Failure to escape traumatic electric shock: Incompatible skeletal-motor responses or learned helplessness?

Interference and facilitation produced by noncontingent reinforcement in the appetitive situation

“…Although retarded learning, rather than a failure to learn, has been accepted as evidence for learned helplessness (Levis, 1976, p. 51), failure to learnhas beendemonstratedin the aversive situation (Maier, 1970;Maieret al, 1973;Shurman & Katzev, 1975). Thus, the effect observed in the aversive situation appears to be strongerthan the sometimes transitory or nonexistent effects reported in the appetitive context.…”

“…A notableexceptionto the limited shock exposure during testing is the experiment reported by Maier (1970): Maier conducted 130 test trials of a maximum duration of 60 sec (10 sec of CS and 50 sec ofshock). During this extensive testing, 5 of the 10inescapable shockdogs failed to learn test task escaping on less than 3 trials on average.…”

Learned helplessness in an appetitive discrete-trial T-maze discrimination test

“…Learned-helplessness theory proposes that the retarded learning often observed after exposure to uncontrollable shock (Brown & Dixon, 1983;Maier, 1970;Seligman & Beagley, 1975) is due to the subjects' learning that their responses and the reinforcement are unrelated (Alloy & Seligman, 1979;Maier & Jackson, 1979). The major proponents of learned-helplessness theory have also suggested that a similar effect could be caused by exposure to uncontrollable appetitive outcomes, such as food (Maier & Seligman, 1976;Seligman, 1975).…”

The effects of order of shock durations on helplessness in rats

“…By contrast, increasing shock durations produced greater conditioned fear to the shock context than did decreasing shock durations in Experiment 2. The differential effects of shock-duration order on finickiness and fear are explicated in terms of the specificity of fear conditioning during exposure to increasing versus decreasing series of shock duration orders.Animals exposed to uncontrollable (inescapable) electric shock frequently show subsequently retarded escape and avoidance learning when compared with subjects receiving prior controllable (escapable) shock or simple apparatus exposure (Brown & Dixon, 1983;Job, 1987;Maier, 1970;Overmier & Seligman, 1967;Rosellini, DeCola, Plonsky,Warren, & Stillman, 1984). The occurrence of this learned helplessness effect is influenced by a variety ofparameters associated with the schedule ofuncontrollable shock used during stress pretreatment, including shock intensity and duration (Glazer & Weiss, 1976a;Jackson, Maier, & Rapaport, 1978;Rosellini & Seligman, 1978;Steenbergen, Heinsbroek, Van Haaren, & Van de Poll, 1989), current characteristics (Crowell, Lupo, Cunningham, & Anderson, 1978), the minimum intertrial interval (Minor, Trauner, Lee, & Dess, 1990;Rosellini, DeCola, & Warren, 1986),and the ability to predict shock termination or shock-free periods (Jackson & Minor, 1988; Minor et aI., 1990;Overmier & Murison, 1989).…”