PSY402 Theories of Learning

1. PSY402Theories of Learning Chapter 11 – Cognitive Control of Behavior (Cont.)

2. Learned Helplessness

3. Learned Helplessness Theory • Seligman – depression is learned. • Depression occurs when people believe: • Failures are due to uncontrollable events. • Failure will continue as long as events are beyond their control. • Depression arises from helplessness.

4. Animal Research • Step 1 -- three groups of dogs: • Inescapable shock – no control. • Escapable shock -- terminated if the dog pressed a panel. • No shock • Step 2 – 10 trials of signaled avoidance training in shuttle box. • 2/3 of inescapable shock dogs did not learn to jump during step 2.

5. Step 1 Step 2

6. Dogs Fail to Escape

7. Helplessness in Humans • Hiroto – three groups of college students: • Uncontrollable group – wrongly told that pushing button would end noise. • Escapable group – pushing button ended noise. • Control – no noise. • Tested using finger shuttle box. • Uncontrollable group did not escape

8. Human Results Mimic Depression Depressed (no noise) and Inescapable Noise conditions Non-Depressed Escapable Noise and no noise conditions

9. Characteristics of Helplessness • Motivational impairment – unable to initiate voluntary behavior. • Mice in water maze. • Nonspecific – carries over to a variety tasks and test situations. • Intellectual impairment – incapable of benefiting from future experience – even if they jump, don’t learn. • Emotional trauma – negative affect.

10. Studies of Depressives • Show similar results to learned helplessness studies. • Depressed individuals do not escape noise, responding like inescapable non-depressed individuals. • Depressed individuals do not adjust likelihood of succeeding upward when they experience success. • They credit chance not skill.

11. Criticisms of Seligman’s Theory • There is more to depression than learned helplessness. • Helplessness subjects described the task as a skill task, even though acting as if it were a chance task. • Failure to replicate performance deficits in humans – facilitation of performance instead. • Results may be due to personal attributions.

12. Attribution Theory • Attribution = the perceived cause of an event. • Causal attributions of failure have three dimensions: • Internal-external– internal traits or characteristics vs environmental forces • Stable-unstable – past causes will persist vs new forces will determine future outcomes • Global-specific– outcome relates only to one task vs outcome effects everything.

13. Attributional Model of Depression

14. Two Kinds of Helplessness • Personal helplessness – an individual’s inability causes failure. • Universal helplessness – the environment is structured so that no one can control future events. • Abramson -- both kinds lead to depression. • Vary on external-internal dimension. • Low self-esteem only with personal.

15. Severity of Depression • Depression can be transient if attributed to global but changing conditions. • Severe depression occurs when attributions are: • Internal • Global • Stable • Better if external, specific, unstable.

16. Hopelessness Depression • Hopelessness– the expectation that desired outcomes will not occur. • Learned helplessness -- no control over undesired outcomes. • Accounts for anxiety without depression. • Anxiety – possibility that a person may have no control over negative events. • Depression occurs when certain.

17. Pessimism and Optimism • Langer suggests perceived control is basic to human functioning – mastery, competence. • Negative explanatory style – hopeless style predicts susceptibility to depression. • Positive explanatory style – optimists are hopeful, feel they can control events, tend to be more successful, more healthy. • They are not depressed when life goes wrong.

18. Learned Hopefulness • Seligman believes a more positive attributional style can be taught. • Enhancing positive attributional style in depressed patients decreased their symptoms. • Changing the attributional style of college students via a workshop & ongoing coaching prevented development of depression.

19. Biological Changes • Weiss has suggested that repeated exposure to uncontrollable stress causes biochemical changes in people and animals. • Rats showed decreased feeding & sex drive, less grooming, lack of voluntary response, early morning wakefulness – signs of depression. • Related to increased activity in locus coeruleus and increased glutamate – similar to depressed individuals.

20. Cognitive View of Phobia • Bandura– two kinds of expectancy maintain a phobia: • Stimulus-outcome expectancy – about the nature of the stimulus. A statistics class will be aversive. • Response-outcome expectancy – about the likely result of behavior. I cannot pass the statistics class. • Why does phobia lead to avoidance behavior with negative outcomes? • Self-efficacy expectancy – belief that one can or (with phobia) cannot execute a particular action.

21. Self-Efficacy Expectations • Types of information used to establish self-efficacy expectations: • Personal accomplishments, success. • Task difficulty, amount of effort. • Observations of success/failure of others – vicarious modeling. • Emotional arousal – we feel less able to cope when agitated or tense. • High self-efficacy predicts approach behavior.

22. Criticisms of Efficacy View • Efficacy expectations may be epiphenomenal (not causal) – they may arise with anxiety but have no effect on responding. • Three types of anxiety: • Cognitive – affects self-efficacy • Physiological – affects physiology • Behavioral – directly influences responding. • Lang – contribution of each depends on prior experience and the situation.

23. Remainder of Chapter • Concepts and comparison of human and animal learning are part of PSY 334. • This material will not be on the final exam.