Learned Homelessness Essay

Learned Helplessness, as it was eventually defined, was discovered by accident during experiments conducted by Martin Seligman and Steve Maier in 1965. Their experiment sought to further previous research on classical conditioning, sometimes referred to as Pavlovian, in which a subject displays an innate, involuntary behavior elicited or caused by an antecedent environmental event (Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. 1997). In the original classical conditioning experiments conducted during the 1890s, a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov was studying the digestive system in dogs as it pertains to the connection between salivation and subsequent actions of the subject’s stomach. When the subject dog was presented with food, the dog began to salivate. He concluded that without salivation, the stomach did not start

After a short time, the dog would salivate at the sound of the metronome even when the food was not present. In the 1903 publication of his study, The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals, Pavlov referred to the discovery as a “conditioned reflex,” which differs from an innate reflex in that it is learned (Pavlov, Ivan 1903). An innate reflex occurs involuntarily for the subject as a result of an antecedent environmental event. An innate reflex is not learned. However, in a conditioned response, the subject pairs a neutral stimulus with a specific result or response. Thus, while the metronome itself is not used to serve the food or aid in its preparation; the dog makes a connection between the tone and the food that causes an involuntary response of salivation when the tone is sounded. One important caveat to Pavlov’s research was that he also discovered that a conditioned reflex would be repressed if the stimulus were not supported with regularity. For instance, if the metronome rings and there is not food served with it, over time the dog stopped salivating when hearing the