It is the beginning of the semester. I start an infamously challenging course with a tough professor. I get a failing grade on my first assignment. I don’t think much of it. It is just the first assignment after all! I will just have to work harder next time. So I work harder. I bomb the second assignment. Oh man, but I worked so hard. I should do well! I must! I get back to work. I get a C. Am I incapable of doing well? What was I even thinking, taking this class, like I could handle it? By the time the midterm rolls in, I don’t even feel like trying. What’s the point? I am not smart enough for this. I try and try, and the outcome is still the same. Failure
If you are familiar with this scenario, you have probably experienced the bitter taste of helplessness. Failure becomes a recurring, expected event, and leads to abject resignation.
When one internalizes that their action has no bearing on the outcome of a stressful situation, they are less likely to attempt to cope with the stress and are less able to learn how to cope with it. This psychological phenomenon was first documented in a series of 1967 studies that showed that dogs exposed to inescapable and unavoidable electric shocks in one situation later failed to learn to deal with shock in a different situation where escape was possible (Seligman & Maier, 1967). It was as though they’d learned from the first experiment that there was nothing they could do to avoid the shocks, so they gave up without trying in the second experiment.
This phenomenon was termed learned helplessness, and it has since been found to apply to cats, mice, rats, fish, and humans. The experiments in these organisms converge to a common conclusion: when one learns that they have no control over an adverse situation, it interferes with their subsequent ability to learn new ways to escape stress (Maier & Seligman, 1976).
Lack of control, or the perceived absence of association between your actions and the environment, increases the subjective severity of stress. It exacerbates fear and anxiety, reduces fight/flight responses, and disrupts sleep patterns and appetite. Moreover, lack of control produces changes in the cognitive, emotional, and motivational systems that cause passivity and inhibit learning (Hammack et al., 2012).
These changes are caused by the physical rewiring of your brain’s circuitry. First, stress reduces the functionality of the neurons in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory formation center. Under the condition of stress, fewer new neurons are made in the hippocampus, and the hippocampal neurons become less complex, losing structures that let them communicate with other neurons (Kim et al, 2015). Moreover, stress rewires the flow of information away from the hippocampus toward the dorsal striatum, causing a shift from conscious to subconscious learning strategies (Schwabe et al., 2013). This makes the acquisition of information requiring conscious recall harder. Furthermore, stress also decreases the prefrontal cortex’s connectivity, which is associated with faster acquisition of fear and longer time required to “unlearn” it (Chakraborty & Chattarji, 2019).
Perceived control was shown to diminish these physical and behavioral changes. Experiments in rats reveal that two rats can receive exactly identical types of stress of the same severity, frequency, and duration, but still suffer very different consequences depending on if the rats have some perception of control over the stress (Maier et al, 2006). This is achieved by simultaneously shocking two rats in different cages, and stopping the shock for both of them when one of the rats (assigned to the escapable shock (ES) group) terminates the shock by wheel turning. The other rat (assigned to the inescapable shock (IS) group) has no control over the shock. It has been shown that ES rats experience less deterioration in their hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. The ES mice learn better and are more successful in escaping future stress. Having control over a stressful experience thus has a profound mitigating influence on how stressful the experience feels, and this has been shown to be the case in humans as well.
We can use this knowledge to improve our lives. By understanding the profound impacts of perceived control on our psychological attributions and learning optimal strategies to escape learned helplessness.
References
Chakraborty P, Chattarji S (2019) Timing is everything: differential effects of chronic stress on fear extinction. Psychopharmacology 236:73–86.
Hammack SE, Cooper MA, Lezak KR (2012) Overlapping neurobiology of learned helplessness and conditioned defeat: Implications for PTSD and mood disorders. Neuropharmacology 62:565–575.
Kim EJ, Pellman B, Kim JJ (2015) Stress effects on the hippocampus: a critical review. Learning & Memory 22:411–416.
Maier SF, Amat J, Baratta MV, Paul E, Watkins LR (2006) Behavioral control, the medial prefrontal cortex, and resilience. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 8: 397–406.
Maier SF, Seligman MEP (1976) Learned Helplessness: Theory and Evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology 105:3-46.
Schwabe L, Tegenthoff M, Höffken O, Wolf OT (2013) Mineralocorticoid Receptor Blockade Prevents Stress-Induced Modulation of Multiple Memory Systems in the Human Brain. Biological Psychiatry 74:801–808
Seligman MEP, Maier SF (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology 74:1-9.