Learned Helplessness
A rat exposed to repeated uncontrollable stressors cannot learn a simple active avoidance task. It does not learn to cope. On the contrary, ==it has learned to be helpless.== (Location 4969)
One might wonder whether the helplessness is induced by the physical stress or, instead, the psychological stressor of having no control. It is the latter. (Location 4976)
⇒ Predictability and Control
If you tighten the association between a coping response and a reward, a normal rat’s response rate increases. In contrast, linking rewards more closely to the rare coping responses of a helpless rat has little effect on its response rate. Even when control and mastery are potentially made available to it, the rat cannot perceive them. This is very similar to the depressed human who always sees glasses half empty. (Location 4985)
The learned helplessness paradigm produces animals with features strikingly similar to those in humans with major depressions: a rat’s equivalent of dysphoria — the rat stops grooming itself and loses interest in sex and food. The rat’s failure even to attempt coping responses suggests an animal equivalent of psychomotor retardation. (Location 4993)
⇒ Stress and Depression
Humans given unsolvable tasks were afterward less capable of coping with a simple and easily solved task. This also transferred to social coping situations. (Location 5006)
Students who came into the experiment with a strongly “internalized locus of control” — a belief that they were the masters of their own destiny — were more resistant to learned helplessness. The more that someone has an internal locus of control, the less the likelihood of a depression. (Location 5012)
Inner-city school kids with severe reading problems, taught Chinese characters instead of English — within hours they were capable of reading more complex symbolic sentences than they could in English. The children had apparently been previously taught all too well that reading English was beyond their ability. (Location 5025)
"Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled actions." (Location 5034)
The more prior history of stress you have, especially early in life, the less of a stressor it takes to produce those neurochemical changes. But the same stress signal, Glucocorticoids, alters Norepinephrine synthesis, serotonin trafficking, and so on, starting you on the road toward recovery — unless your genetic makeup means that those recovery steps don’t work very well. (Location 5092)
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Tags: neuroscience science psychology
Superlink: 050 🧠Neuroscience 051 ☣Neurobiology
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Erstellt: 05-04-26 10:00