Effects of Prolonged Deprivation on Learned Helplessness

Abstract

The influence of prolonged deprivation on response to uncontrollable outcome was investigated among 104 young Indian students. They received an unsolvable block design task followed by an anagram solution test and an attribution questionnaire. As predicted, the high-deprived and the female students displayed greater helplessness than their low-deprived and male counterparts, and they attributed uncontrollable outcome more to internal, stable, and global causes.

The association between neighbourhood-level deprivation and depression: evidence from the south african national income dynamics study

“…The employment domain was the second most salient in the ‘effect’ it exerted on depression symptoms. Experiments in social psychology have shown that prolonged deprivation along with basic needs not being satisfied can lead to feelings of incompetence and inefficiency as well as powerlessness and helplessness [ 39 ]. This in turn creates a perception of loss of control over one’s circumstances and often a sense of hopelessness [ 39 ].…”

Effects of Control Deprivation on Subsequent Use of Stereotypes

“…First, control deprivation has been hypothesized as playing an important role in a wide range of phenomena (Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993), such as depression (Miller & Seligman, 1975;Seligman, 1975), aging (Baltes & Baltes, 1986;Fry, 1989;Langer & Rodin, 1976;Schulz, 1976), achievement problems in school (Diener & Dweck, 1978;Kofta, 1993), prolonged deprivation effects (Mal, Jain, & Yadav, 1990), and social class experience (Adler et al, 1994). This research implies that control deprivation could be a critical but underestimated factor in understanding social behavior.…”

Empirically Grounded Clinical Interventions Clinical Implications of a Psychological Model of Mental Disorder

“…If, for instance, a person were to identify depressed mood in their problem list, a formulating clinician should investigate processes of self-esteem maintenance (Brown, Bifulco and Andrews, 1990), learned helplessness and self-efficacy (Mal et al, 1990;Evans, Saltzman and Cooperman, 2001;Seligman, 1989) and the extensive literature on negative cognitive schemas (Beck et al, 1979;Kumari and Blackburn, 1992). These latter considerations should extend to interpersonal schemas (Young, 1999).…”

“…The mediating psychological processes approach (Kinderman, 2005), of course, is not limited to cognitive processes. Behavioural mechanisms such as learned helplessness (Mal et al, 1990;Evans et al, 2001;Seligman, 1989) and classical conditioning (Dadds, Davey and Field, 2001), and interventions such as systematic desensitization (King, Muris and Ollendick, 2005), activity scheduling (Beck et al, 1979) and behavioural experiments (Bennett-Levy et al, 2004), and psychodynamic factors such as the role of family processes (Lopez et al, 2004) and relationships with formal and informal carers (Ryan, 2002) can be integrated into the formulation.…”

“…In this model, biological abnormalities or physical insults are believed to lead to mental disorder because those biological factors may adversely affect psychological processes. Similarly, the mediating psychological processes model argues that social factors such as poverty and social deprivation may lead to disillusionment, hopelessness and learned helplessness; a realization that there is little or nothing that one can do to improve or change one's lot in life, and perhaps even that one's actions have no effect or purpose (Mal, Jain and Yadav, 1990;Evans, Saltzman and Cooperman, 2001;Seligman, 1989). Finally, and of course only a single example among many possible, Kinderman (2005) argued that circumstantial factors and life events, such as childhood sexual, emotional or physical abuse, may lead to a wide variety of mental disorder as a result of the impact on the ways in which the children (and later the adults) appraise themselves, the important people in their lives, their actions and the consequences of their actions, and the ways in which relationships and social intercourse should be governed (their cognitive schemas) (Young, 1999).…”