit] The attributional reformulation
Later research discovered that the original theory of learned helplessness failed to account for people's varying reactions to situations that can cause learned helplessness.[6] Learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation,[7] but at other times generalizes across situations.[5]
An individual's attributional style or explanatory style was the key to understanding why people responded differently to adverse events.[8] Although a group of people may experience the same or similar negative events, how each person privately interprets or explains the event will affect the likelihood of acquiring learned helplessness and subsequent depression.[9]
People with pessimistic explanatory style—which sees negative events as permanent ("it will never change"), personal ("it's my fault"), and pervasive ("I can't do anything correctly")—are most likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.[10] Cognitive behavioral therapy, heavily endorsed by Seligman, can help people to learn more realistic explanatory styles, and can help ease depression.
Bernard Weiner's attribution theory (1979, 1985, 1986) concerns the way that people attribute a cause or explanation to an unpleasant event. Attribution theory includes the dimensions of globality/specificity, stability/instability, and internality/externality.[11] A global attribution occurs when the individual believes that the cause of negative events is consistent across different contexts. A specific attribution occurs when the individual believes that the cause of a negative event is unique to a particular situation. A stable attribution occurs when the individual believes the cause to be consistent across time. Unstable attribution occurs when the individual thinks that the cause is specific to one point in time. An external attribution assigns causality to situational or external factors, while an internal attribution assigns causality to factors within the person.[9]
[edit] Differences between humans and animals
There are several aspects of human helplessness that have no counterpart among other animals. One of the most intriguing aspects is "vicarious learning (or modelling)": that people can learn to be helpless through observing another person encountering uncontrollable events.[12] However, studies with animals have shown that many species can learn through observation.[13] Thus, this "difference" may not exist between humans and nonhumans.
Apart from the shared depression symptoms between human and other animals such as passivity, introjected hostility, weight loss, appetite loss, social and sexual deficits, some of the diagnostic symptoms of learned helplessness—including depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness, and suicidal ideation—can be found and observed in human beings but not necessarily in animals.[10]
[edit] Health implications
Whatever their origins, people who suffer uncontrollable events reliably see disruption of emotions, aggressions, physiology, and problem-solving tasks.[14][15] These helpless experiences can associate with passivity, uncontrollability and poor cognition in people, ultimately threatening their physical and mental well-being.
[edit] Physical health
Learned helplessness can contribute to poor health when people neglect diet, exercise, and medical treatment, falsely believing they have no power to change. The more people perceive events as uncontrollable and unpredictable, the more stress they experience, and the less hope they feel about making changes in their lives.[16] [17]
Young adults and middle-aged parents with a pessimistic explanatory style are likely to suffer from depression.[18] People with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to be poor at problem-solving and cognitive restructuring, and also tend to demonstrate poor job satisfaction and interpersonal relationships in the workplace.[19][16] Those with a pessimistic explanatory style also tend to have weakened immune systems, and not only have increased vulnerability to minor ailments (e.g. cold, fever) and major illness (e.g. heart attack, cancers), but also have a less effective recovery from health problems.[20]
[edit] Psychological health
Learned helplessness can also be a motivational problem. Individuals who have failed at tasks in the past conclude erroneously that they are incapable of improving their performance.[21] This might set children behind in academic subjects and dampen their social skills.
Children with learned helplessness typically fail academic subjects, and are less intrinsically motivated than others. They may use learned helplessness as an excuse or a shield to provide self-justification for school failure. Additionally, describing someone as having learned to be helpless can serve as a reason to avoid blaming him or her for the inconveniences experienced. In turn, the student will give up trying to gain respect or advancement through academic performance.[22]
[edit] Social impact
Child abuse by neglect can be a manifestation of learned helplessness: when parents believe they are incapable of stopping an infant's crying, they may simply give up trying to do anything for the child.[23]
Another example of learned helplessness in social settings involves loneliness and shyness. Those who are extremely shy, passive, anxious and depressed may learn helplessness to offer stable explanations for unpleasant social experiences. However, Gotlib and Beatty (1985) found that people who cite helplessness in social settings may be viewed poorly by others, resulting in a situation that reinforces the problematic thinking. A third example is aging, with the elderly learning to be helpless and concluding that they have no control over losing their friends and family members, losing their jobs and incomes, getting old, weak and so on.[24]
Social problems resulting from learned helplessness seem unavoidable; however, the effect goes away with the passage of time.[25] Nonetheless, learned helplessness can be minimized by "immunization" and potentially reversed by therapy. People can be immunized against the perception that events are uncontrollable by increasing their awareness of previous positive experiences.[26] Therapy can instruct people in the fact of contingency[27] and bolster people's self esteem.[28]
[edit] Extensions
The American sociologist Harrison White has suggested in his book Identity and Control that the notion of learned helplessness can be extended beyond psychology into the realm of social action. When a culture or political identity fails to achieve desired goals, perceptions of collective ability suffer.
According to author Jane Mayer,[29] Seligman gave a talk at the Navy SERE school in San Diego in 2002, which he said was a three-hour talk on helping U.S. soldiers to resist torture, based on his understanding of learned helplessness.
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