How does learned helplessness related to depression

According to the reformulated learned helplessness model, depressive symptoms are associated with an attributional style in which uncontrollable bad events are attributed to internal versus external , stable versus unstable , and global versus specific causes. In the ASQ scale, participants are presented with 12 hypothetical scenarios half good, half bad and are asked to decide what the major cause of the situation would be if it happened to them.

Participants then rate the cause along a 7-point Likert scale for each of the three causal dimensions. To experimentally induce learned helplessness in human participants, we adapted the original human version of the learned helplessness LH task [ 48 , 62 ] using a triadic design and a computerized modification of the original task.

The triadic design, used in the original and almost all of the following learned helplessness study [ 10 , 63 ], is a 3-group paradigm that assigns different levels of uncontrollability to each group. Because the concept of control is central in learned-helplessness, the triadic design consists of 3 groups with differing levels of controllability: a master-escapable shock group, a yoked-inescapable shock group, and a control with no treatment group.

There are 2 phases in the experiment; in the pretreatment phase when helplessness is experimentally induced, the master group experiences 30 unsignaled but escapable loud tones; the yoked group experiences 30 unsignaled inescapable loud tones, and the control group passively listens to loud tones identical to the ones used in the master and yoked groups.

The triadic design allows us to manipulate the controllability of the identical stressor loud tone, in our case , and because all three groups are exposed to the loud tones, any behavioral differences observed between groups would be due to the effects of coping rather than the stressor itself.

The computerized program of the task is written in PsychoPy and ran on Windows 10 system with a inch monitor. The aversive stimulus is a Hz, db loud tone generated by PsychoPy, measured at db exact by an audiometer and played by two stereo speakers connected to the computer. Upon arrival, participants are briefed that the whole study has three parts: one set of surveys and two computerized games, and it takes approximately one hour to finish.

In other words, control is not experimentally altered in the 3 rd control group as action-outcome learning is absent in this group. Participants are instructed that they will first play a game that has some unpleasant but not otherwise harmful loud noises. Participants are seated in front of the computer, and the master and the yoked groups are given the following verbal instructions:. When that tone comes on there is something you can do to stop it. Please sit and listen to it. Subsequently, a 3-sec sample of the loud tone is presented to the participants.

Participants are told that the same tone will be used throughout the task, and they will immediately start with the pretreatment session after the sample tone is given. The pretreatment session consists of 30 unsignaled sec trials during which the Hz, db tone is played. Throughout the pretreatment session , 2 colored squares are displayed on the screen with a black background context A.

Coinciding with the onset of the tone, a cross appears in each of the colored squares, signaling actions can be taken to stop the tone Fig 1. The correct response to terminate the tone is pressing the left square and then the right square; in the next trial, the participant should reverse the order of the square by pressing the right square and then the left square.

The correct sequences alternate across trials so if the participant correctly presses one sequence in any given trial, they should change to the other sequence in the next trial. After a while, the sequence of button pressing should become predictable to participants as they learn.

A successful escape response is defined as pressing the correct sequence left to right, or right to left depending on the given trial and terminating the tone within 10 seconds. If participants fail to press the right buttons within 10 seconds, the tone and the buttons will disappear from the screen after the sec interval and the trial is marked as failed. After completing 30 trials in the pretreatment session, participants take a 1-min break.

Top: the pre-treatment phase; button, the test phase. Testing : the correct sequence is left-right-left or right-left-right, alternating across trials.

To test for helplessness, a test session is conducted after the 1-min break. Participants are again seated in front of the same computer, and all 3 groups are given the same instruction for the test session:. The test session is conducted using a similar, but not identical, computer task. In the test phase, the background color of the task changes from black to white, and the color of the squares also changes.

These alterations signal a new context context B , but the auditory stimulus is identical to the one used in the pretreatment session. The test session consists of 18 signaled sec trials, with ISI ranges 10—20 sec with a mean of sec. During each trial, a 5-sec red light and the four buttons on the screen appear at the center of the screen signaling the onset of the sec tone, with the offset of the red light followed immediately by the onset of the loud tone.

The participants are not explicitly told that the response sequence is different in the test session and need to learn to find the correct response as they proceed. Response latency is coded as follows: if the participants respond correctly between the onset and offset of the red light latency of 5 sec or less , thus terminating the red light and the tone altogether, a successful avoidance trial is recorded; if the participants respond correctly after the offset of the red light but before the offset of the tone latency of 5 to 15 sec , thus do not terminate the red light but terminate the tone within the sec interval, a successful escape trial is recorded.

If participants fail to respond correctly before the tone ends latency larger than 15 sec , a failed trial is recorded. Five behavioral measures are taken, including: a trials to the criterion for avoidance acquisition, defined as 3 consecutive avoidance responses; b trials to the criterion for escape acquisition, defined as 3 consecutive escapes or a mix of 3 escape and avoidance trials ; c the number of avoidance responses for the 18 trials in the test phase ; d the number of failures to escape, defined as the number of trials with a latency of 15 sec.

If participants perform 2 successful escape responses and 1 successful avoidance response in succession, or 2 successful avoidance responses and 1 successful escape response, it is considered that they have met the criterion for escape acquisition but not the criterion for avoidance acquisition. The criterion for avoidance acquisition is only met when the participants have 3 consecutive successful avoidance responses. We expect only participants from the yoked group to show increased state anhedonia and anxiety scores.

The rationale behind this task is that an unequal ratio of reward between two correct responses produced a response bias towards the more rewarded stimulus, rendering a preference to identify the more frequently rewarded stimulus, and reduced response bias to the more frequently rewarded stimulus is associated with a higher anhedonia score. The task is written in computer software PsychoPy running on a Windows 10 computer.

The task consists of four trial blocks and lasts approximately 20 min. During each trial, an asterisk fixation point is shown at the center of the blank screen for msec, followed by the presentation of a mouthless cartoon face in the center of the screen for another msec.

Immediately after, a short mouth Although there is no time limit for each trial, participants are instructed to make their responses as fast as possible. You earned 5 cents! The goal of the task is to choose the right face and earn as many points as possible, as the total number of points earned in the signal-detection task transfers to the number of raffle tickets participants can earn. All the raffle tickets will be drawn at the end of the chance to win a dollar Amazon gift card.

Participants are then given the written instructions and two sample trials before they proceed with the actual task. The signal-detection task is based on a differential reinforcement ratio, meaning that an unequal number of positive feedback is given to one correct response vs. Specifically, only 20 out of 50 trials are followed by reward feedback in each block. The reward feedback is given following a pseudorandom schedule, and if the participants fail to correctly respond to a certain trial during which the reward feedback is scheduled, the reward feedback is delayed until the next correct identification is made.

Upon completing all the trials, participants are debriefed, thanked, and given the course credits and corresponding numbers of raffle tickets for a chance to win a dollar Amazon gift card. We will follow the IRB guidelines during and throughout the experiment. De-identified data will be made available and stored at the data repository of our University. The response latency is grouped into 6 blocks of 3 trials each. A repeated-measure analysis of variance ANOVA test is used to test for the main effect and interactions of response latency across 6 blocks, with the treatment group as the between-subject measure and blocks as the within-subject measure.

A post hoc Scheffe test will be performed to account for multiple comparisons if significance is reported. We predict that, compared to the master group and control group, the yoked group will have significantly longer response latency across 6 blocks. A fixed-factor ANOVA is used to test for the main effects of a trials to the criterion for avoidance acquisition, defined as 3 consecutive avoidance responses; b trials to the criterion for escape acquisition, defined as 3 consecutive escapes; c the number of avoidance responses for the 18 trials; d the number of failures to escape, defined as the number of trials with a latency of 10 sec.

We predict that compared to the master group and control group, the yoked group will have 1 significantly more trials before they meet the avoidance acquisition criterion i. Data will be analyzed with respect to the accuracy, discriminability, reaction time, and response bias. Accuracy is defined as the percent correct across total trials. Reaction time RT , defined as the time from the disappearance of the mouth until they make a successful key press, is the average RT calculated across trials.

Discriminability and response bias are both derived from the signal-detection behavioral model [ 67 , 68 ]; the detailed derivation can be found in the original paper [ 53 ] and the calculations are as follow:. Response bias: Where Long correct is the number of correct responses after the presentation of the long mouth, Short incorrect is the number of incorrect responses after the presentation of the short mouth, etc.

For discriminability and response bias, only Block is included as the repeated measure. To examine if acquired helplessness has an effect on response bias, we will also use the treatment group yoked, master, and control from the learned helplessness task as an additional between-subjects factor in the ANOVA. Post hoc Newman-Keuls tests will be performed in case of significant findings.

In other words, we predict that the response bias will remain the same for the yoked group across blocks. We predict that the discriminability will remain unchanged for all 3 groups across blocks, and that all groups will find the task equally difficult. Post hoc Tukey test will be used if significance is reported. We predict that both the anhedonia and anxiety state scores will increase after the LH task for the yoked group but not the master or the controlled group.

Besides assessing how the factor treatment group affects the response bias, we are also interested in seeing if the mean response latency in the LH task correlates with response bias in the SDT task, collapsing data across the 3 treatment groups.

If normality, linearity, and homoscedasticity assumptions are met, we will use a Pearson r correlation test to examine the correlation between average response latency defined as the time from the start of a trial until they make a correct response in the LH task and the response bias in the signal-detection task.

By combining all data from all of the treatment groups and not dichotomizing the population acquired LH or not , we will be able to extract more information from the data.

We predict that the average response latency in the LH task will be negatively correlated with response bias in the signal-detection task, such that people who have a longer average response latency in the LH task will more likely have a lower response bias score. To assess if the s tate anhedonic scores agree well with the results from the signal-detection task, we will perform a Spearman r correlation test to test each pair of the anhedonic score and the response bias score combination for all the 3 treatment groups if normality, linearity, and homoscedasticity assumptions are met.

We expect to see the s tate anhedonic scores agreeing with the anhedonic measure in the signal detection task, such that individuals with lower hedonic state scores after the LH task will have a lower response bias score, showing a positive correlation in the Spearman r correlation test.

Although we predict that the yoked group will develop learned helplessness and show performance deficits in all of the measures discussed above, we acknowledge the possibility that we may see alternative outcomes. Besides, there may exist certain confounding artifacts that may otherwise be responsible for the effects we see in our results. To account for all possible outcomes, we have implemented the following secondary analysis to better understand the main effects we get, or lack of effects if our predicted results are not observed.

Individual differences in personality traits may affect who quickly and readily develops learned helplessness; if a person is highly anhedonic or anxious prior to the LH task, we predict that they will have a higher chance to show helplessness faster. To see how anhedonia and anxiety traits affect how easily one acquires learned helplessness, we will analyze the yoked group separately and see if the speed of developing learned helplessness is affected by their anhedonia and anxiety traits.

We expect that anhedonia and anxiety traits scores will be 1 positively correlated with the number of trials needed for avoidance acquisition; 2 positively correlated with the number of trials needed for escape acquisition; 3 negatively correlated with the total number of successful avoidance trials, 4 positively correlated with the number of failures to escape, and 5 positively correlated with the average response latency.

We think that anhedonia and anxiety traits scores could have an impact on any effects we see in the LH task, and it is possible that individuals with higher anhedonia and anxiety traits scores would have more severe performance impairments. However, with random assignment between groups, these pre-existing individual differences in personality traits should be balanced out.

It is possible that tone perception can be a variable across individuals and that different individuals likely will have different tolerance to the loud tone, thus we have included a brief survey at the end of the LH task, asking the participants on a scale of 0—10, how annoying the participants would rate the tone. It is possible that different participants would rate the tone at different annoyance levels, which could impact their perception on how uncontrollable the situation is.

But with random assignments at the beginning of the LH task, any pre-existing individual differences should be averaged out among groups. Thus, we predict that there will be no significant differences across participants on their tone annoyance rating and that their tone annoyance rating does not affect all the other behavioral results.

As discussed in our introduction, we believe that attributional styles may play a role in the formation of helplessness. This is especially important if observed results do not follow our predictions e. If our predicted results are not observed, we think context specificity and attributional styles may account for the lack of effects in any one or more of our measures. Specifically, we will look at how global and specific attributional styles correlate with the formation and transferability of helplessness.

The reformulated LH theory Abramson et al. In line with the reformulated LH theory, we believe that participants who had global attributional styles will show helplessness in both similar and new contexts; on the other hand, participants who had a specific attributional style may only show helplessness in a similar context, but this helplessness will not transfer to a new context. We anticipate that the yoked participants will likely explore different kinds of strategies given their lack of control, and their behaviors will be more complex.

Thus, and that response latency may not be enough to capture their exploratory behaviors. Specifically, we will perform exploratory analysis to examine the following data in both the conditioning and testing phases: 1. The number of different sequences the yoked group would try in any given trial, with a larger number of sequences tried indicating more strategies used; 2.

The number of keypresses in each trial, with the more keypresses implying more active engagement and more attempts to escape; 3. The faster a participant is to give up faster in the conditioning phase suggesting they may be quicker to develop learned helplessness. We add these additional measures to the conditioning as well as the testing phase because we think the conditioning phase may yield interesting results as this is when the yoked subjects would try the most strategies as they slowly start to realize their lack of control.

The current study aims to address the lack of research in human learned helplessness and its relationship with anhedonia. To experimentally induce learned helplessness in human participants, we designed a computer game using a triadic design, based on the original human version of the LH task [ 48 , 62 ]. Although we design the new game as close to the original human LH task as possible, we realize that this experiment is not without weaknesses.

We will name a few in this section. Firstly, like most human helplessness experiments, this study has rather weak construct validity in its design most LH tasks have a good face and predictive validity nonetheless.

Unlike animal LH tasks, most human LH tasks, including this current protocol, do not confine participants in a truly uncontrollable environment for a prolonged period of time, nor do they use any traumatizing stimuli. Participants could terminate the experiment session anytime they wish, and this fact alone strongly attenuates the perception of uncontrollability.

In addition, despite the performance deficits participants may demonstrate in the LH task, how can we be sure that participants truly develop helplessness in a lab setting over a short amount of time? Thus, we would refrain from overgeneralizing the effectiveness of the current protocol; rather, any main effects we see in this study should be interpreted in lab settings and should not be viewed as permanent behavioral and neurochemical changes in the brain.

Future studies should examine any long-term changes following such protocol to further determine the effectiveness of the current protocol. A second limitation regards the general reliability of human LH tasks as some studies fail to produce performance impairments, or the performance deficits fail to transfer across situations [ 12 , 20 ].

The reformulated LH theory [ 12 ] explains that the lack of effects in these studies should be interpreted by individual differences in attributional styles, such that participants only learn to be helpless if they make a correct attribution as the cause of their failure.

If our predicted results are not observed, we think context specificity and attributional styles could account for the lack of effects in any one or more of our measures. Finally, there exists a divergence between non-human animal and human LH research, not only due to ethical considerations for human studies but also because the reformulated LH model is less testable in non-human animals because it is harder to examine cognition in non-human subjects [ 21 , 22 ].

To bridge human and non-human LH research, future studies could devise new measures that capture the cognitive aspects of the reformulated LH mode. The experiment both the LH and the SDT task is completed and coded using PsychoPy 3, and the questionnaires will be administered using the online survey platform Qualtrics. We have both the necessary support funding and facilities, as well as the approval an approved IRB protocol for the proposed research. Should the initial submission be accepted, we wish to start the data collection process right away, but due to the negative impact of the Covid19 pandemic and the fact that the University of Minnesota our major participant pool will only operate partially in-person in the foreseeable future, we expect that the data collection process will be much slower than we predicted.

Originally, we estimated that it would take 6 months to collect all the data and another 3—4 months to perform data analysis, but given the current situation, we expect that the data collection process will take about a year or even longer depending on how soon the university campus reopens; once we have all the data, then we will need 4—6 months to process the data and complete the manuscript. In summary, we expect to have 16—18 months for the overall completion of the study, although this may change either direction depending on the evolution of the pandemic.

We have some pilot data at the moment that was gathered in order to check how difficult and time-consuming the tasks are. This data will not be used for the analyses reported in the paper. De-identified data will be put online in a public repository. The experiment and analysis code will be uploaded and made available at the Open Science Framework repository. The results for a discrimination learning problem were mixed. The groups did not differ in latency to shut off an aversive noise. So, depressed subjects perceptually distort the outcomes of skilled responding as being response-independent, and they may, under certain conditions, show deficits at learning the consequences of responses.

These deficits may reflect learned helplessness and are specific to depression. Cutting is a type of self-harm. Although it can be a challenging habit to break, there are many ways to prevent yourself or others from cutting. Child abuse refers to any emotional, sexual, or physical mistreatment, as well as neglect of a child.

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Acute stress disorder ASD is a short-term condition that can develop after a person experiences a traumatic event. Its symptoms are similar to those…. What is learned helplessness? Medically reviewed by Timothy J. Legg, Ph. What is it? Theory In adults In children Who it affects Related conditions Treatment Summary Learned helplessness is a state that occurs after a person has experienced a stressful situation repeatedly.

Share on Pinterest A person who experiences stressful or traumatic situations may develop learned helplessness. Background to the theory. Learned helplessness in adults. Learned helplessness in children. Share on Pinterest A child with learned helplessness may exhibit a lack of motivation and low expectation of success. Why does learned helplessness affect some people and not others?

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