"The Misconception: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can do to escape it.
The Truth: If you feel like you aren't in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in."
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2009/11/11/learned-helplessness/
I have learned about this before. In Health Psychology we discussed the study of nursing home residents who were given a choice in their activities. Their health improved significantly. Having control to make our own choices is important to us. According to the article: "When you are able to succeed at easy tasks, hard tasks feel possible to accomplish. When you are unable to succeed at small tasks, everything seems harder." I couldn't agree more.
I found this really interesting. On initial reading of the article I thought about Stockholm Syndrome. What this basically is is when kidnap victims become so enthralled in escape that they will actually change their behavior due to their antecedent and actually have feelings whether they be emotional or sexual for their captor.
http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=167
I completely agree with this. It made me think about Emily Smart's situation, the girl who was captored by a couple who lived only a few miles away from her home. After being threatened and psychologically abused for so long, her captors were able to take her out in public without fear of her escaping because she felt there was nothing she could do to change her situation, which ultimately changed her behavior.
I found this very interesting along with being very informative. this made me think of every day life challenges. If you ccome across a challege and u give up you just settle with with defeat! I also thought about kidnap victims and how one changes their behavior. Most of which is due to fear!
This is a very informative article. It really breaks down learned helplessness and makes it easy to understand. It also proves that just as easily as we may fall victim to learned helplessness we can just as easily overcome the threat of learned helplessness. Like the article said we are smarter than rats and dogs so we dont just have to sit and take the oppression like dogs and rats. This may be a explaination for the uprisings in the middle east. The people after decades of oppression and rule by dictators are finally overcoming the helplessness they have learned to deal with for so long.
This really relates to my abnormal psychology class. We have learned a lot about depression in this class and learned helplessness really relates to this. Depressed people basically just give up on everything because they think that no one cares or that they can never accomplish anything in life. They end up just sitting in a room and do nothing. They basically are training themselves to think they are useless. It's really hard to over come depression because they are reinforcing bad behaviors.
I found this article to be very interesting. I currently work at a residential care facility for individuals with mental illness, all of the residents at the facility have small chores that they are asked to do each day and I've noticed that the individuals who participate in completing their chores have more stable mental health than those who do not.